California Scrambles to Find Electricity to Offset Plant Closures | Hacker News Reader

California Scrambles to Find Electricity to Offset Plant Closures

wsj.com

169 pointsJumpCrisscross273 comments

> PG&E announced that it plans to close the two Diablo Canyon reactors in 2024 and 2025, stating that because California's energy regulations give renewables priority over nuclear, the plant would likely only run half-time, making it uneconomical.

> In 2020, experts at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) warned that when the plant closes the state will reach a "critical inflection point", which will create a significant challenge to ensure reliability of the grid without resorting to more fossil fuel usage, and could jeopardize California's greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Good stuff, shooting yourself in the foot because ideology versus reality

Yeah, this seems really stupid. I can see an argument for prioritizing renewables for new capacity (and can also see the argument for not), buy if the nuclear plants are already built, why de-prioritize dispatching their power now?

Probably because they're not. It's just the offer cost of nuke in the market is substantially higher than the juggernaut of solar, so the "invisible hand" is pushing it's capacity factor (how often it runs) down considerably to where it can't make enough money to stay in business.

Of course this isn't 100% due to free markets as the subsidies of renewables allow them to offer in extremely cheaply, but it exacerbates the problem. Even without the subsidies, this would happen with current designs. Now of course there is "resiliency" value to having a nuke plant (example: when the sun doesn't shine) that is a value by itself, but it isn't being priced and paid for.

I mean, the quote and the article disagree with what you're saying - it's not the "invisible hand of the market", it's a policy choice by California to prioritize buying from renewables over "dirty" power. Oil and coal can eat that because they have lower operating costs and fill a different need than nuclear does. Implying that this is due to the superiority of "the juggernaut of solar" seems incorrect to me.

I get there's this utopian vision of solar, and the gains in the industry have been impressive, but those gains are backed by some really deep market subsidies and policy choices - which, to be fair, were needed to get the technology off the ground. However, it's not there yet, and it didn't get there under its own power. What we're seeing here is a repercussion of those policy choices, not the a market stabilization in favour of a superior player.

That's not how electricity markets work such as the CAISO market.

Generators bid in their short run marginal cost for energy and the cost to provide certain reserve services and the unit commitment and economic dispatch algorithms choose which resources to turn on and what level they run at based on some cost minimization function.

Before markets, the incumbent utility would run all their nukes and coal as base load. Now with regional markets you have lots of utilities and private entities competing. Once massive amounts of cheap renewables (armed with subsidies to boot) entered the supply mix, it pushed out the most expensive generation to where instead of running ~24/7, they began running far less. Go look at any nuke plants capacity factor (percentage of the year running) in the US by year (you can Google it). You'll see a rather sharp drop. It can only go so low before the plant has to be retired as the cost to run it is greater than the break even point. CAISO operators obviously don't want that, but absent some kind of side payment from the state (unpopular with economists), it's the inevitable outcome.

I just wanted to make the distinction that the entity running the market and making sure the grid doesn't blackout usually doesn't make any decisions regarding what the rate payers at the retail level pay for. Even if they know a plant is required for reliability, it's a difficult process to figure out how to accommodate the plant outside the market. It could be argued that these markets in the US need to figure out how to better quantify the risk from losing these nukes and reflect that as part of the price (as well as other technologies). So far that hasn't occurred. Some areas have long-term capacity markets (example: PJM), but California does not (I don't think). Even then, the capacity markets have had many issues.

> Now with regional markets you have lots of utilities and private entities competing. Once massive amounts of cheap renewables (armed with subsidies to boot) entered the supply mix, it pushed out the most expensive generation to where instead of running ~24/7, they began running far less.

What this really means is that their cost function is broken.

Power plants really have three types of costs.

The first is the construction cost. This is a sunk cost for anything that already exists.

The second is fixed operating costs. This is things like property tax and security and maintenance, which you could save if you shut down the plant permanently, but you don't save at all by having it run at e.g. 50% capacity.

The third is variable operating costs. The cost of generating the incremental MWh, given that the plant is operational. For fossil fuel plants this is dominated by fuel. For nuclear plants (and renewables) this is basically zero.

Only the second and third should be a factor in whether a plant that already exists gets shut down. But more importantly, only the third should be a factor in where you buy power.

If you have a nuclear power plant which you're paying to keep operational but not consuming 100% of its output, you did the math wrong. (Or your electricity prices are regularly zero or negative.)

Electricity markets have been exhaustively researched for ~2 decades (the type we have in the US) and even longer for economic power systems in general.

All that to say the way things are done are not perfect, but they have had a lot of brilliant people looking into them for a long time. There is a lot of economic theory out there on the usage of short run marginal costs for offers and renewables are insanely cheap in comparison to most other technologies.

When you talk about paying for a nuke plant, but not consuming 100% of it's output, that's not exactly what I'm talking about. I would guess that many nukes simply have to run and can't be committed/decommitted like many other conventional technologies. They essentially become a price taker at that point and whatever they are making is likely not enough to cover what they need to stay in business. I hope that's more clear.

Also, zero or negative prices are indeed becoming increasingly common in certain parts of the US.

Edit: the capacity factors I saw posted publicly for nukes in 2020 weren't near as bad as I thought. Regardless, there are still a lot of planned retirements as I understand it, in the next few years. With Southern Company's Vogtle way over budget and behind schedule, I can't imagine another nuke being built in the US of that kind anytime soon either.

> Electricity markets have been exhaustively researched for ~2 decades (the type we have in the US) and even longer for economic power systems in general.

Do you think these cost functions properly price disruptions? I'm saying this because the US is an order of magnitude less reliable than in Europe, and most of these costs are pushed onto consumers. E.g. When the power goes out and I have to throw away food or lose a day of work, PG&E has never compensated me for that. It's externalized. Now imagine a scenario where lots of people rely on the grid to charge their cars.

I'm really skeptical of the obsessive hyper-optimization that's going on. If you have a situation where there is an extremely cheap energy provider that is highly unreliable, it could drive out of business the more expensive, reliable provider, and that needs to be taken into account. The zero or negative spot prices that were common in Texas as a result of windpower look to be an example of that pathology at work.

They do have "scarcity pricing" which comes up when energy is either deficit or the required reserves are. ERCOT in particular has something like $9000/MWh.

So let's go with this number. A price is the result of optimizing some cost function, so let's see if the underlying cost function correctly measures the cost of a disruption. 9K/MWh would attribute 1 day of electricity as being worth $108 (assuming standard per-capita usage of 12kW).

So for a single living alone, that's a bad deal, as suffering a power outage for 1 day and then being given $108 will not make them whole -- it wont even pay for the spoiled food, let alone the inconvenience of being without AC or internet for a day.

For a household of 2.5, they would get $270, which would pay for the spoiled food and inconvenience of buying it and maybe get $30 left over for the inconvenience of no A.C., cell phone running out, not being able to use your computer or internet, do your laundry, perhaps not being able to use your mobile phone, etc. And we aren't even assuming PEV or people working from home. Then they would also lose 1 day of wages.

So it would seem to me that just to make someone whole you should probably double or triple that, say to 20K/MWh, but then this is supposed to be a penalty rate, so it should cost more than what it would take to make a household whole, because we don't want the utility to be indifferent between making the household whole and providing the electricity, we want the utility to be heavily incentivized to avoid the disruption.

These are wholesale prices, not retail, but yes the two are linked.

