39 ms·

California faces power shortages and price hikes amid drought woes: report

25 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

FollowingTheDao 4y ago
- epistasis 4y ago
  The people who are moving out of California are the ones with lower incomes, who do not own homes, and get priced out as they can no longer afford rents. I would not say that these are the people that "ruined" California in any way. Those who can take responsibility for the state of California are those who have more power and money: the homeowners.
  - egberts1 4y ago
    LOL! Let me digress with you right there. Middle-class, by its inherent virtue, are very mobile and adaptive. Lower-class, not so much.
    - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
      Cmon now, under neoliberalism it is always the "poors" that are the problem...
      - egberts1 4y ago
        The “poor” are not a problem as long as there are middle-class to fund them.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      How do you define middle-class and lower-class? Education? Income? Place your markers on here: https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265 https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265
  - PaywallBuster 4y ago
    Would be interesting to see numbers on that Could be that many (or a significant portion) are part of the "tech" elite who has kept a job for the past 2 years and it's optimizing their "costs" by moving to a more advantaged area? While other people, may be getting better prices now that the bubble is deflating?
    - epistasis 4y ago
      I don't have any data from the pandemic, but the trend for the two decades before that has been very strong: https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265 https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265 Lower incomes, and younger. The people least able to afford houses.
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    Funny you all think I am blaming the "rich". I am not, I am blaming a mindset. This is a mindset held by rich, middle-class, and poor alike. If you all can tell me why, if not for the people, that California is suffering so much (homelessness, drought, wildfires) I am open to a suggestion.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      I didn't see you blaming a mindset, I see you blaming the people that were leaving. I would like to hear the mindset you blame. Personally, I blame the mindset of trying to keep people out, keep people away, and of not welcoming all the infrastructural changes we need in order to accommodate population growth from immigration. To me that means more dense, mixed use housing, in transit corridors. And when I say transit corridor I don't mean freeways, I mean trains and maybe busses. This lack of housing is the direct cause of nearly all our homelessness. We just don't have places for people, so tons and tons of people have commutes longer than they should be (more traffic), and tons of people crowd into homes that are way too small. Homelessness is just the most visible end route of that. The more expensive housing is, the greater flow of people into homelessness. It's not poverty rates that cause this, it's high housing costs. And the only only only way to deal with the high housing costs is to get rid of the idea that we have to keep people out, and start building tons of dense housing. Dense housing greatly reduces water usage while accommodating more people. Another mindset I blame is giving everything to somebody just because they got their first. So that's why we have farmers, who use 80% of CA water, growing massive amounts of alfalfa, instead of allowing people to use that water. Drought and wildfire are the consequences of climate change. That is definitely the fault of those with the mindset that everybody has to drive and live in isolated single family homes, to the point that they ban apartment buildings in nearly all of the state.
epistasis 4y ago
Why is a Kentucky newspaper reporting on this? There is probably a deeper story about why this article, and it's particular editorial choices, ended up in that newspaper.
- radicaldreamer 4y ago
  It’s just syndicated content from The Mercury News without the paywall the OG source has.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Aha, thanks, that makes sense. So not a very deep story, but an interesting one nonetheless. Very interested in why a Kentucky Newspaper would syndicate it.
    - egberts1 4y ago
      To get middle-class to come to Kentucky by the virtue of their inherent mobility. It’s better than recruiting, oh let us say, homeless?
      - epistasis 4y ago
        That doesn't make any sense to me, becuase I don't think this recruits anybody to move to Kentucky, as Californias probably aren't reading the Kentucky newspapers, and even if they were there's nothing in the article to recommend Kentucky as the destination versus anywhere else. It would make far more sense as an advertisement to people in Kentucky to not move to California. However, I suspect that it may be mostly about solidifying political dividing lines in the country, in an attempt to separate us from each other. I don't have any evidence for my suspicion though.
        egberts1 4y ago
        Yes, it is implicit advertising for (about to be) homeless in Kentucky.
mistrial9 4y ago
headlines are quick to declare "shortages" , where are the considered actions on efficiency ? It seems obvious yet efficiency is not discussed.
ibejoeb 4y ago
California is going "carbon neutral" by 2045. I think it's time to admit that the crusade to adopt only wind and solar is premature, despite all the good intentions. Hydro doesn't work where it's dry, and socal is feeling it. We need to be realistic. In summer 2020, we had blackouts. In '21, we built 6 new gas-fired plants to mitigate that. There's something really off about burning gas, shipping energy over wires, and using it to charge our teslas and feeling good about it. We've got at least one major nuclear plant scheduled to shut down in 3 years. What then? There has got to be a better way to do this.
