California's blackouts present an example of what not to do [View all]

[JI7]

<The cause of California’s problem was simple: There wasn’t enough electricity to meet everyone’s needs. With more people staying indoors to avoid the coronavirus and a heat wave sweeping the region, electricity demand spiked.

Right now, California relies on wind and solar power for roughly a third of its electricity. Just when people needed electricity the most, the sun stopped shining, the wind stopped blowing — and over 1,200 megawatts of electricity suddenly became unavailable. Admittedly, some of this shortage was due to an unexpected malfunction in some natural gas plants, but much of it was from wind and solar going M.I.A.

Since the sun sets each day, this was expected for solar power. Every night, the disappearing sun takes with it thousands of megawatts of electricity, and it’s a problem that solar plants in California have had for years. Of course, the state has always been able to force other plants to ramp up production quickly to compensate. It’s an expensive strain on the entire system, but it gets consumers through the night. And, in this case, the wind that usually blows through the night simply stopped blowing, removing 1,000 megawatts of electricity — enough to power nearly a million homes.

Here’s the rub: Neither the setting sun nor the calm weather would have been a problem if the state had had sufficient backup power. Wind and solar power, because they depend on the weather, must be backed up by reliable power sources. However, California has spent years closing the very plants capable of backing up and accommodating this variability.

In 2013, California closed a nuclear plant that generated over 2,000 megawatts of emissions-free electricity. This is enough power that, were the plant still running today, the recent blackout wouldn’t have happened. In the same time span, California lost over 6,000 megawatts of natural gas-fired electricity — over four times the shortfall that triggered the blackout. Natural gas plants are unique in their importance to the modern grid in that they can alter electricity generation quickly to accommodate fluctuations in wind and solar energy output.

California regulators are doubling down on these closures instead of wisely understanding that, without reliable backup power, wind and solar are a liability for a stable grid. They’re going to close the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant in 2025, taking even more reliable, emissions-free power out of the equation.>


https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/514955-californias-blackouts-present-an-example-of-what-not-to-do