By April 29, Brown went even further and issued an executive order to cut carbon dioxide emissions 40 percent by 2030 by developing more renewable power that supposedly lessens the power grid’s reliability. Could California experience another power outage as it did in 2011 across the southern part of the state, after a lineman’s error sent high voltage pulsing through lower voltage systems?

So what will it be for the summer of 2015: Brown lawns and rolling power brownouts due to less hydropower availability from drought and more renewable, but supposedly less reliable, green power? CalWatchdog.com posed the question to the operator of the grid, the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), which has a stellar reputation of impartiality and technical competence.

The ISO’s forecast — 2015 Summer Loads and Resources Assessment — concludes that electricity supplies will be adequate for the summer of 2015, even if a heat wave scenario unfolds. And contrary to reports of green power unreliability, the report indicates new solar power projects coming online this summer will add more generation and will moderate peak energy events.

In an email, Cal-ISO spokesman Steven Greenlee also indicated that its new Energy Imbalancing Market would plug a gap in the early morning hours when wind power calms down and late afternoon hours when solar power fades.

According to Cal-ISO, California is likely to have too much power available, resulting in dumping of power. Greenlee said:

“If wind does not subside, then all of the resources combine to produce excess energy — at which time we are bound by grid standards to begin immediately rebalancing supply with demand. We let the market cure the situation, but as a last resort to maintain reliability, the ISO can and will curtail generation by dispatching units to zero output; we want to avoid having to this take this action.”

But what about the prospect for power brownouts mentioned by Moniz and the blackout that occurred during the Southwest Blackout of 2011?

What about brownouts?

Greenlee and Cal-ISO staff responded:

“In the intervening time since September 2011, the ISO internally and with its balancing authority neighbors have completed several reliability enhancements that have made the grid stronger and more resilient. This includes the following:

• “Enhancing the day ahead full network model that includes a representation of the entire Western Interconnection, which supports better congestion and energy balancing in the day ahead and real-time periods, explicitly modeling high voltage direct current links, and implementing a new outage management system that informs grid analysis;
• “Adding detailed network models for the Imperial Irrigation District, NV Energy, APS/Yuma, Western Area Power Administration-Lower Colorado and Sierra Nevada regions, LADWP, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Modesto Irrigation District and Turlock Irrigation District;
• “Expanding real-time contingency analysis to account for external model changes so operators can see the impact of external systems to the ISO grid as well as increasing the frequency of the analysis to every 5 minutes from 15 minutes intervals previously used; and
• “Implementing procedures to ensure the resources with the correct characteristics are procured to recover from a contingency and be ready for the next contingency as soon as, but not longer than 30 minutes.”

Another part of Cal-ISO’s planning is what is called “Demand Response,” whereby electricity customers voluntarily curtail power usage in the event of peak prices or if grid reliability is threatened.

Small businesses and residents would be asked to curtail

However, Greenlee clarified:

“Demand response programs, we believe, vary in composition of mostly residential and small businesses, are offered and managed by the state’s three investor-owned utilities, but please note the ISO does not have any control of, review privileges, or special insight into these retail programs.”

In sum, Cal-ISO does not expect reduced hydropower availability to materially impact grid reliability for 2015. And neither does it foresee a higher risk of brownouts or blackouts, as technical fixes have been put into place to prevent another power outage such as occurred in 2011. Moreover, new solar power coming online should provide greater grid reliability for summer 2015, although California still mainly relies on natural gas and imported electricity.

The only heightened concerns for the summer of 2015 are grid congestion and wildfires caused by transmission line sag that comes with high temperatures. California utilities have not yet adopted newer transmission line technology that reduces high temperature sag and can double current line carrying capacity.

By Joseph Perkins

After giving a speech in which he refused to bail out New York City from impending bankruptcy, Gerald Ford prompted the famously pithy headline in the New York Daily News:  FORD TO CITY:  DROP DEAD.

The Los Angeles City Council this week did not exactly tell San Diego and Orange County to drop dead, but it did send them a message that LA is perfectly sanguine with the prospect that the state’s second- and third-largest counties spend the upcoming summer in the dark.

In a unanimous vote, the 15-member council passed a resolution urging federal regulators not to allow the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station to restart either of its two reactors, both of which have been offline since January 2012, owing to premature wear on steam generator tubes.