$9000/MWh isn't crazy for a few intervals once a year, but if a generator clears 200 MW for each hour of the day for a day in the day ahead market and then has issues and can't provide that power in the real time market, it has to buy back that power at the spot price. That can get insanely expensive fast. Now imagine the owner of that generator has other generators in the same boat and it just stacks. These aren't trivial prices. Similarly, the load serving entities have to buy power at that spot price if they don't have it locked in at a lower price in the forward market (hard to do when events occur over multiple days). A little googling will turn up some chatter about many of those companies nearly defaulting from the ERCOT scarcity pricing during the February event.

>$9000/MWh isn't crazy for a few intervals once a year, but if a generator clears 200 MW for each hour of the day for a day in the day ahead market and then has issues and can't provide that power in the real time market, it has to buy back that power at the spot price. That can get insanely expensive fast.

Exactly! And it should be 30K, not 9K, due to my arguments above. You are pointing out that renewables, while unreliable, are so cheap they are driving the reliable electricity out of business. That means something isn't being correctly priced, because we as a nation require reliability. So I propose to put a price on that reliability, and you point out it can drive the unreliable provider out of business, which is kinda the point -- that unreliable provider will need to purchase insurance from the reliable provider to cover them, or "side payments" as you call it, in case something goes wrong. This puts a price on having the nuclear provider available in case the wind doesn't blow, and creates payments to that provider, but via market mechanisms. If the wind provider is confident in their battery storage they don't need to purchase insurance from the nuclear provider. But the point is to stop externalizing the costs of unreliable power. This is to end up in a situation where we as a nation are able to fund reliable sources of electricity rather than everyone switching to wind and the nation going dark when the wind stops blowing, throwing up it's hands and saying "oops", or "wow, I can't afford this. Gonna declare bankruptcy now, see you on the other side with more cheap spot prices". That's how you do it with the market mechanisms - by putting much bigger penalties on unreliability than we have now and requiring proof of insurance for being able to handle those payments.

> These are wholesale prices, not retail

Of course, because we are talking about how much to penalize providers for disrupting the lives of households - remember we are trying to price reliability. The providers pay wholesale, so that is the relevant cost function to target, not retail.

Seems like they could essentially reserve a block of capacity (provided by the nukes) as being outside of the market, no? If the nuke plant has a planned or unplanned outage of some or all capacity, that reserve capacity could temporarily be reduced to give a larger slice to the market. Seems like a fairly straightforward way to accommodate the need to ensure for reliability.

Easy to do on paper, but probably hard in reality. If you do that, pretty soon you don't have a market. It can also suppress prices as well by having too much capacity online I think. There's a lot of moving parts.

One question to ask yourself is who is going to pay for this block of nuke capacity? It would be very expensive to pay for that on a 24/7 basis "just in case". The market already clears reserves for a variety of contingency events and it's certainly a balancing act to ensure you have enough without over paying for something you'll only need in ultra rare occasions.

Part of the market philosophy is also not to signal out any one technology. You put in some requirements and let the economics find the cheapest solution. So you could ask for more reserves, but they probably wouldn't just come from nuke.

It's sad really.

There is an alternative reality where anti nuclear activist [1] never succeeded and we continued to make great progress on reactors. Ultimately, reducing fossil fuel use and corresponding GHG levels.

One of the very things the environmental groups fought against was one of the things that could have saved us.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement

Yes, this country should be covered in nuclear plants that provide the majority of our electricity. Energy should be too cheap to meter. Whatever problems we as a society may have, it will take energy to address those problems, and the core of our energy production has to be stable and reliable.

I had a conversation with a co-worker who used to work for Toshiba heavy industries on their nuclear stuff - he made the interesting point that there's only so much accessible uranium on the planet, to the point where we'd use up all of it in ~75 years if we were running the entire planet on nuclear. The only way around this is to use breeder reactors, which is a huge no-no from an international relations perspective because those are the same types of reactors used to make nuclear grade fissile materials.

Honestly that seems like a more easily solvable problem than what to do with ~30 billion solar panels and the corresponding battery capacity that would need to be built up if we tried to get the bulk of the world's energy from solar. Of course when someone points out that there isn't enough raw material to make all those batteries and panels, the standard answer is "we'll mine more", but strangely that's not supposed to be an option with mining uranium -- so I am generally skeptical of the "peak uranium" theories. It's not even a matter of needing to turn to breeder reactors, although that's certainly a possibility, but rather it's just a question of mining more, and that always happens as technology improves and demand for a metal increases.

But sure, nuclear power is not something that would work for every nation on earth. But it would certainly work well for North America and the EU, as well as China, India, Australia, and Japan, which together account for the majority of the world's energy needs.

Your co-worker may be mistaken. ~75 would only make sense if he was saying of known deposits. And even then, there is about 50 million tons of known deposits, and the currently open mines only account for about a tenth of that... I'm not sure we'd need to burn through the resulting refined product of 50 million tons of pitchblende to run the entire planet for 75 years.

This also ignores the rest of the intended refinement chain: thorium and other reactor fuel sources.

The uranium deposits are a long way from 1:1 with fuel grade uranium. Natural ore is generally under 20% uranium, and that uranium is 90.3% U238, and 0.7% U235. Reactors want ~5% U235 but depleted uranium is still 0.2% to 0.3% U235. Which means your produce less than 10% fuel grade uranium from every ton of natural uranium. Ex: Cigar Lake with ~217 million pounds (99,000 t) of ore at 18% uranium is only going to produce ~1,700t of reactor grade uranium. As you very roughly get 1GW for 1 year from 1t of reactor grade fuel that’s only 23GW for 75 years.

Aka, those 50m t of ore globally work out to around 0.5-1m t of fuel though we’re extracting the cheapest stuff first so expect prices to rise well before you extract all of it. There are also options to extract vastly more energy from that same ore, but again they all make nuclear more expensive.

> Reactors want ~5% U235

Light-water reactors, which are the more/most prevalent design. Heavy-water reactors, like CANDUs, can use non-processed uranium in 'natural' concentrations:

* https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/CANDU_reactor

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor#Purpose_of_using...

The heavy-water is deuterium oxide, where there "hydrogen" atom has one proton and one neutron, whereas the far more common hydrogen has no neutrons in the nucleus:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water

Current CANDU reactors are significantly more expensive to operate and have had relatively low capacity factors. Which is why they have had little success outside of Canada. China for example only uses 2 and has abandoned the design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

They do use up to 30% less mined uranium as your link points out, but also produce a lot more high level nuclear waste.

Hmm, that might be right then. I was doing the fuzzy math in my head on what we can do, not what is worth doing right this moment due to market influence.

Conventional reactors also produce plutonium; in fact, there's a suspicion that one reason Chernobyl was so poorly designed (e.g. lacking a containment dome) was that they were extracting warhead fuel from it. About a third of the energy in US reactors is actually from fissioning plutonium, but they do that inefficiently so plutonium and other transuranics make up most of the long-term radioactivity in high-level nuclear waste.

On the other hand, breeder reactors don't necessarily make weapons-grade material. The Integral Fast Reactor in the US produced a mix of four plutonium isotopes, which was totally unsuitable for weapons, and harder to enrich to weapons-grade than natural uranium.

Using breeders multiplies the energy from uranium ore by a factor of a hundred. With such low fuel consumption, it also makes seawater extraction pretty easy, which extends our fuel supply to many millions of years.

This is an interesting point. Is there some data to use as a reference for it? Would other forms of nuclear fuel replace uranium in larger quantities?

I feel like this has been absent in many pro-nuclear arguments (I always assumed we had much more)

There's "uranium in the planet" - lots! - and "uranium accessible to humans" - not so much.

