A milestone reached (or darn nearly reached) in the Golden State!

Doesn't Ca have rolling blackouts every year?

Like my car license plate says, "Coal keeps the lights on"

Don't want to violate the rules here by specifically enumerating any of the geopolitical aspects of alternative energy generation, so I'll just suggests that one might want to seek out answers to the following questions and arrive at his/her own conclusions as to their implications:

•what country manufactures the overwhelming majority of solar panels?

•what toxic, heavy metals do solar panels contain and what are the environmental impacts both of mining those substances and of disposing of them when the useful life of the solar panel is over? (This question should also be asked about electric vehicle motors and batteries)

•what sorts of beneficial animals do wind turbines routinely kill?

•once their service life ends, can wind turbine blades be recycled? If not, what becomes of them?


Not trying to assert that these devices should not be considered/used for the purpose of electricity generation: just want to point out that they should be evaluated with both eyes open since they are not necessarily the utterly harmless panaceas which they are often portrayed to be.

Please: do not consider this post to be an invitation to debate this here as doing so will likely wind up getting the thread locked.

Sure it is simple if you forget that each panel is made from toxic material that creates more long term pollution by one of the worst offenders in the world of just dumping into the environment.
Many other sources of energy listed as renewable are actually not. Co-generation plants and wind turbines that sit idle most of the time, and huge carbon footprints to produce, and at the end of life they sit abandoned in place just east of where I live.

Not always a fan but this one was interesting:

......... and the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant up the coast here in earthquake-prone CA is sitting within three miles of two seismic fault lines.  For me, I prefer solar panels in the desert. 


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant

I find the article quite difficult to believe, but then, it is on the internet, so it must be true!  

It doesn't mention what kind of electric bills people in CA are now receiving....or how this has affected the electric companies that once supplied the power.  Are they going bankrupt, or just enjoying the benefits of not having to keep their plants running full steam...?  

Inquiring minds....

SoCal Edison is still supplying the power.  Power generated by solar or turbine installations, whether large commercial or residential, gets fed back into the state grid.  If you install a rooftop solar system at home, your meter may run backwards if you generate more power than you use.  With home solar systems, it is also possible to install battery systems to store power for nighttime hours when there is no sun.  We looked into a home installation for our place near Palm Springs.  But the cost (~~~$60k without batteries) and estimated eight years to break even was too much for us to justify the cost.

Regarding monthly power costs, we're not out there during the hottest months of the year (leave a/c set to maintain 89 when we depart), but we're paying a flat $81/month to SoCal Edison on a level payment plan with an annual true-up.  If we were there, during hottest months, the monthly bill to run the a/c would be around $350.  We've also volunteered to have a cut-off installed on our a/c units so they can be turned off by SoCal Edison during periods of stress on the grid.  We get rate reduction for that.  No shut-off can continue for longer than eight hours.  We're gone so we figure it's a good deal for us.  SoCal Edison also advertises locally encouraging folks not to run major appliances between 4-9pm, when there is maximum stress on the grid.  We set our dishwasher to start up after midnight.

Thanks, I do know how the system works.  My questions weren't actually serious ones.  I do think that the overall cost of electricity should eventually come down, with so much being generated by renewables.  But we all know that will never happen.

Air quality with natural gas and even coal is very good. With the modern scrubbers and particulate filters the only exhaust from either is water and Co2.

I won't go into the politics of Co2 but fact is without it all life as we know it would die.

That’s the thing no one talks about. We have reduced pollution down pretty low with air scrubbers. Yet everyone wants to paint the picture of coal producing plant spewing out soot everywhere. Then there are all the jobs lost in those “fossil fuel” regions of the country. Replace them with what exactly?

...... except there is no politics of CO2 except to deny broad scientific consensus.

The very vocal deniers are the equivalent of tobacco industry mouthpieces telling us back in the 50's, in the face of research to the contrary known to the tobacco industry, that smoking is healthy.  

Generating electricity without burning fossil fuels does not give rise to increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere.  

This, from Yale:

yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/02/scientists-agree-climate-change-is-real-and-caused-by-people/

The Earth has gone through warming and cooling periods. I think we have charted 3 periods where there was no year round polar ice in the past 800,000,000 years.

People were not around to cause it the other 2 times.

Most plant life will flourish. This will increase crop production, more food and higher O2 levels. Mammals will also flourish

I was recently reading where someone plans to invest a bunch of $$$ and effort into Geothermal.

That is where none polluting energy could be had and with ongoing and never ending consistency.



Or so it seems to me