Essentially, the council wants the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reverse its finding earlier this month that allowing Southern California Edison to fire up one of the nuclear plant’s reactors would pose no threat to public safety. SCE has a 78 percent ownership stake in San Onofre, San Diego Gas & Electric 20 percent and the city of Riverside 2 percent.

The council is following the advice of S. David Freeman, a former head of the Los Angeles Department of Water, who is now a “consultant” with the extremist environmental group Friends of the Earth, which is crusading to permanently shutter San Onofre.

Freeman and anti-nuke Friends demand that the NRC require Edison to obtain a full-blown license amendment to restart San Onofre. That may sound reasonable, but it entails courtroom-like proceedings at which Edison would be on public trial.

All Edison wants to do is get San Onofre operating at reduced capacity by this upcoming summer, the peak season for electricity demand in the Southern California region.

When San Onofre is operating at full capacity, it accounts for a fifth of the electricity both Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric deliver to their business and residential customers.

Rolling blackouts

Now, if L.A. businesses and residences faced the prospect of a summer with 20 percent less electricity than normal, and the resultant possibility of rolling blackouts, there’s no way the City Council would urge that San Onofre remain idle.

But because San Onofre generally doesn’t supply atoms to the L.A. Department of Water and Power, the City Council felt free to dump on the nuclear plant, no matter the consequence to Edison’s Orange County customers and SDG&E’s San Diego County customers.

In fact, a report last month by the California Independent System Operator (CaISO), which oversees the electrical grid for 80 percent of the state, warns that the combination of the continued shutdown of San Onofre and the significant drought-related reduction of hydroelectric generation — which helped replace the nuclear plant’s electrons last summer — could cause “Enron-style” power shortages this summer.

While the power shortages would affect all of Southern California, they would fall hardest on southern Orange County and San Diego County.

That suits the L.A. City Council just fine. After all, who cares if the bumpkins to the South have to deal with rolling blackouts this summer?

by Wayne Lusvardi

Green Power hasn’t been much help during the current heat wave. Especially bad have been the “snapback” hours from, about 7 to 8 pm daily, when demand exceeds the forecasted supply of power.  Green Power is, at best, a pricey luxury public good.

The state electric grid operator forecasts that California should have a surplus of about 10 percent — or 5,200 megawatts of extra power — to cover the estimated demand of about 47,000 megawatts of electricity needed to meet the heat wave from August 10-12.

But wind and solar power are producing only about 1,300 megawatts — or about 2.8 percent — of peak hour power needs from 3 to 5 p.m. during the heat wave.

And green power can’t be counted on if suddenly the wind should stop blowing or a dust storm should cover solar panels on desert solar energy plants. Despite all the hoopla about Green Power it is a pricey luxury public good ,at best.

Is California’s huge investment in green power — wind and solar energy — making any difference? And when California shifts to 33 percent mandated Green Power in the year 2020, will this pose a threat to the reliability of the power grid during similar heat waves or cold snaps?

Shut Downs and Outages Result in FLEX alert

Contributing to the crisis of the heat wave of the second week in August, 2012, is that the 2,150-megawatt San Onofre Nuclear Power Station is shutdown for repairs and an unidentified 775-megawatt natural gas power plant suddenly went down for unexplained reasons.  The San Onofre nuke plant remains offline with no scheduled restart date.

These two facilities roughly serve about 2.95 million homes.  This resulted in the state electric grid operator calling a “Flex Alert” to conserve electricity consumption on Thursday August 9 through Sunday August 12.  A Flex Alert is meant to prevent having to call a Stage 1 power emergency.

Most of the Flex alert reductions were absorbed by industries reducing their work, closing early, or going to night shifts.  Greenies may detest “smokestack” industries but it is mostly such industries that make it so homes can continue to run air conditioning during heat waves.

Green Power Generation on August 9 

The three stable sources of green power — geothermal, biomass, and hydropower — were producing about 1,500 megawatts on Aug. 9 (see second graph above).

The variable sources of green power — wind and solar power — were producing about 1,900 megawatts when it was least needed at 1 a.m.

At 8 a.m. wind and solar were generating about 600 to 700 megawatts of power.

