Kerry JacksonEditor’s note: This has been excerpted with permission from the Pacific Research Institute. To read the entire article, click here.
Does anyone in the California Capitol subscribe to the Washington Post? Maybe someone on the governor’s staff, or an aide to an influential legislator?
Because the Post published on March 7 an informative story that should be passed around to every lawmaker in Sacramento.
Start with the headline (and a link to the cached version of the article):
“Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power.”
Turns out there are “vast swaths” of the country at risk of being unable to produce enough electricity. Georgia, Arizona, Virginia and Texas are noted as states where “utilities and regulators” are “grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.”
The drain is being caused by “electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories” that are proliferating “around the country.”
There’s no mention, however, of the stress electric vehicle mandates will place on the grid. California’s 2035 transition to an all-EV fleet, for instance, is going to cause supply to fall 21.1% short of demand. The calculation behind this figure assumes that residential consumption will remain flat, as it has since 2006, and does not include increased demand from future “electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories.”
Given these factors, that 21.1% shortfall is a conservative estimate.
To continue reading, click here.
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And people rarely make allowance for the equally delusional idea that we can transition from natural gas heating in homes and businesses to heat pumps — putting yet another factor of 1.5 times demand on the grid at critical times.
The cult of the amateur has been put in charge of things that they have so little knowledge of that they cannot evaluate how little they know. My goal for the next nine months or so is making my life robust against these coming failures without bankrupting myself. Tricky.