(Alan Caruba in Ice Age Now) If you live in California,
I have a bit of advice. Get out now while you can afford the gas to load up the
van and head north or east. You won’t be alone. According to
“Crazifornia:
How California is Destroying Itself and Why It Matters to America”, about
150,000 Californians have been fleeing the state each year of late.
In fact,” wrote Laer
Pearce, “Los Angeles alone has lost more households than New York, Miami, and,
incredibly, the economically decimated city of Detroit…combined.”
The tide of traffic leaving
the state is likely to increase. According to a news release from Earthjustice,
one of the innumerable environmental organizations bent on destroying every
form of energy that has fueled the growth of the American economy, the California
Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has “finalized a groundbreaking decision to
build innovative high-tech energy storage systems that will lead California
toward a future of clean, renewable energy and away from dependence on fossil
fuels.”
You remember fossil fuels,
oil, natural gas, and coal. The “clean, renewable” energies are wind and solar
because, of course, the sun shines all the time and the wind blows all the
time. Or not.
By definition, energy
“storage systems” can use mechanical, chemical, or thermal processes to store
energy; these processes range from battery technologies to energy storage
within compressed air or molten salt. If that sounds bizarre, it is. According
to Will Rostov, an Earthjustice attorney,
“Clean, renewable energy
sources will shape our future, whether the dirty antiquated fossil fuels
industry likes it or not, so it’s excellent to see California getting there
first. It took years by environmental advocates and state regulators to reach
this point.
Actually, Europe has been
there for some time now. In England’s Yorkshire Dales, they’re tearing down
four wind turbines that have been around for twenty years and have not worked in years.”
Indeed, across Europe there is a lot of buyer’s remorse for having embraced
wind and solar. As Marc Morano, the editor of ClimateDepot.com, noted in an
October 17 article, “Wind and solar mandates are breaking Europe’s electric
utilities.
“Last week the CEOs of
Europe’s ten largest utilities finally cried uncle and called for a halt to
wind and solar subsidies. Short of that, they want subsidies of their own. They
want to be paid, in essence, not to produce power.”
Thanks to mandates to use
electricity from wind and solar Europe’s energy costs increased 17% for
consumers and 21% for industry in the last four years.
California, in addition to
requiring comparable use of wind and solar power while pushing to close
coal-fired plants and keep some nuclear plants shuttered, will require its
utilities to purchase 1.3 megawatts of “energy storage” power by 2020. The San Jose Mercury News
reported that
“The first-in-a-nation mandate is expected to spur innovation in
emerging storage technologies, from batteries to flywheels. Once large
quantities of energy can be stored, the electric grid can make better use of
solar, wind and other technologies that generate sporadically rather than in a
steady flow, and can better manage disruptions from unpredictable events such
as storms and wildfires.”
This is another very
expensive Green pipedream that, like other California initiatives, would prove
impossible to achieve and will be abandoned or ignored.
Since neither wind nor
solar produce electricity in a steady, predictable fashion that enables
utilities to ensure a flow of electricity to consumers, “energy storage” is the
new, idiotic, alternative way of providing electricity that has been in effect since
Edison first invented the turbines to produce it.
There is, simply put, no
reason to require “energy storage” if “dirty, antiquated fossil fuels” were
used. Wind and solar provide just over 3% of the electricity used in the U.S. According to the Western
Region Deputy Director of the Sierra Club, Evan Gillespie,
“Fossil fuels like
natural gas are a dead end for the people of California, the power companies,
and the entire planet.” If you listened
to Strela Cervas, Coordinator at the California Environmental Justice Alliance,
fossil fuel use is a conspiracy against “low income communities and communities
of color overburdened by pollution, in particular from power plants. California
does not need any new gas-fired power plants.”
Those low income communities
might not agree, along with all the rest of the Californians, in the wake of
the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. While California strives
to save the state from a warming that has not been occurring for more than 15
years, the new mandate that 33% of the state’s energy come from wind and solar
is estimated to cost $114 billion, all of which will come out of the pockets of
energy consumers. According to Pearce,
“Legislators, regulators,
lawyers and environmentalists have driven up the cost of doing business in the
Golden State until it has become 30% greater than in the neighboring states.”
The result of 40 years of anti-business (and anti-energy) policy has caused a
decline in the state’s standard of living. “California’s median household
income plummeted by 9%–nearly twice the national average between 2006 and 2010,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau.”
This is the kind of
environmental insanity that has been at work at the federal level since Obama
was elected in 2008. Billions have been lost in loans to wind and solar
companies that went bankrupt within months and years. Think Solyndra. Now apply
that same insanity to the whole of the nation as the administration continues
its “war on coal” and actually laments the growing access to natural gas and
oil due to hydraulic fracking technology.
The U.S. will produce more
oil than Saudi Arabia this year. It has several centuries’ worth of affordable
coal, scads of natural gas, and could expand its nuclear power generation if it
wanted.
California is leading the
way as it drives out its citizens and businesses, leaving behind only those too
poor to leave; those dependent on a range of welfare programs that
“redistribute” money from “the rich” and the middle class. They are turning the
entire state into Detroit.
It is a war on the
provision of electricity; the lifeblood of the nation’s capacity to function.