At 3 p.m. — when peak power was needed most — wind and solar were only about 1,300 megawatts of the 47,000 megawatt peak load or about 2.8 percent.   Solar power production starts to drop fast while consumption is rising towards its peak.   This is not typically fatal to irrigating crops but it could be for other purposes.

Then there is the proverbial “snapback” of power demand about 7 to 8 pm. This is when demand typically exceeds forecasted supply of power as people turn on late night television to go to bed but air conditioners are still turned on.  Solar power at this hour is typically non-existent and wind power is mostly a late night and early morning phenomenon.

2020 crisis

There is a looming crisis for 2020, when the proportion of green power has to be 33 percent of the base load power sources in California by law. Base load power — the lowest level of power needed in a day — is about 25,000 megawatts on at 5 a.m. for August 10.

When air conditioning, then evening lighting, is added we reach a consumption peak. Peak power is defined as the highest demand required at a particular time. On Aug. 10 that should be about 47,000 megawatts of power per hour.

In 2020, thirty three percent of base load power on a day like August 9 would be about 8,250 megawatts (25,000 megawatts x 33 percent = 8,250 MW’s).

During a similar heat wave in the year 2020, the 8,250 megawatts of green power would equate to about 17.5 percent of total peak hour demand.  Today, the state electricity grid operator uses about a 10 percent surplus to meet any unexpected emergency demands on the system.

But what happens in 2020 when highly unreliable Green Power amounts to 17.5 percent of the power mix?  What happens when variable Green Power is greater than the backup power?  Will California have to add more expensive conventional power plants than it should need to just to have a reliable source of power?

Blackouts have increased 350 percent since 2007.

Hopefully, California will have a chance by 2020 to repeal or curtail its Green Power mandate.  But it may take more blackouts such as occurred in San Diego in November 2011 before the proverbial light turns on in the liberal mind of most Californians.

By JOHN SEILER

More evidence California has descended into Third World status: Yesterday evening I sat in the dark in my apartment for two and a half hours as a blackout blanketed Huntington Beach.

The Orange County Register reported: “HUNTINGTON BEACH — A widespread power outage in Huntington Beach left more than 21,000 customers without electricity on Tuesday night, authorities said.

“A technical problem with a breaker at a substation knocked out power to 21,285 customers at about 8 p.m., Southern California Edison spokesman David Song said….

“Officials have not determined what caused the breaker of the substation, which they described as the ‘nerve center’ of the local power grid, to fail.”

I’ll tell you the cause: California’s slide into incompetence, poverty and Third World governance.

I remember that, growing up in a Detroit suburb in the 1960s, blackouts struck only when a major thunderstorm, sometimes whipping up tornadoes, crashed through the area. The blackouts hit maybe once every five years, and with good cause. While sitting in the darkness clutching a flashlight and comforting my dog and cat — who were freaked out — I used my cell phone to call my brother, and he affirmed my memory.

In those halcyon days, Detroit Edison, the local power company, even distributed free light bulbs before the government made them stop on anti-trust and environmental concerns. Imagine that: a company actually encouraging customers to use its product. And if you lived through one of those harsh Michigan winters in the 1960s and 1970s, bogus global “warming” wasn’t a threat, but something to be hoped for.

But in Southern California in recent years I’ve been hit with one of these blackouts about once every year. And as with yesterday, there’s no good reason for them. The weather was typical Southern California balmy in February, the reason I moved here instead of to Alaska. Haven’t there been advances in power-grid technology in the past 50 years? Apparently not, at least not in Third World areas.

And I well remember the blackouts of 2000-01, during the California electricity crisis. The incompetent, Third World utilities and state government couldn’t keep the lights on for millions of people at a time.

Utilities = Regulators

Part of the reason is that the regulators and the utility executives are the same people, an obvious instance of Third World-style crony capitalism. The head of the California Public Utilities Commission the past nine years has been Michael R. Peevey. According to his bio, he originally was appointed by Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2002. After Davis was recalled, one might have expected that a changing of the guard was in order. But Peevey was re-appointed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, showing the virtual identity of the two parties.

According to his bio, “Mr. Peevey was President of Edison International and Southern California Edison Company, and a senior executive there beginning in 1984.  Mr. Peevey has served on the boards of numerous corporations and non-profit organizations.” So he’s regulating where he formerly was regulated. And both political parties are just peachy with that. How cozy. How crony capitalist cozy.