The other fuel used would be plutonium and thorium, I believe. My understanding (not a nuclear scientist) is that there's a cycle of enrichment and decay that produces more fissile materials than it consumes.

Interestingly, from my perusal of wikipedia, it seems like you effectively can recycle the uranium isotopes indefinitely in such a reactor, as well as generating fissile plutonium and thorium.

Again, the problem is that generating fissile plutonium is how you make a bomb

I think China is testing a thorium reactor now. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02459-w

China is leading the way, both in terms of adding coal capacity right now to address the power outages while also building out nuclear capacity for the future.

The ability to act rationally like this when popular movements turn irrational is one advantage of an authoritarian system. No doubt many in the west are looking somewhat enviously at China.

Except coal has gotten super duper expensive, and most Chinese coal plants are designed to burn high grade coal such as produced in Australia. Many can’t run at all on the much more common lower grade coal that they can find inside of China, or they can’t run effectively on it.

So, the Chinese are spending way more money than they should on building super duper expensive coal plants that can’t effectively run on the kind of coal that they can get. And they have a coal embargo against Australia, so they can’t import the stuff that they could actually burn effectively.

Meanwhile, solar panels have continued to get progressively less expensive, so that even in China, it is now cheaper to run solar panels than it is to burn coal.

The more uranium is used, the more it will increase in price, allocating more resources to exploring for new sources.

Increased uranium prices will not significantly affect energy cost, as fuel price is very small fraction of nuclear plant operation.

These days there are ways of getting uranium from sea water [1], basically making the supply practically limitless. This way is currently un-economical, but as current reserves are depleting, it will become viable option as well. (Along with researching for more reserves)

So yes, it was totally possible to decarbonise electricity production long ago.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

It's wrong.

Breeder reactors can make fuel during use.

We only need enough fuel for one reactor.

> 75 years if we were running the entire planet on nuclear

That seems like plenty of time to

a) build renewables

b) figure out fusion

c) discover/make accessible more uranium just like we did with oil

d) Ramp up population to 20B people.

I believe Russia runs the only 2 breeder reactors known to be operational? So if they can get away with it, seems like major nuclear powers could agree to produce fissile material for energy purposes, keeping public record of how much is made and selling some limited quantity to poor countries for running small plants. Require public audits by an agreed upon body created for such a purpose and representing equally each major nuclear power. There can be solutions made.

It's a fair point. The US or Russia having more bomb-grade fissile material isn't such a shift in geopolitical reality.

There are 4 billion tons of uranium dissolved in the oceans [1]. That's about 80000 times the worldwide annual production.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/materials/Fishing-uranium-ocean-spider-s...

It's hard to believe that someone from the nuclear industry doesn't know about breeder reactors.

Nuclear fuel can increase during use. Running out isn't required, the way it is with consumable fuel

Exactly, it's a man-made, not a technical issue - breeder reactors are the solution.

It's not a technical problem (solution is well known), it's a policy problem.

"it didn't get there under its own power"

Existing power infrastructure has already paid its capital costs, meaning they have a massive incumbent advantage. Coal and gas power also haven't historically had to pay for their externalities, which is another distortion in their favor. This means that without extra incentives, you're stuck with coal until the plants need to be replaced, which essentially means until something truly magical happens or forever, whichever comes first.

So, you can look at the subsidies for solar as offsets for the incumbent advantages and externality subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the LCOE of solar has improved exponentially with scale and semiconductor improvements, which gets close to the 'something magical.'

Are not all forms of generation heavily subsidized? I feel if you could generate electricity by killing kittens and baby seals you would instantly get a subsides

the electricity market equivalent of HOAs are not the invisible hand

Nuclear is heavily subsidized itself. Without guaranteed prices for energy for decades nuclear plants would be far less attractive to build.

Shutting an existing plant without having an alternative in sight is just plain stupid even if it was coal powered power plant. Higher energy prices and lack of energy also kills people and damages environment. Do you really want people to run diesel generators in their backyard when power goes off ? Do you really prefer people to buy gas powered gadgets or cars because they don't trust electric grid ? In the absence of reliably grid electricity, people might opt for alternatives that are much more damaging.

My local solar company advertises itself as "alternative to unreliable PG&E", it is expensive and not many can afford it but I can see why some people might spend their healthcare or education budget on buying those expensive solar panels.

Diablo Canyon was commissioned in 1985 with a planned decommission date of 2015. 36 years is on the upper end for how long nuclear power plants last. The alternative is to buy/import electrical power. Of course, the power grid needs upgrading.

https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/29402043133.pdf

Because Diablo canyon is also built on an earthquake fault.

Diablo Canyon is designed to withstand an earthquake of shaking amplitude ten times larger than that which the Shoreline fault is capable of triggering, based on an analysis by plant owner Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_earthquake_vul...

Just note that PG&E is the entity who has stated the Shoreline fault is only capable of a 6.5 magnitude earthquake - while the plant is designed to be capable of handling [after post-construction updates] an earthquake up to 7.5 magnitude (10X since it's a log scale).

Also note, the linked page states there are four "nearby" faults -- it doesn't state the distance to them, but included is the San Andreas fault, and I'm relatively confident we know it's capable of producing >= 7.5 magnitude earthquakes.

I don't know, nor claim to know, much of anything about how susceptible [or not] this plant is to seismic events -- and I'm generally quite pro-nuclear -- but it's worth noting that there are other seismic concerns here, and potentially some questionable incentives for PG&E who is the one attesting to the capabilities of the area & this specific plant.

The first part of what you say is not valid: outside groups have estimated the capabilities of the close Shoreline fault. The rest of your comment I agree with. Although I would point out that if San Andreas quaked at (eg) 8, it would not be 8 when it reached Diablo Canyon.

According to USGS seismologist, Jeanne L. Hardebeck, the Shoreline Fault has potential to trigger an earthquake of 6.4–6.8 magnitude

Your point is clear enough, but both the parent & grandparent comments are misuing the terminology.

Earthquake sizes are usually expressed via Richter scale or Moment Magnitude Scale values, which both attempt to quantify the total energy released by the quake. These scales do NOT quantify the force experienced at any particular location, which depends heavily on distance from the epicenter and local geology. For that kind of quantity, you would use a seismic intensity scale (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_intensity_scales).

So it's wrong to say that a quake "...would not be 8 when it reaches Diablo Canyon" because the value '8' is an MMS or Richter value. Instead, you could say that "...the damage potential would be reduced by the distance to Diablo Canyon."

Keep in mind that one mistake made in the Fukushima design, and which might be happening here, is whether these estimates are based only on past historical data or not.

If they're based on historical data, on the worst known past earthquake/s in the region, then they may be effectively black-swan blind. Eg, they may be failing to take into account that the worst past events always exceeded the prior worst event before it, and therefore prior worst events were not, and are not, a reliable measure for future ones.

Building earthquake-proof nuclear reactors requires, at minimum, taking the worst past earthquake nearby, and assuming the next will be worse yet, and building for that one (or the one after, etc).

Or better yet, just don't build nuclear plants on top of fault lines, regardless of what historical data shows about it.

Do you trust pg&e after the whole French laundry lobbyist thing? https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/abc10-originals/new...

No, I would definitely support an audit of their claims. With my comment, I intended to point out that a seismically active location may not be game over for a nuclear plant if proper consideration is taken.

The same PG&E also fell behind on maintenance of vegetation around power lines, causing wildfires. As well as gas pipe infrastructure, causing a neighborhood scale explosion.

On the other hand, distributed, statewide maintenance (vegetation, gas pipelines) is very different than centralized maintenance (nuclear power plant).

