Golden State Residential Electric Prices Rise with "Free" Renewables THOMAS J SHEPSTONE
Moreover, California imports much of its power so it can brag about emissions it has adroitly pushed out of the state so it can get the credit and someone else can pay the price.
Golden State Residential Electric Prices Rise with "Free" Renewables
JUL 25
As usual, JoNova has a great post up today about Australian electricity prices have risen with renewables which, of course, is inevitable given that renewables demand redundancy in the form of baseload power. She includes these nice charts to make the point that If “Australia gets any more free cheap energy it’ll go broke."
I decided to do a little test myself to see if her point held true for California, our own politically correct trend-setting state. I went to the Energy Information Administration’s handy-dandy electricity data browser and quickly obtained the volumes on non-hydro renewable energy generation and retail residential prices from 2001 through 2023. I then plotted the data on a single chart to get this:
Now, there are lots of reasons prices can go up. Moreover, California imports much of its power so it can brag about emissions it has adroitly pushed out of the state so it can get the credit and someone else can pay the price. And, correlation is not necessarily causation but notice how electricity prices for residential consumers went up dramatically 5-7 years following similar increases in the amount of non-hydro renewables generation.
That makes perfect sense, of course, because renewables forced onto a grid are just extra at first but as the grow they reduce the efficiency of baseload power plant operations and force some out of business. The need for baseload is still there, though, as backup, but now it’s more expensive, driving up the overall cost of electricity for California homeowners and renters.
So, there you are, Governor Gruesome. This is what you and your predecessors have done to your constituents and why you are driving them out of the state.
#California #Baseload #Power #Electricity #ElectricPrices #Australia
California’s collective memory is gobsmackingly short. Does nobody remember Enron? If they shut down Diablo Canyon as the government signaled last week, the cost of power is going to rise sharply again. They can’t build renewables and batteries fast enough to replace Diablo Canyon and of course there’s the reality of the cycles.
The similarity of effect will be gut-wrenching, based on a sudden loss of supply to cause brownouts and sharply rising costs.
Renewables can’t cut it.
Stephen, thank you for restacking this. Thomas, thank you for your analysis of the expensive waste inherent in current California energy policies. I believe what is driving these policies is aggressive lobbying of California decision-makers by greedy economic elites. Front and center is Berkshire Hathaway Energy (BHE) subsidiary PacifiCorp. PacifiCorp has a lucrative business selling mostly coal-fired power from Wyoming to power-starved California. Since November, 2014, PacifiCorp has already sold almost a billion dollars of its pollution-laden power on a daily spot market it helped to create with CAISO. Annualizing PacifiCorp's second quarter 2024 California general lobbying expenditures yields an unprecedented $24.9 million. BHE "greenwashes" its coal-fired generation by removing mentions of it on corporate websites and spending ample public relations dollars promoting BHE as a solar and wind leader. Nope.
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway CEO, admitted circa 2014 he is on the gravy train at taxpayer expense. (Buffett's father was a four-term U.S. Representative from Nebraska.) Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett explained the rationale for solar and wind generation in 2014:
"For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."
"Big Wind's Bogus Subsidies - Giving tax credits to the wind energy industry is a waste of time and money."
By Nancy Pfotenhauer, Contributor | May 12, 2014, at 2:30 p.m US News & World Report
https://tinyurl.com/Buffett-Wind-Scam