Naturally he’s also politically correct on the right issues: “He is also a strong supporter of renewable energy and renewable procurement requirements for utilities, and is a leader in implementing California’s Solar and Greenhouse Gas Initiatives. He also serves as Chairman of the California Emerging Technology Fund.”

Even after Solyndra went bankrupt last year, blowing $535 million in loans from the federal taxpayers and a $25 million tax break from California, the PUC under Peevey continued to support such breaks for similar companies. Reported Bloomberg, “Paul Clanon, a deputy to Public Utilities Commission President Michael R. Peevey, said California would risk losing advanced-energy companies to other states if the incentives were taken away.

“’This is exactly the wrong time to be pausing a green-jobs program’,” Clanon said.

“In November 2010, the authority granted Solyndra a tax break on equipment for its manufacturing facility for cylindrical solar modules in Fremont, California. The break was valued at $34.7 million, according to a report from [California Treasurer Bill] Lockyer’s office, of which the now-defunct company has used $25.1 million.

“Solyndra’s exemption accounts for nearly 80 percent of the tax relief used so far, according to figures from Lockyer’s office. The program, initiated in 2010, has awarded a total of $104 million in tax breaks, most of which haven’t been used.”

But when you’re “pursuing a green-jobs program” instead of the real job of keeping the lights on, you end up with endemic blackouts, such as those that keep striking California.

This is typical of third-world areas: More concern by public officials for subsidies for crony capitalist companies, such as Solyndra, than for providing efficient services to customers.

‘Culture of Corruption’

My colleague Katy Grimes has written a popular series of articles of how the PUC under Peevey has erected dangerous power lines through Chino Hills to bring power from trendy “renewable” energy sources, such as windmills, to Southern California. She wrote: “In the Southern California city of Chino Hills, there is a palpable anger spreading as the landscape is changing from bedroom community to industrial park. The bedroom community landscape now includes 200-foot electrical towers near homes, churches and parks.

“The Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project has had many of the 76,000 Chino Hills residents up in arms, but they are now left feeling impotent against one of the largest power providers in the state. Residents are watching helplessly as the installation of new massive electricity towers —  200 feet tall and 60 feet wide — are erected quickly, as close as 40 feet from some residents’ backyards.

“Southern California Edison’s Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project will cost a total of $1.8 billion in order to access and construct renewable energy generators from Kern County to western San Bernardino County. The City of Chino Hills has proposed various alternate routes that would move the transmission lines away from residential communities and schools into a local state park area, but were rebuffed by the California Public Utility Commission.”

In another article, “CPUC Stuck In Culture of Corruption,” she wrote, “It was on Peevey’s watch that a succession of deadly events took place, including the horrific 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion, which killed eight, injured more than 100 and destroyed 38 homes (pictured at right). Peevey was CPUC President when a gas line exploded in Rancho Cordova on Christmas Eve 2008, destroying a home and killing the occupant, as well as the very recent September pipeline explosion at a Cupertino condominium, which did not receive much press coverage.

“After years of approving rate increases earmarked for the San Bruno pipeline upgrades, the CPUC never followed up to make sure that PG&E actually did the work. Instead, PG&E pocketed the rate increases, shined on the pipeline upgrades and kept going back to the CPUC trough for additional rate increase approvals.”

Other Third World Indicators

There are other Third World indicators for California:

* Corrupt elections. As my colleague Steven Greenhut just wrote, Attorney General Kamala Harris, who’s charged with upholding the law in California, destroyed a pension-reform initiative by giving it a “false and unfair title…. Harris runs the Justice Department, yet she chose to wield her power to help her political allies and harm her opponents by posting a blatantly dishonest title. This is a totalitarian approach. If there is no semblance of fairness in the Justice Department, then all we are left with is the exercise of raw political power. Fear a society in which people like Harris rule the roost. Actually, we’re already in that society.”

* Crony redistricting. As John Hrabe has detailed on our site, the California Citizens Redistricting Commission rigged the process of drawing new lines for legislative and congressional districts. It should be renamed the California Crony Redistricting Commission.

* One-party politics. In addition to the corrupt elections and the crony redistricting listed above, Republicans bear much of the blame for their own descent into irrelevance. But however it happened, California now is a typical one-party Third World state. The Democratic Party dominates everything, beginning with all 10 statewide offices (including the supposedly “nonpartisan” Superintendent of Public Indoctrination). There’s no competition and no choice for voters.