It doesn't speak well to their competence, but "inspect and maintain 1,000s of miles of line" is different than "inspect and maintain 1,000 items in one place."

If the risks were equivalent, but it’s maintain many more than 1000 items to at a tolerance 1000 times more sensitive with a outcome 1000 times worse than a wildfire or gas explosion.

Plants owners will always say that they analyzed their own plant being safe...

NRC's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Diablo Canyon was 1 in 23,810 according to an NRC study published in August 2010.

Indeed. This sort of thing should be called "toilet ducking", in recognition of the (Dutch) brand whose ads poked fun at this very idea in the 90s. "Therefore, we of Toilet Duck recommend ... Toilet Duck!" ("Toilet duck" is a transliteration of their name.)

Moreover, it sounds suitably silly to be used for such silly nonsense.

Toilet Duck is sold as such in the US.

And that is before they start storing spent fuels on site.

> ideology versus reality

It works until it doesn't. I don't think it's common knowledge today that ideology is a luxury, and doesn't put gas in the tank of a functioning society, now that we've generally taken a functioning society for granted.

There’s probably a theory in there that any technological or social system is doomed to have periodic major preventable failures as a function of human life span and attention. If people aren’t reminded of failure they will inevitably neglect the system until it happens.

There’s a follow up whereby it might be optimal to design systems explicitly to allow somewhat frequent non catastrophic failures to keep people on their toes. Attempts at “perfect” safety seeming to only build up to less frequent but bigger disasters.

The theory you may be looking for is [1] Chesterton's Fence

[1] https://thereaderwiki.com/en/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

Cliodynamics is this, but for the miseries of industrial war.

The tradeoff is one failure for another

Disasters created by ideology are the normal pathway to vaccinate the general population against memetic viruses. Were education may fail, a winter with rolling black-outs, may not.

Sometimes you need a forcing function.

Much the same is happening in Texas but in the opposite direction. [1]

"“I’m very disappointed,” Nichols said, taking issue with a provision in the new law that lets gas companies easily skirt weatherization requirements as long as they don’t declare themselves to be “critical infrastructure” with the state."

[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/...

This could almost be a good thing. If they shut this plant down and immediately start experiencing grid reliability issues it could get some press coverage and be a wakeup call

Negative press coverage doesn't seem to phase PG&E

or the california government

This entire recall election for the governor seemed to stem from press coverage that sparked a limited movement. Considering the result seemed too close for comfort throughout much of the campaign process, I wouldn’t exactly consider the government immune to negative press.

Maybe not, but PG&E sure seems to be immune. It's not a great look when you both have very high electricity prices [0] and you're also frequently starting fires and killing people. But good news, shareholders, it turns out that actually being convicted of crimes [1] as a corporation is no big deal, so much so that they're pleading guilty to manslaughter ten years later [2]. And even better, there's regulatory capture that makes it extremely hard for municipalities to stand up their own services to provide safer and cheaper power to residents [3].

[0] 0.26/KWh if you're a saint and use almost nothing to $0.41/KWh if you use a normal-or-more amount of electricity. See https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/pge-ordered-develop-com...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pg-e-pleads-guilty-manslaughter...

[3] https://www.desertsun.com/story/tech/science/energy/2018/10/...

> because California's energy regulations give renewables priority over nuclear

Hack to solve this: classify nuclear as renewable?

Or just repeal a bad law instead of trying to fill the law books with hacks.

It's effectively renewable because (1) there's essentially no pollution and (2) with no prospect of new plants, mining of fuel is not going to add up to much impact.

I agree with your viewpoint in general.

Nah I don’t think you can take linguistic shortcuts on this. As much as I’m a proponent of nuclear power, I’m a bigger proponent of repealing bad laws rather than accommodating them with poorly thought out extensions and calling nuclear something it’s not doesn’t sit well with me when it stands fine on its own merits.

I think we’re agreeing directionally at least.

Yeah, that's fair. Admittedly I posted that comment because it amused me.

This is happening in Europe! "Finland has joined France, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic in lobbying the European Union to categorize nuclear power as sustainable."

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/14479635067377049...

Facts don't matter only feelings do - One of the California politicians.

When people say X must be treated and utility and politicians must control it, I show them PG&E as a glorious example of California's corruption and overall incompetence.

... because activism trumps intelligence.

nuclear isn't profitable for lobbyist because of the regulations around it, can't outsource production of panels to China and reap massive profit margins from subsidies. Same thing for wind turbines. I know executives with power companies who built out massive wind farms only because of the subsidies, those wind mills have about a 20 year life time and can't be recycled or reused

Should we get rid of subsidies for oil production too?

This has been in the works since 2016.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/End-of-an-atomic-era...

If only reality would listen to reason.

Reason working its will on reality is the definition of progress.

Yes, this the motto on our state flag I believe

Solar has become dramatically cheaper in the past decade but the policymakers don't seem capable of realizing it's still not enough for America's energy needs on its own, doubly so drought-ridden California.

How are droughts creating problems for solar?

They aren't, they're creating weird issues with the power grid due to lack of investment there for which Californians are now on the hook to address through higher utility bills.

https://www.pge.com/en_US/about-pge/company-information/regu...

California has such a disfunctional gov, don’t ever let people tell you there’s no money. It’s just going to overpaid public sector workers in education (where you can’t be fired after 2 years and pay is completely based on seniority), health care, and the prisons. Police in my area make up to 600k with overtime, and probably get a similarly large guaranteed pension. All those services have gotten huge increases in money over the last few years with 0 to negative improvement.

While I agree that the funding model for a lot of services in California is broken, I think you're basing your opinion on a number of false premises. For example, speaking directly to your claims about educator pay:

1. You can absolutely be fired for cause as a tenured teacher in California, and it happens all the time. It's certainly more difficult than most other professions, but there is no law or policy preventing teachers from being fired.

2. Teacher pay is not entirely based on seniority. Graduate education, certifications such as the National Board of Teachers (which is merit based and does require observation) or a bilingual certification, coaching a team/leading a club, all can contribute significantly to a teacher's salary.

3.After a 10 years of service, a teacher with a masters degree in my area makes $63K/year. Adjusting to a 12 month schedule, they'd be paid $75K year. With only a BA that drops to $54K. Hard to argue they are overpaid at that rate IMO.

It's extremely easy to see the excessively high rates that some regents or college administrators make, and attempt to use that anecdata to draw a full conclusion, but in my experience the rank and file make on average 25-30% less than they could in private industry.

Not sure where in CA you're based, but in Menlo Park there are custodians with total comp in the low six figures (including benefits but on a 9-month calendar). The teachers make more, and counselors/administrators are in the $200k range.

As for teacher firing, it is very rare in CA. [1]

> California has more than 1,000 school districts and 300,000 teachers, yet only 667 dismissal cases were filed between 2003 and 2012. Only 130 of those actually got to the hearing stage, and 82 resulted in dismissals — fewer than 10 a year.

1: https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/01/25/firing-a-tenured-teac...

The laws governing teacher firing were changed in 2014 [1], and credential revocation has become compulsory in a large number of cases. The Commission on Teacher Credentialing opened 361 discipline cases last month alone [2].

I'm in metro Sac and got my numbers from this local district [3]. Looking at the numbers for Menlo Park City [4], the max pay rate is still only $130K, and that would require a PhD and over 20 years of service. A teacher with a BA never reaches $100K.

1: https://www.davisvanguard.org/2014/06/governor-signs-bill-st... 2: https://www.ctc.ca.gov/docs/default-source/educator-discipli... 3: https://www.sanjuan.edu/cms/lib/CA01902727/Centricity/domain... 4: https://district.mpcsd.org/cms/lib/CA01902565/Centricity/Dom...