- epistasis 4y ago
  > I think it's time to admit that the crusade to adopt only wind and solar is premature, This would be an unsupported conclusion. We had power outages not because of renewables, but because we hadn't planned for enough capacity. And we hadn't planned for enough capacity because the planners had not taken into account the effect of climate change: https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2021-01/caiso-cpuc-cec-issue-final-report-causes-august-2020-rotating-outages https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2021-01/caiso-cpuc-cec-issue-... I agree we should stop utilities from building new gas facilities, but if we also combine that with your proposal of stopping renewables, and keeping nuclear, we will have rolling blackouts. The only way forward is lots more renewables and storage, whether or not Diablo Canyon stays open. Diablo Canyon is just 2.2GW, and we need to serve peak demand 25-30x that on hot days. We should choose the most cost efficient method of doing that. If DC can compete on cost, sure, keep it open. But in general the problem in California is that we are not building enough new stuff. We need to dismantle the old, replace it with better newer and more efficient technology. The number of crappy tract homes from the 1970s that are sitting on $1-2M plots of land is an affront to basic common sense. We we'd far more energy efficient housing in the form of townhomes and apartment buildings on such expensive land. And that will greatly reduce our energy, water, and transit needs all at the same time.
  - ibejoeb 4y ago
    >your proposal of stopping renewables This is not my proposal. It's the unfortunate side effect. What happened is that now that we're feeling the pinch, we're building fossil plants again. I guess if I had a proposal at all, it would be to keep existing generation online while there continues to be supply shortages. >only way forward is lots more renewables and storage Now, I don't know that I'm 100% on board with that. How much land are we willing to ruin to wind and solar farms? Then there's the strip mining and slavery required for the lithium... All these things combined makes it apparent to me that we're not quite there yet. Let's keep researching. In fact, let's make it the #1 priority. Already there seems to be a lot of promising development, e.g., NaO2 batteries.
fakethenews2022 4y ago
Our inability to handle crises that everyone can see coming from miles away just shows you that our political class is not doing its job. See the droughts, wildfires, power shortages, homelessness, drug overdoses, etc... These have the potential for leading California on a downward spiral. We could and should have built far more renewable power. We could and should have built far more desalination plants. We could and should have cleared out far more undergrowth. We could and should have built far more cheap housing while cleaning up the streets. The Democratic supermajority has been in power for years but has done nothing in these areas. Perhaps some solutions go against the far left of the party and so they do nothing. Perhaps these issues don't better help them get reelected. Oftentimes, behind an issue is a powerful lobby group benefiting from the status quo. You can easily tell from the lobbyists that the politicians choose to meet with: PG&E, healthcare, teachers unions, etc... and who have carveouts against policies held over the rest of the population. That is why teachers were amongst the last to go back to in person, PG&E now has insurance against fires, etc... The Democrats holding office bounce from one office to another up the office hierarchy irrespective of their qualifications for the office. Many if not at the least overwhelming majority of the Republicans running for office appear to the neighborhood crazies you don't want to be office.
- epistasis 4y ago
  > crises that everyone can see coming from miles away just shows you that our political class is not doing its job. While I don't agree that everyone saw the energy capacity issues from miles away (even if it's obvious in retrospect), I do agree that our political class is not doing their job. But I disagree with the partisan political analysis of it. The problem isn't that we have a lack of diversity of political opinion, and in fact there's a huge diversity in democratic opinions, as big as I ever saw between democrats and republicans in the 1980s. The problem is that we have embraced an extreme form of conservatism that rejects changes to the status quo, and let's a tiny number of people prevent any form of change. We have embraced the power of the veto in nearly all parts of our government. Which may be fine if you are trying to stop negative changes. But we live in an era where we need lots and lots and lots of positive change in our system in California. And all those spots that allow vetos have blocked us from making those changes. The one story that gives me hope is of the story of a NIMBH blocking thousands of students from being enrolled in Berkeley. It set off a media storm and the legislature finally took action to overturn this one specific case. Sure, it was only because it was the parents of thousands of over-achieving students reacting with rage. But it gave me hope that this sort of "we can't change anything" attitude can at least be confronted. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/uc-berkeley-university-enrollment-nimby/622927/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/uc-berkele...
foolzcrow 4y ago

