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There were blackouts in California in 2000. Everyone should have seen them coming by now. They weren't solved then. It should have been obvious that the problem

by fakethenews2022 4y ago

There were blackouts in California in 2000. Everyone should have seen them coming by now. They weren't solved then. It should have been obvious that the problem would recur. Those NIMBYs you refer to are often lobbyists for special interests groups. For example, PG&E has been lobbying for years and in the meantime they inadequately cleared underbrush, didn't keep records on natural gas pipes falling into disrepair, etc... And in return we get falling power lines sparking wildfires and the San Bruno natural gas explosion. We have had water shortages for years and years. Yet the far left environmentalists block desalination plants. The environmentalists are actually ideologically opposed to all attempts to increase water supply: dams, desalination plants, etc... Meanwhile water rights are such that most of the water goes to agriculture. You can completely starve urban areas of water and the problem will still be there. The agricultural groups are loath to give up water rights. Our politicians are serving these groups at the cost of most of the population.

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epistasis 4y ago
Agreed on a lot of this, except that the 2000 blackouts gave us any clues about what to do for the blackouts decades later. Completer different, unrated causes. For 2000, deregulation was don't poorly and allowed a corrupt company to exploit a bad market. For the later blackouts, climate change estimates were not taken into account for extreme weather events, which led to underestimating peak load.
- fakethenews2022 4y ago
  Fair enough but look at population growth in California from 2000 till recently. That alone was going to cause problems.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Right, they accounted for population change, as you can tell because we don't have daily blackouts. They did not account for extreme weather events that were outside prior models of weather possibilities. This is quite distinct from, say, Texas's failure to respond to freezing events that were identical to the freezing events from a decade prior. The California blackouts were due to extreme events that had not been experienced. (In addition to failure of a large natural gas plant, IIRC, but the plan should take that into account too)
    - fakethenews2022 4y ago
      Fair enough.

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epistasis 4y ago

Agreed on a lot of this, except that the 2000 blackouts gave us any clues about what to do for the blackouts decades later. Completer different, unrated causes. For 2000, deregulation was don't poorly and allowed a corrupt company to exploit a bad market. For the later blackouts, climate change estimates were not taken into account for extreme weather events, which led to underestimating peak load.

fakethenews2022 4y ago
Fair enough but look at population growth in California from 2000 till recently. That alone was going to cause problems.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Right, they accounted for population change, as you can tell because we don't have daily blackouts. They did not account for extreme weather events that were outside prior models of weather possibilities. This is quite distinct from, say, Texas's failure to respond to freezing events that were identical to the freezing events from a decade prior. The California blackouts were due to extreme events that had not been experienced. (In addition to failure of a large natural gas plant, IIRC, but the plan should take that into account too)
  - fakethenews2022 4y ago
    Fair enough.