Great point. You can see CA public employee salaries here. [1] The numbers are shocking, not only because they are all overpaid (the effect of public employee unions owning California's Democrat government, a downward-spiral effect predicted by people as varied as right-wing economists and Franklin D. Roosevelt [2]), but because in many cases these people get $500K - $700K per year for life in retirement. A private sector person would need a $10-$20 million post-tax trust fund in order to have that.

[1] https://transparentcalifornia.com

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/18/the-first-b...

> You can absolutely be fired for cause as a tenured teacher in California, and it happens all the time. It's certainly more difficult than most other professions, but there is no law or policy preventing teachers from being fired.

Possible ? Yes. Does it happen often ? No.

You can read this LA times article for detailed statistics.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-may-03-me-teach...

> 3.After a 10 years of service, a teacher with a masters degree in my area makes $63K/year. Adjusting to a 12 month schedule, they'd be paid $75K year. With only a BA that drops to $54K. Hard to argue they are overpaid at that rate IMO.

I agree here. Teachers in public school are not overpaid. It is mostly the rest of the public schooling system that is bloated and overpaid but not teachers. Teachers in public schools end up spending more than 8 hours per day on school related activities and have to struggle even to get a day off as they need to find a substitute.

The rest of the non teaching staff however is mostly bloated and is a jobs program for adults. Some of them directly hurt the learning and teaching process and yet have massive power over teachers.

> the rank and file make on average 25-30% less than they could in private industry.

True. But most of them will be unemployable in private sector due to sheer incompetence and actual accountability.

Absolutely! People really don't understand the scope of the rot.

The LA Unified District has 25K teachers...and 50K administrative staff. Moving onto universities, Penn State has 8000 Academic Staff... and 17,000 administrative staff. The bloat is obscene.

Yeah my mom was a teacher in and around la for many years. They don't really ever fire tenured teachers. There were cases of known sex offenders kept on administrative leave for years.

> 1. You can absolutely be fired for cause as a tenured teacher in California, and it happens all the time. It's certainly more difficult than most other professions, but there is no law or policy preventing teachers from being fired.

My best friend from college was a guidance counselor at Hollywood high school. Besides from the foundations of the building crumbling, he told me that it was normal for teachers to get in physical fights with the students and in the aftermath you couldn't expel the student or fire the teacher. They were both locked into the system.

I mean, NIMBYs have made it impossible to live in Northern California unless you make a lot of money. 80k for a teacher sounds a lot until you realize that you have to have roommates to survive or have inherited a place.

> NIMBYs have made it impossible to live in Northern California unless you make a lot of money

At which point the tax base starts rotting.

I grew in up the Bay Area. (Among other places.) The clear trend in my high school group: make money, buy a house, move to a lower-tax state (read: any state), pay what you owe for the days you’re in California. Which leaves middle class folks like my parents, one of whom was until recently a bank teller, shouldering the cost for these policies.

NIMBY protections have been struck down statewide with the passage of a September law banning single family zoning [1]. I believe pressure to remove Newsom was driven by NIMBYs and real estate investors who wanted to prevent this. So hopefully we will see the housing crisis here ease somewhat.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/housing-market-pandemic-home...

Inheritance needs to be abolished or severely curtailed.

It's weakening society by giving the lazy children of privilege outsized reward and power while making it nearly impossible for motivated, hard working contributors to society the ability to rise up.

Have any actual data support this claim?

Because reality generally disagrees with your assessment.

I read this thinking that the 600k figure you mention couldn't possibly be right, but apparently it is:

https://blog.transparentcalifornia.com/2020/11/16/oakland-co...

...as long as you notice the "up to" part of that. Still, higher than I expected, even at the more common 200-300k.

They spend 5000$ per resident per year that they don't have?! Mismanagement is putting it lightly...

Police offers in many departments can retire after 20 years with a life-time annual pension >100% of their current salary.

If you look at how much you'd need to make to be able to save to have a pension this large - the average police officer in most major departments is getting paid close to an equivalent of $400k per year.

Public pensions are out-of-control generous.

I imagine the majority of police officers would gladly take 2x the pay and no pension and end up working until they're 65 like everyone else. So is it even really benefiting police officers?? It's just a massive drain on the public purse.

the across-the-board, badge-wearing pay raise was specifically enacted by US Pres. Bush the Younger. I was irritated to find out that a state policeman here with a 2-year community college degree, started pay at more money than I had made after years of high-skill small companies. It was from Texas, and the rumor at the time was that the Bush family admired the military security in Saudi Arabia and sought to be more like that.

Do you put your life on the line at your job?

For the record, being a police officer is the 25th most dangerous job in the US, after:

Logging workers, Aircraft pilots and flight engineers, Roofers, Construction helpers, Crossing guards, Garbage collectors, Farming supervisors, Delivery drivers, Ironworkers, Farmers, Cement masons, Agricultural workers, Construction supervisors, Highway maintenance workers, Grounds maintenance workers, Mining machine operators, Supervisors of mechanics, Power lineworkers, Construction workers, Construction equipment operators, Maintenance workers, Heavy vehicle mechanics, Crane operators, Landscaping supervisors

https://advisorsmith.com/data/most-dangerous-jobs/

I totally get it and agree that there are so many problems in California's government. With that said, please show me a state that is better run compared to California. I am genuinely curious to learn how we can do better.

US News does a ranking, taking into account infrastructure, education, fiscal health, crime, health care, etc.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings?int=top_nav...

Their top states are:

Washington

Minnesota

Utah

New Hampshire

Idaho

Nebraska

Virginia

Wisconsin

Massachusetts

Florida

I am not going to die on the hill that this is the best ranking system. For example, every benefit has a cost, but fiscal health is only one factor whereas health care, infrastructure, education are three factors so the rankings are biased towards benefits rather than cost-effictive benefits, but it's still a decent starting point.

The individual metric that California fails badly on, coming 50th is this one:

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity

But I have no idea what it's measuring based on that blurb.

Oh, if you click it breaks it down to "affordability", "equality" and "economic opportunity" of which it does poorly on the first two.

So basically, California's main weakness is that too many rich people live there.

> So basically, California's main weakness is that too many rich people live there.

California is a state where median house price is $760K, whereas median household income is $75K.

If you look at that number and say "Well, clearly that's because too many rich people live there", then I'm not sure what benefit is obtained from looking at any data at all.

That's almost exactly what I think. Sucks for the low wage earners who can't relocate but its a fairly predictable outcome of lots of well paid immigrants (inter and intra-national) arriving. At the urban scale this is called gentrification.

I would like to add that wash is a better run state. They build more housing, the roads are in a better state despite worse weather, liberal politics, no state income tax and property tax is lower when you buy a house new, while in CA the rate can get to %1.5 effective, while it's around %1 in king county, doing this all while you have no state income tax.

We need an economic collapse so baaaadly. I love California but this shit is out of hand.

What do you imagine that would look like? Not trying to be flippant, genuinely curious.

USA has financed itself by taking investments/loans from other countries for decades now, at some point the net inflow of money will have to stop and the country will have to sustain itself rather than live off funding. Imagine what happens to the economy when you can no longer import twice as much goods as you export.

Exactly what happened in NYC in the 1970's. The city gov't was so far in debt with social program spending that the bankers, the ones who purchased the bonds that facilitated the debt that allowed the city to spend more than it took in, literally didn't show up to the next bond sale. NYC plunged into darkness for a long time. Complete misery. The rich left, taking their tax dollars with them. Crime rose to all time high levels. Buildings sat in decay. Debt is ok, unless there is no way to pay it back.

