California's rolling blackouts this summer were caused by decades of costly and poorly planned decisions to replace coal, nuclear, and gas-powered plants with solar and wind, according to some energy experts.
"It speaks to the delusion of California policymakers," says Michael Shellenberger, the president of Environmental Progress, which advocates for greater reliance on nuclear power as a way to reduce CO2 emissions and provide reliable energy.
On Wednesday, California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, signed an executive order asking the state legislature to ban fracking oil and gas, the latter of which provided a majority of the state's energy during the recent blackouts.
The main operator of California's grid says a lack of easily accessible backup energy, not renewables like wind and solar, were to blame for the blackouts.
One additional factor is that as California has increased its reliance on renewable energy, it has also become increasingly reliant on energy imported from neighboring states, who failed to make up for the shortfall during the heatwave.
Mills has calculated that storing a barrel of oil's worth of energy in a battery costs at least 100 times as much as storing the oil and that it would take 1,000 years for the world's largest battery factory to produce enough to store two days' worth of America's energy needs.
Shellenberger says the entire nation should view California as a cautionary tale, because its energy policy is the blueprint that some Democrats in Washington, D.C., want to follow.
https://reason.com/video/how-californias-environmental-mandates-led-to-blackouts/
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