One far-left official just got smacked upside the head by reality.
Breitbart reports that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Monday was forced to admit that the state’s renewable energy sources just aren’t getting the job done at the moment.
The status quo
Hundreds of thousands of people in northern and central California have been experiencing electricity blackouts since last Friday. This is the unfortunate part of this story as being without power, especially during the heatwave that the West Coast has been experiencing, is no joking matter.
Just about every other part of this story, however, is, for the level of incompetence on display is staggering.
California has been pursuing its own version of the Green New Deal. Included in it is the goal of completely replacing nonrenewable energy sources, namely fossil fuels, with renewable ones, particularly wind and solar power, by 2045.
The state has been rushing to enact this change, no doubt to demonstrate its enlightenment. That was until California recently came up against a cloudy day.
Time to “sober up”
Newsom on Monday was forced to admit that the recent blackouts were caused, at least in part, by an overreliance on renewable energy, which with recent weather conditions was simply not able to meet California’s energy demands.
On Friday, Newsom said that the state was 1,000 megawatts short, 450 on Saturday, and over 4,000 on Monday. On Sunday that state just about managed to get by.
Newsom attributed this to lack of wind and a lack of sunlight, including at night. “We failed to predict and plan these shortages,” Newsom said, accepting responsibility and promising to fix this problem so that “we never come back into this position again.”
Newsom also vowed to continue California’s transition to 100 percent renewable energy. He, however, stated that “we cannot sacrifice reliability as we move forward in this transition,” adding that a “more sober” forecast for solar energy is needed.
Reality check
The idea that California somehow “failed to predict” these problems is, of course, nonsense. There is no more basic criticism of wind energy than at times the wind might not blow, of solar energy, that at times the sun might not shine.
The real problem here is that the sort of idealism that prevails in California is blind to the realities of the world we live in. The result: hundreds of thousands of people – in the year 2020 – without power in record-breaking high temperatures for no other reason than that it was windless and cloudy.
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