> In the early 1970s, the City’s borrowing increased rapidly and bankers began to question the accuracy of its financial records and its ability to repay its debt. These concerns were exacerbated in 1974, when the State Urban Development Corporation defaulted on some of its debt. In 1975, the banks lost confidence in the City’s numbers and financial managers, and there were no bids for New York City notes and bonds. In short order, New York City lost all access to the long-term and short-term debt markets. During FY 1975, New York City had borrowed more that $8 billion in short term debt and had $4.5 million of notes outstanding at the end of the fiscal year. Moreover, New York City was funding $600 million (about 5% of its operating budget) through issuance of long-term bonds. When the markets closed to the City, it was unable to fund its cash flow needs; it was forced to halt its capital program; it could not finance the portion of its operating budget that had been funded by long-term debt; and it could no longer roll its accumulated deficit from year to year

https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/Forsythe_D...

Similarly, the world was doing something similar to the US in the 1970's, then Nixon decided to take us off the gold standard and go to a fiat currency, which we still use today. They were questioning America's ability to repay it's bond obligations and whether America had enough physical gold in its vaults to cover it's paper currency inflation. Instead of being repaid in dollars, they started demanding being repaid in gold, which put a run on the gold supply, so Nixon took us off. The whole system is fake, and ripe for collapse. All major nations are financing the US Gov't. One day, they just might decide America is too far in debt to repay them, and stop. I think that's a matter if when, not if. I mean, have you looked at the interest rate on long term bonds?

The 30 year treasury rate is 2%, which is extremely low compared to historic rates. A lower rate indicates higher demand for the bonds. In other words, we seem to be at very low risk of being unable to find someone to buy the bonds.

In fact, it’s impossible, since the treasury can always buy them. Unlike New York City, the US government issues the currency as well as bonds denominated in that currency.

Interest rates dont mean anything anymore(ie you cant draw any conclusions about the risk the market is pricing in). The entire credit market is manipulated by the FED.

The fed owns like 20% of all federal debt, bought with printed money. Recently they have also been printing so much that they eat up >50% of bond auctions.

Thank you. Now I am fully convinced that "printed money" and "money printing" is a meaningless term that means absolutely nothing.

Before that I assumed that there was some logic behind the term but it is clear that there isn't.

There is some logic. It's heading towards MMT

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

Many people misunderstand what MMT actually is, cherry pick parts and call that MMT. It's interesting concept, I dont think it will work but many do.

>>since the treasury can always buy them.

Inflation will have a say in that... Zimbabwe here we come.

I cant wait until I need a virtual truck load of dollars to buy a loaf of bread because the "treasury can issues the currency"

> In fact, it’s impossible, since the treasury can always buy them.

Minor correction: The US Treasury issues bonds, the Federal Reserve Bank is the buyer.

Yeah sure but this is old news.

>Keynes was able to make his proposal the official British proposal at the Bretton Woods Conference but it was not accepted.[4] Rather than a supranational currency, the conference adopted a system of pegged exchange rates ultimately tied to physical gold in a system managed by the World Bank and IMF. In practice, the system implicitly established the United States dollar as a reserve currency convertible to gold at a fixed price on demand by other governments. The dollar was implicitly established as the reserve by the large trade surplus and gold reserves held by the US at the time of the conference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor

Even more telling, look at the futures on long term bonds.

>Imagine what happens to the economy when you can no longer import twice as much goods as you export.

Jobs would come back. Wealth inequality would stop growing. Right wing extremism would die a quick death. All of this wouldn't be a big issue if your government used the cheap money to build long lasting infrastructure that will be of use long after the cheap money is gone. Oh, right. Trump did massive income tax cuts and burned a hole into the budget and now it's Biden with his infrastructure bill who is irresponsible.

> Right wing extremism would die a quick death.

Suggesting that jobs be brought back and goods produced here is right wing extremism according to many these days. If you do those things, right wing extremism won't die, it will have achieved its policy goals.

Money flows to the us when it’s felt to have the best use for the capital. Money will flow back to the creditors when they have better use of the capital themselves.

No it hasn’t. Most US public debt is held domestically (while I’m not sure on the specifics, I think it’s about 80%).

> No it hasn’t. Most US public debt is held domestically (while I’m not sure on the specifics, I think it’s about 80%).

You aren't contradicting anything I said here. Most debt is domestic, but what matters is the external debt and it will dry up, and when it does USA will no longer be able to import way more than it exports. And imports/exports affects everything else in the economy, so altering massively as is bound to happen would have huge consequences.

Money doesn't drive the economy, it lubricates it.

I'm not just talking about money, I am talking about net imports of goods and services. You can't print more goods and services with the dollars presses.

Do you have a reference to those numbers?

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=police

/rant: As a relatively newer resident of California, I find extraordinary levels of incompetence in pretty much every aspect of public-government interactions compared to other states in the US. This place has the most dysfunctional municipal (I am in Alameda county) and state departments. Just yesterday I wanted to file for self-proprietorship DBA record in the state commerce registry, was sent to 3 different offices in Oakland, incomplete list of form requirements and completely fucked up online forms download page CalGold - https://www.calgold.ca.gov/ that lists a billion forms but no central guidance as to what is needed.

This is the state that built the Golden Gate bridge in 3 years in 1930's but took 8 years to build a little access road recently and more than the cost of the bridge adjusting for inflation. Worse - it is considered a positive thing to have dysfunctional government here. Usually, the response from people in places like Berkeley and SF is that "Why do you need to do all this so quickly? Relax. Life is more than that. Consider gov jobs as a form of UBI. We need to cut down on progress." and crime? "Oh come on, it's not that bad. Car theft is fine, just make sure you have good insurance and get the catalytic convertor shield so it is not easy to use an angle grinder to remove it". Jeez.

Something drastic needs to happen. What a beautiful state occupied by overpaid Government employees.

> This is the state that built the Golden Gate bridge in 3 yeras in 1930s ...

I believe it's a perceptual (understandable) mistake to think it's the same state.

Only the state name has remained invariant.

The 90 years ago state was more engineering feats oriented, perhaps wasn't paying attention to social justices in so doing; the modern state is inverted perhaps. I'm not sure quite how to think of it either.

(I lived there too for about 20 years, am from a far nicer part of the USA)

I wonder if there is correlation between what people think of as incompetence and the population of the state. Would be interesting to look at. I have no data to support this just a guess but I would guess when population increases you get things like this. I mean Texas is the second most populous state and is literally politically the opposite of California. There power grid was 5 mins away from literally crashing completely. So it sure is not what"side" the government picks. Both have struggled with power distribution.

Well I think it is perfectly ok to criticize and point out issues in Government whether it is Texas or California. I really don't care about "sides". What I care about is that ROI of tax revenue that the state forcefully takes from me. We should expect return on what we pay. Good roads, education, good infrastructure, forward looking plans and instead of asking for more funding, Governments should look inward to improve efficiency. There is a lot of low hanging fruit. I am also OK with more taxes as far as Governments are functional and serve the public. I really don't want to pay for some Gov official that sits on his ass all day getting paid $550k in compensation.

Danger is when we stop criticizing governments and keep tooting the party lines.

I want drastically more accountability for California government. Extreme levels of auditing and shaming, completely take off Emperor's clothes.

That is what I am trying to get at. I think atleast here in the United States the bigger your state gets with population the more your going to see issues like you describe. Unfortunately I just do not see any government looking inward to improve efficiencies at this rate. I agree with everything you state and want the same.