25 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

epistasis 4y ago
The people who are moving out of California are the ones with lower incomes, who do not own homes, and get priced out as they can no longer afford rents. I would not say that these are the people that "ruined" California in any way. Those who can take responsibility for the state of California are those who have more power and money: the homeowners.
- egberts1 4y ago
  LOL! Let me digress with you right there. Middle-class, by its inherent virtue, are very mobile and adaptive. Lower-class, not so much.
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    Cmon now, under neoliberalism it is always the "poors" that are the problem...
    - egberts1 4y ago
      The “poor” are not a problem as long as there are middle-class to fund them.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    How do you define middle-class and lower-class? Education? Income? Place your markers on here: https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265 https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265
- PaywallBuster 4y ago
  Would be interesting to see numbers on that Could be that many (or a significant portion) are part of the "tech" elite who has kept a job for the past 2 years and it's optimizing their "costs" by moving to a more advantaged area? While other people, may be getting better prices now that the bubble is deflating?
  - epistasis 4y ago
    I don't have any data from the pandemic, but the trend for the two decades before that has been very strong: https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265 https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265 Lower incomes, and younger. The people least able to afford houses.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  Funny you all think I am blaming the "rich". I am not, I am blaming a mindset. This is a mindset held by rich, middle-class, and poor alike. If you all can tell me why, if not for the people, that California is suffering so much (homelessness, drought, wildfires) I am open to a suggestion.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    I didn't see you blaming a mindset, I see you blaming the people that were leaving. I would like to hear the mindset you blame. Personally, I blame the mindset of trying to keep people out, keep people away, and of not welcoming all the infrastructural changes we need in order to accommodate population growth from immigration. To me that means more dense, mixed use housing, in transit corridors. And when I say transit corridor I don't mean freeways, I mean trains and maybe busses. This lack of housing is the direct cause of nearly all our homelessness. We just don't have places for people, so tons and tons of people have commutes longer than they should be (more traffic), and tons of people crowd into homes that are way too small. Homelessness is just the most visible end route of that. The more expensive housing is, the greater flow of people into homelessness. It's not poverty rates that cause this, it's high housing costs. And the only only only way to deal with the high housing costs is to get rid of the idea that we have to keep people out, and start building tons of dense housing. Dense housing greatly reduces water usage while accommodating more people. Another mindset I blame is giving everything to somebody just because they got their first. So that's why we have farmers, who use 80% of CA water, growing massive amounts of alfalfa, instead of allowing people to use that water. Drought and wildfire are the consequences of climate change. That is definitely the fault of those with the mindset that everybody has to drive and live in isolated single family homes, to the point that they ban apartment buildings in nearly all of the state.

Why is a Kentucky newspaper reporting on this? There is probably a deeper story about why this article, and it's particular editorial choices, ended up in that newspaper.

radicaldreamer 4y ago
It’s just syndicated content from The Mercury News without the paywall the OG source has.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Aha, thanks, that makes sense. So not a very deep story, but an interesting one nonetheless. Very interested in why a Kentucky Newspaper would syndicate it.
  - egberts1 4y ago
    To get middle-class to come to Kentucky by the virtue of their inherent mobility. It’s better than recruiting, oh let us say, homeless?
    - epistasis 4y ago
      That doesn't make any sense to me, becuase I don't think this recruits anybody to move to Kentucky, as Californias probably aren't reading the Kentucky newspapers, and even if they were there's nothing in the article to recommend Kentucky as the destination versus anywhere else. It would make far more sense as an advertisement to people in Kentucky to not move to California. However, I suspect that it may be mostly about solidifying political dividing lines in the country, in an attempt to separate us from each other. I don't have any evidence for my suspicion though.
      - egberts1 4y ago
        Yes, it is implicit advertising for (about to be) homeless in Kentucky.

mistrial9 4y ago

headlines are quick to declare "shortages" , where are the considered actions on efficiency ? It seems obvious yet efficiency is not discussed.

ibejoeb 4y ago

California is going "carbon neutral" by 2045. I think it's time to admit that the crusade to adopt only wind and solar is premature, despite all the good intentions. Hydro doesn't work where it's dry, and socal is feeling it. We need to be realistic. In summer 2020, we had blackouts. In '21, we built 6 new gas-fired plants to mitigate that. There's something really off about burning gas, shipping energy over wires, and using it to charge our teslas and feeling good about it. We've got at least one major nuclear plant scheduled to shut down in 3 years. What then? There has got to be a better way to do this.

