Let’s pretend you like pie. You may in fact already like pie. Great, you don’t have to pretend. I mean, who doesn’t like pie? Anyway, now imagine you want a steady supply of pies to feed your cravings. The local pie maker knows you well because you and your local pie-eating club are always buying pies. The pie maker — let’s call him Billy the Baker — earns a living serving your desire for apple pie, cherry pie, coconut-cream pie, you name it. Ol’ Billy has an incentive to ensure there is ample supply of pies throughout the year to meet demand. Billy also has incentive to strive for the best quality pie so as not to fall out of favor from the pie-eating club and lose business to competitors in the fierce pie market. Bear with me, there’s a point to this hypothetical pie-making nonsense.
Now … let’s imagine that Billy the Baker cannot keep up with demand or chooses not to try. So, instead of expanding his pie-making operation, he urges his club of eaters to stop eating so many pies. Perhaps he tells his customers insultingly,
“Please stop shoving your fat, gluttonous faces with so much of my pie. Climate change has ruined my ability to gather ingredients. You must ration the slices so that there is enough pie to go around. Act responsibly, don’t be a slob.”
How would you react? You might say to yourself, “you know, Billy’s right, I will cut back on my pie eating for the greater good. After all, you can’t blame Billy for the climate.”
But then you find out there is another pie maker out there that is expanding business to meet demand. And that maker — let’s call her Connie the Cook —has no problem finding pie supplies. She tells her customers,
“Please come try my pie. You won’t be disappointed. There’s plenty to go around. If you don’t see a flavor that suits your taste, let me know and I will make one that satisfies your cravings.”
What will you do then? Well, you buy your pies from Connie, duh. Connie does well for herself, and the pie-eating club is happy, too. But Ol’ Billy the Baker loses his pie-making business and decides to go into a more suitable line of work … something that doesn’t require effort to satisfy consumer demand. He gets a job with the California Independent System Operator (ISO)1 to help oversee California’s electricity market.
California Energy
According to state officials, California will likely have energy shortages this summer.2 What’s new? State models predict a shortfall of powering 1.3 million homes during the peak use of summer. So instead of taking responsibility and working to fix the shortcomings of the power grid (the same story year after year), state officials simply deflect blame to nature and urge customers to cut back on their energy use.
The President of the California Public Utilities Commission, Alice Reynolds, said3,
“We know reliability is going to be difficult. We know climate change is putting Californians at risk of further outages.”
California academic energy “experts” spew the same tired story. Professor Severin Borenstein of the energy institute at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business said,
“The climate is changing and it's changing in ways that no one can predict. … The single most important change you can make is adjusting the temperature in your house. … We certainly can't forecast whether we're gonna have rolling blackouts or how many we're gonna have. It depends so much on the weather. A lot of it is due to nature and is out of our control.”
Sound familiar? These people are Billy the Baker incarnate.
California is transitioning its power grid away from traditional sources of electricity, such as natural gas plants, into more “green” sources of energy such as solar, wind, and hydro power. Ya think that maybe, just maybe, this might have some thing to do with the lack of reliability?!
The state set a goal to power itself with 100% non-carbon sources by 2045, and 60% by 2030. It looks like Californians are going to be 100% up $%@ Creek come 2045.
By 2025, the state will apparently lose 6,000 megawatts of power due to planned power plant shutdowns as part of this transition. That’s an equivalent to de-power ~4.5 million homes!
Instead of expanding or maintaining traditional, proven, reliable forms of energy, the state is chasing the absurd, like sourcing batteries to store energy from their solar power systems for when the sun isn’t shining. Or saving water in the midst of a drought to power their hydro plants. Or even encouraging conversion to electric-powered vehicles with government credits to further overload the grid. Absurdity. You ever wonder how other states are able to cope with “climate change?”
Nothing says “green” like the lithium and cobalt mines required for battery production … or the vast landscapes of beautiful rolling hills covered by solar panel farms of silicon semiconductors ... or the hydro-plants that chop up or lock in migratory fish … or the boundless tracts of land summoned to accommodate wind turbines that smack birds and bats right out of the sky. Green, they say.
Climate change is just the next “crisis” government officials will claim is the reason for their failures. And they will use the concept of climate change to alarm the public such that they surrender more and more liberty in the name supposed security. All the while providing lower quality service. They will invoke more power to combat the effects of their own failures. Politicians are good at this. Watch out for Billy the Baker.