Honestly I just think this how all governments operate.

In theory we can vote them out and replace them. Then the new people will do the same things most likely.

You can shame them all you want but if they still hold office, they will not care.

We should still keep trying though. Maybe we can find the right leader's that look out for everybody and do all the above. But I am pretty cynical about it.

I like to think Churchill quote about democracy is right. We have been struggling with this issue forever. Plato's republic and all that.

You are right being able to criticizing governments is really important.

I guess we just keep trying. Wish I had better answer.

Not to be flippant but this is the state that elected Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. (The funny thing is he turned out to be not half-bad at the job.)

What state did you come from and how is it more competent? Talking about what works would be helpful.

https://rechart1.acgov.org/BusinessLicense/SearchEntry.aspx?...

it's happened at the city level too. SF built out the extraordinary auxiliary fire fighting system back in the day. Now they're unwilling to extend it to the sunset so just bought a bunch of pipes.

Could never quite put my finger on what happened, but I have to imagine Reagan had a lot to do with it

The EU is undergoing a massive price hike right now and several countries want to rethink the common policy as well (in direction nuclear).

Unfortunately with the renewables of today, a freak streak of windless, cold and dark winter days is very destabilizing. There still isn't an economic and ad-lib scalable way how to conserve excess energy produced on sunny, windy days for future use. Pumped storage only works in certain geography and suitable sites are already mostly taken here.

I hope that small reactors, Rolls-Royce like, can be built quick enough and for reasonable money. Big nuclear plants tend to be stuck in bureaucratic and constructional quagmire for decades.

https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...

The Ignalina Power Plant in eastern Lithuania was decommissioned as a prerequisite to enter the EU. I always thought they should reactivate, especially given the reliance on Russian gas for power.

I'm aware its a Type II reactor (same as Chernobyl) but it should be easier to convert to a modern Type IV, no?

Or possibly Type V like Czech Temelín.

Reality simply does not care about ideology. The fact that California management is increasingly making it difficult for both people and businesses to live in the state will mean that the tide of people and businesses leaving the state will simply increase. And this tide is not a factor in how things are being managed, so I'm not sure what would trigger reasonable management in the state again. As much as I love California and the city of San Francisco, the direction of management at all levels is towards doubling down on policies that make living and working in this state increasingly hard, and forces reasonable people and businesses to simply vote with their feet. Wrecking reliable power would be the final straw for many.

Voting rights should have a cool down period. If you trash the red or blue state you live in with your voting policies which are toxic and then when the time to pay the tab comes, you flee to your next victim state and vote for the same unsustainable politicians you had in the place you just left you are a cancer to democracy.

Excellent news. The more people see the lunacy of these "green" policies in CA, the less chance there is they will metastasize into the rest of the US, and the more chance there is that nuclear (the only really "green" option when it comes to base load) would see a revival. The technology is already there to build dramatically cheaper and safer reactors. The political will is being built up by taking a wrecking ball to CA's energy sector, and those who did it don't even realize what they're doing - their planning horizon does not extend beyond the next election.

I still don't understand why CA is phasing out nuclear power.

Because lobby groups for environmentalism/green energy are stuck in the Cold War mentality that anything nuclear is bringing forth the apocalypse.

This is not why the plant is being shut down. It is reaching end of life, which means that if it wants an renewal on its license, it needs to come into compliance with modern environmental laws.

The key violation for the current plant is its cooling system, which uses once through sea water. To limit the damage to the environment, a modern cooling system would need to be built. When PG&E took bids for new cooling systems, all designs had a construction cost of many billions.

Rather than pay for such an expensive upgrade, PG&E made the wise decision to spend that money on cheaper replacements. The problem is that despite having a decade to get things in order, they haven't yet done met the capacity needs for the rest of the state, much less for this capacity retirement.

Nuclear is (one of) the new invisible demons flying around to be afraid of.

It's an old demon. Ironically it's one of the few things that could have prevented our current climate crisis. A great tragedy of human hubris.

It's more throwing the baby out with the bathwater than hubris.

hu·bris (noun)

excessive pride or self-confidence

I'd say it fits but yours [1] is a better known characterization.

I was using it in the tradition of [2] Greek Tragedy Hubris.

"The overbearing pride which leads humans to follow paths or projects which lead to certain self-destruction."

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_throw_the_baby_out_wit...

[2] http://theatreofancientgreece.blogspot.com/2014/11/hubris-or...?

It powers evil Bitcoin mining

it's not though. fear of flying is common enough but people accept that's not backed up the statistics. nuclear energy is in the same camp.

it is objectively the safest method for power generation

There is no coordinated plan to phase out nuclear power, the plants are just reaching end of their licenses, ans nobody wants to deal with the expense of bringing nuclear into compliance with modern laws.

What radicalized me on nuclear power was seeing the decommissioned San Onofre nuclear plants replaced with natural gas plants.

Incentive for other 'green' sources of electricity to come to market

There's nothing greener than an already built nuclear reactor.

> already built

Therefore, ineligible for pocketing green subsidies to build new stuff.

Yikes, that’s a perverse incentive they should fix.

I think the concern with nuclear energy is around the possibility of a nuclear meltdown. The media portrayal of nuclear energy is that it's very dangerous, even if that's not really true.

Same as Germany: politics.

Why “scrambles”? Seems like something that should’ve been planned in advance, to coincide with the closing of those plants, no?

Is the issue that they gave too short notice, or waited till the last minute to figure out replacement?

No, this is the money quote:

other states have moved to close coal-fired power plants in recent years, reducing the amount of electricity California can import when high temperatures boost electricity demand.

In other words, the problem with wind/solar is that they are not controllable, and so California was planning on using the rest of the grid as a buffer -- all of Western US is on one grid. Thus California can still import from coal fired plants in Utah when it needs power, say on a hot day when AC use is high or a day when the wind isn't blowing too strongly.

Except now it's realizing that as other states adopt the same strategy, that the grid can't be relied on so much and the state has to do that itself or face blackouts in hot days or windless days. So with this new awareness that the rest of the grid will not be able to bail them out, they have updated their estimate of needed battery capacity in time for the planned shutdowns. Alternately, they are scrambling for some sources of energy that could be tapped on demand in place of battery capacity.

Just so that I'm sure I've understood this right. California decided to save the environment by shutting down "unclean" power within the state, with the idea that other states will provide them with their "dirty" generated power?

Yes!

Scream it from the roof tops. Most think California is green. What they did was outsource energy production to other states. This allowed them to move "dirty energy" from their balance sheet. But moving your coal plant to another state does not reduce GHG production. It only moves it across state lines.

EDIT: [1] Here some context with a link about the different types of GHG measurement methods.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714396

EDIT: the gist being that if we moved to "B. (Absolute) GHG footprint accounting" we wouldn't be creating policy based on false accounting and those "loopholes" would be obviously misguided.

A large amount of California environmentalism is air quality, as measured in California; moving to cleaner sources within the state and dirtier sources outside the state helps tremendously with air quality as measured in the state. Of course, it doesn't help air quality near those other sources, and global measures aren't helped by simply moving coal plants elsewhere.

It's also not great for grid reliability to increase the watt miles used (is there a real term for that?).

It's a bit worse than that, from a GHG perspective, because of additional waste in transmission line losses. Mid-single digit percentages are typical.

Yes

Not actually solving the problem, just shifting it elsewhere. Nice.

Yes, we're talking about California.

Excess power from any source. California has imported power from hover dam forever, for example.