epistasis 4y ago
> I think it's time to admit that the crusade to adopt only wind and solar is premature, This would be an unsupported conclusion. We had power outages not because of renewables, but because we hadn't planned for enough capacity. And we hadn't planned for enough capacity because the planners had not taken into account the effect of climate change: https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2021-01/caiso-cpuc-cec-issue-final-report-causes-august-2020-rotating-outages https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2021-01/caiso-cpuc-cec-issue-... I agree we should stop utilities from building new gas facilities, but if we also combine that with your proposal of stopping renewables, and keeping nuclear, we will have rolling blackouts. The only way forward is lots more renewables and storage, whether or not Diablo Canyon stays open. Diablo Canyon is just 2.2GW, and we need to serve peak demand 25-30x that on hot days. We should choose the most cost efficient method of doing that. If DC can compete on cost, sure, keep it open. But in general the problem in California is that we are not building enough new stuff. We need to dismantle the old, replace it with better newer and more efficient technology. The number of crappy tract homes from the 1970s that are sitting on $1-2M plots of land is an affront to basic common sense. We we'd far more energy efficient housing in the form of townhomes and apartment buildings on such expensive land. And that will greatly reduce our energy, water, and transit needs all at the same time.
- ibejoeb 4y ago
  >your proposal of stopping renewables This is not my proposal. It's the unfortunate side effect. What happened is that now that we're feeling the pinch, we're building fossil plants again. I guess if I had a proposal at all, it would be to keep existing generation online while there continues to be supply shortages. >only way forward is lots more renewables and storage Now, I don't know that I'm 100% on board with that. How much land are we willing to ruin to wind and solar farms? Then there's the strip mining and slavery required for the lithium... All these things combined makes it apparent to me that we're not quite there yet. Let's keep researching. In fact, let's make it the #1 priority. Already there seems to be a lot of promising development, e.g., NaO2 batteries.

fakethenews2022 4y ago

Our inability to handle crises that everyone can see coming from miles away just shows you that our political class is not doing its job. See the droughts, wildfires, power shortages, homelessness, drug overdoses, etc... These have the potential for leading California on a downward spiral. We could and should have built far more renewable power. We could and should have built far more desalination plants. We could and should have cleared out far more undergrowth. We could and should have built far more cheap housing while cleaning up the streets. The Democratic supermajority has been in power for years but has done nothing in these areas. Perhaps some solutions go against the far left of the party and so they do nothing. Perhaps these issues don't better help them get reelected. Oftentimes, behind an issue is a powerful lobby group benefiting from the status quo. You can easily tell from the lobbyists that the politicians choose to meet with: PG&E, healthcare, teachers unions, etc... and who have carveouts against policies held over the rest of the population. That is why teachers were amongst the last to go back to in person, PG&E now has insurance against fires, etc... The Democrats holding office bounce from one office to another up the office hierarchy irrespective of their qualifications for the office. Many if not at the least overwhelming majority of the Republicans running for office appear to the neighborhood crazies you don't want to be office.

epistasis 4y ago
> crises that everyone can see coming from miles away just shows you that our political class is not doing its job. While I don't agree that everyone saw the energy capacity issues from miles away (even if it's obvious in retrospect), I do agree that our political class is not doing their job. But I disagree with the partisan political analysis of it. The problem isn't that we have a lack of diversity of political opinion, and in fact there's a huge diversity in democratic opinions, as big as I ever saw between democrats and republicans in the 1980s. The problem is that we have embraced an extreme form of conservatism that rejects changes to the status quo, and let's a tiny number of people prevent any form of change. We have embraced the power of the veto in nearly all parts of our government. Which may be fine if you are trying to stop negative changes. But we live in an era where we need lots and lots and lots of positive change in our system in California. And all those spots that allow vetos have blocked us from making those changes. The one story that gives me hope is of the story of a NIMBH blocking thousands of students from being enrolled in Berkeley. It set off a media storm and the legislature finally took action to overturn this one specific case. Sure, it was only because it was the parents of thousands of over-achieving students reacting with rage. But it gave me hope that this sort of "we can't change anything" attitude can at least be confronted. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/uc-berkeley-university-enrollment-nimby/622927/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/uc-berkele...

foolzcrow 4y ago