* One-party union power. A major facet of one-party Democratic domination of California is the control over the party wielded by the government-employee unions. The taxpayers funnel billions to the union employees. The union bosses siphon off hundreds of millions in dues for political campaigns. The campaigns elect favored Democrats to office. The Democrats then do the unions’ bidding. Hence, there never is any substantial reform of pensions, or poorly performing schools or massive pay and perks for union members.

* High taxes. Crony Third World countries soak the productive to subsidize the crony unproductive. This was described by the great Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto in his book, “The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism.” The title is a reference to the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) socialist insurgent group in Peru, which attacks capitalism in favor of aiding the poor with wealth distribution. But De Soto points out that the real cause of Peru’s poverty is a crony capitalist system that prevents wealth creation by high taxation and massive bureaucracy. He detailed how hard it was  to go through all the red tape just to start a small business.

High taxes in Peru forced the wealthy to move their money to other countries, instead of investing it at home to create businesses and jobs.

The solution, De Soto said, isn’t socialism, but cutting taxes and getting rid of red tape. Such reforms create businesses and jobs, which in turn lift the poor into the middle class.

The whole situation in Peru sounds just like California with its anti-business, jobs-killing policies and attitude. It’s a message that should be heard by the Occupy Oakland and other Occupy movements.

* Bankruptcy. Looting the productive seems a good idea for a short time, until the looted leave for more favorable investment and business climates. Too much spending, too much taxing that drives away producers and a general anti-business attitude are major reasons why California effectively is bankrupt.

* Shrinking Middle Class. The pattern in First World areas — such as California once was — is to have a small ruling elite; a large middle class that can be entered by anyone just by working hard; and a small lower class that can be escaped by diligence, determination and savings that move one into the middle class, or even higher. All societies have ruling elites; can’t avoid that. But in First World countries, the ruling elites at least take some interest in the other classes, and in particular are solicitous of encouraging and preserving the middle class as the bedrock of prosperity and social progress.

By contrast, Third World countries also have a small ruling elite; but they have a small middle class that may be shrinking; and the have a large lower class that’s hard to escape. This now is California’s condition. In December, the Public Policy Institute of California reported that, since 1980, California’s middle class has shriveled from 60.5 percent to 49.7 percent of the population.

The Contra Costa Times reported that, according to report co-author Sarah Bohn, “Globalization and technological progress contributed to the long-term changes, which hurt some but were not always bad for everyone over the decades, she said. While some fell out of the middle into poverty, others moved from the middle to the higher income brackets.”

A better explanation is that high taxes and increasing government regulations slammed the middle class, while leaving California still attractive to the wealthy, such as those in Silicon Valley. If you’re a 180-IQ computer nerd, California still is the place to be. But if you’re just a middle-class person, it isn’t.’

In particular, I would add, the state’s regulations severely restricting housing construction have made home ownership prohibitive to the lower end of the middle-class, especially in coastal areas. Especially devastating has been the California Coastal Commission, a Soviet-style agency imposed 40 years ago that severely restricts home construction along the coast, thus keeping prices artificially sky-high, even after the recent real-estate bust.

This has a ripple effect, forcing up housing prices in areas next to the coast, and so on inland.

For example, the median price of a modest home in Huntington Beach was $20,000 in 1970, about the national average. That would be about $200,000 in today’s inflated dollars, well within the reach of most middle-class families. And as recently as 1998, the median home price there was about $160,000. But the actual median price now is $550,00, according to Zillow. See the line with the light-blue dashes in this graph:

California Nightmare

The result of all the heavy-handed government government taxation and bureaucracy is the destruction of the California dream. That dream is to move to California, buy a modest house, work hard at a decent private-sector job, raise some kids and have fun frolicking in the surf and sun. That dream still is enjoyed by a wealthy few: the 180-IQ Silicon Valley geniuses, the government workers with their generous pay and pensions, some private-sector business leaders who haven’t yet moved to Texas, and drug dealers.

For everyone else, its a California Nightmare of low wages dropping fast, unaffordable housing, a shrinking middle class, government schools that churn out illiterates and innumerates and blackouts that leave people fuming in the darkness.