It was 93 degrees in Southern California on Tuesday, and 10 million Californians were without power to their homes as a result.
I kid you not.
The liberal national news media are trying to pretend that, as Politico claims, “everyone faces blame,” but the truth is that these blackouts are a direct result of proscriptive, Green New Deal-style energy policies adopted by Democrat-dominated governments over the last quarter of a century.
Here’s an excerpt from that Politico report:
The exact root of California’s rolling blackouts is still unclear as more power outages loom, and that’s allowed everyone to point fingers.
Energy experts Monday cited a litany of potential causes for the rotating outages that affected hundreds of thousands of California residents Friday and Saturday nights: ballooning demand, inadequate transmission, an overreliance on renewable energy and natural gas plant challenges during hot weather.
While California braced for another round of rolling blackouts Monday night, the state’s grid operator held off for a second straight night, citing cooler than expected weather and widespread conservation. It also came as Gov. Gavin Newsom questioned all of the state’s electricity players about why the outages occurred and faced blowback from frustrated residents. Still, the state says more blackouts affecting millions of residents could occur this week as a historic heat wave endures.
California has endured planned blackouts in recent years as a wildfire prevention measure. But it was the Golden State’s first round of rolling blackouts related to supply since 2001, when Enron and other energy traders manipulated California’s market.
[End]
Note how the liberal Politico writers managed to insert a reference to Enron, a company that did indeed manipulate markets in California and other parts of the country, but which hasn’t even existed for almost 20 years. Note also, however, the key admission that Democrat governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom have both used rolling blackouts intentionally as alleged “fire prevention measures”, an effort designed to condition residents of the Golden State to accept such systemic losses of power as just another part of the “new normal” that is being intentionally created by Democrat party policies.
Understand what this means, folks: To California Democrats, rolling blackouts are not an inconvenience to be avoided, but a public conditioning tool to be intentionally deployed during major emergencies.
The next three paragraphs of this lede-burying story reveal the real nature of the issue:
Earlier Monday, the California Independent System Operator blamed Friday’s outages on “high heat and increased electricity demand.” Yet some energy experts noted that demand wasn’t particularly higher than normal, as is typical for weekends, and CAISO had predicted it would have adequate reserves on hand for the 80 percent of California’s grid that it manages.
“What’s weird about what happened is they were adequate until they weren’t,” said Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s climate and energy program and a member of the state’s Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery Commission. “It seems as if certain power plants for some reason were not able to deliver on the commitments to supply reserves and also supply energy.”
Because the Friday outage started around 6:30 p.m., when solar is ramping down and gas-fired plants are ramping up, gas is the likely immediate culprit, Wara said. “The timing of all this strongly suggests problems with gas plants,” he said.
[End]
Why yes, there are “problems with gas plants” in California: There aren’t enough of them. That’s because the Democrat-controlled government in Sacramento has spent the last 20-plus years making them increasingly costly to permit and build. In addition, the absurdly impractical emissions goals adopted by a string of left-wing governors have given public utilities like CAISO no choice but to resort to a massive over-reliance of intermittent sources like wind and solar while at the same time under-building new base-load capacity fired by natural gas plants.
Indeed, it is not even possible at this point to build any form of true baseload power plants in California other than combined cycle natural gas, as coal and nuclear have been basically outlawed by the Democrats in the state. But the ability of utilities to build more gas plants has also been restricted by lack of supply as Democrat politicians have also adopted policies that make it almost impossible to build new pipelines in the state. And so, we have the rolling blackouts day after day during a summer that is not particularly hot by California standards and which is positively mild by standards seen in other southwestern states.
What we are in fact seeing taking place in California this week is nothing more or less than a preview of the kinds of summer days filled with rolling blackouts that the energy/environment policies endorsed by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would produce for the entire nation.
If you like your air conditioning and want to keep it, you should vote for Donald Trump. It really is that simple.