> so California was planning on using the rest of the grid as a buffer

Was this actually a plan, or just what ended up happening?

My understanding is that CAISO has continued their resource adequacy program to ensure that there is guaranteed supply to meet the expected demand (plus margin), but the problem is that this program was developed before renewables and therefore the central metric is peak demand (which happens around 5pm), which is insufficient for planning when there is a lot of solar & wind generation, because then the most critical period is after peak demand (around 7pm).

In other words, I thought that CAISO failed to plan properly, not that they planned to lean heavily on imports.

> Was this actually a plan, or just what ended up happening?

It's a good question, and depends on your perspective.

I said "planned to" because that is what the state has historically been doing -- relying on the rest of the west coast grid for 25-30% of its electricity, especially for swing capacity.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156

"The California Independent System Operator is soliciting power producers across the West to sell more megawatts to the state in July and August in anticipation of regionwide heat waves that will substantially boost electricity demand." -- back in 2021. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-el...)

So the grid has always been what's bailed California out from it's poor energy policies and what has saved California during the summer.

Now one can call this lack of planning, but if something's been going on for a few decades, then at some point it has to become part of the plan, although maybe not an official plan written down anywhere. But when someone discovers that the unofficial plan is not going to not work anymore, then you need to scramble.

FYI, the whole Enron electricity scandal was all about selling energy to California, because California is constantly in need of energy. Why they didn't wake up after that scandal and start building out more energy sources remains a mystery. Instead, they went in the other direction to reduce domestic capacity.

But that's not all, because a lot of the private utilities are being given mandates to get more green energy sources and storage that they are going to have a hard time meeting. You can't simply order someone to get battery power that lasts through the night when batteries last 4 hours. This is discussed in the article:

"“We are literally on the cutting edge” of rapidly adding renewables, Mr. Wan [PG&E] said. “And along with that, there are some things we are learning by trial and error, and we are taking some risks in the process.”"

In other words, you have the legislature giving mandates that the CPUC can't meet, and then the CPUC gives mandates to the producers that they can't meet, but everyone is shaking each other's hand at what a green future they are building.

Meanwhile, the lights in California are kept on by coal and gas fired plants in the rest of the country. That system obviously doesn't work if the rest of the country tries to adopt California's model.

Thanks for your reply.

There are several different classes of electricity imports, and I think it is important to consider them separately - there are imports under long term contracts, opportunistic imports due to lower prices in the short term market, and short term contingency imports (when CAISO is freaking out due to unexpectedly high demand or low supply, or both). I guess I had incorrectly assumed we were discussing contingency imports.

California does import a ton of electricity from outside the state. I don’t think it is accurate to characterize most of this as a bailout - the majority of this imported supply is either secured under contract well in advance, or used instead of available in-state supply when it is cheaper. Neither of these cases are saving California from it’s poor energy policies, these are part of California’s energy policies. IMO, your description only applies to the third class I mentioned above (emergency imports).

These imports include a lot of different sources - a lot of coal and gas, but also a lot of wind, solar, and hydroelectric (especially from the Pacific Northwest).

I agree that California’s shift to renewables has been poorly planned and done too fast, but I don’t think this is simply because California imports a lot of electricity in general. The issue is really handling the period after peak demand when demand is dropping but supply is dropping faster (solar & wind) - right now this is not handled well and there was apparently no plan to handle it well, and it leads to leaning a lot on unplanned imports, as you highlighted.

> FYI, the whole Enron electricity scandal was all about selling energy to California, because California is constantly in need of energy. Why they didn't wake up after that scandal and start building out more energy sources remains a mystery. Instead, they went in the other direction to reduce domestic capacity.

FWIW, the current resource adequacy program used in California was developed in response to this mess in 2001.

It may be the money quote but you removed the context in an almost misleading way:

> The drought has constrained the output of some of the region’s most significant generating facilities, including the Hoover Dam. … “What changed dramatically…is we have had significantly bigger and more West-wide heat waves than ever before,”

Maybe a failure of planning, but the plan was not to get "bailed out" by the grid as you guess.

Given that California is in drought all the time, I don't see how this changes long term planning.

FYI, there is a fun wikipedia page that lists California droughts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California

The first sentence is:

"Throughout history, California has experienced many droughts, such as 1841, 1864, 1924, 1928–1935, 1947–1950, 1959–1960, 1976–1977, 1986–1992, 1999-2004, 2006–2010, 2011–2017, 2018 and 2020-[1][2] 2021. "

So the idea that OMG, we didn't realize there might be a drought - doesn't sound very plausible to me.

Uhm, okay, you have convinced me that droughts aren't a new phenomenon.

The claim however was that they become more frequent and severe. Not every drought is the same. From your link:

> the 2012–15 period was the driest in at least 1200 years

Also, according to your link, about there was a drought in 12 of the last 20 years, with only one or two years in between droughts, where they previously usually were spaced by around a decade or more.

The data listed there really doesn't seem to contradict the article's claim about more frequent droughts in the future.

So is your claim that the 2012-2015 drought was unknown to California when it passed the 2018 law -- maybe the legislature is filled with slow readers?

Again, I don't see how the possibility of severe droughts was some unforseen thing when the law was passed. In fact the law was passed in an environment of terrible fear about climate change, so you can't really argue that no one predicted this when writing the law, can you? Don't you think, if you believe the climate is changing, that your energy plan should include production of energy not dependent on the climate?

> The data listed there really doesn't seem to contradict the article's claim about more frequent droughts in the future.

FYI, California droughts have in the past lasted more than 200 years. The idea that you can count years in the last century and extrapolate drought risk doesn't work. The state goes through long secular wet and dry periods, and this is something we have known for some time.

Therefore any energy plan that breaks down if there is a prolonged drought is not an energy plan suitable for the state of California in any period of time. In fact any policy at all that breaks down during a prolonged -- say 100 year -- drought is not one suitable for the state of California. We have the tree ring data, and we know that this used to be called "the Great American Desert". That is why we fought water wars and built enormous public works, it's why San Francisco considered breaking off icebergs and floating them down to the bay in order to get water. California as a state has a highly variable water supply susceptible to century-long droughts.

Check out this article:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-pa...

drought in California does not impact the Hoover Dam.

The drought in question is a drought in the entire western US (and therefore the Colorado river basin).

Unless the plan was to have rolling brownouts/blackouts I have no doubt that being bailed out by the grid was absolutely part of the contingency plan.

Maybe they didn't expect to need the contingency so soon, but that is on their risk analysis of the weather.

A deliberate underproduction to get "bailed out" is a strong accusation, I think it warrants a better proof than analysis of one line of an article. Especially when the article points out other reasons why production doesn't meet demand.

Unless you talk about actual contingency plans for emergencies in which case I don't quite understand what's so scandalous about falling back on the grid in emergencies. France also falls back on Germany's power generation when they have to shut down some of their nuclear reactors during heat waves.

> A deliberate underproduction to get "bailed out" is a strong accusation

In 2019, 25% of its electricity was imported[1]. This is before California takes even more power offline and replaces it with variable power.

[1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156

I think that WECC would probably have gone ballistic if this was actually California’s plan.

Also, yes, being able to import from other places as a contingency is not a bad thing, it’s one of the major benefits of having the Western Interconnect at all.

Its the same for people with home solar panels. They dont pay for most of their electricity so they aren't contributing much for the grid or generators, but then they expect to be able to use power on a cold dark night and the infrastructure to just be there for them.

at least in my case I still pay 20 bucks worth of random fees every month even though I am generating more electricity than I use - so its more like the home solar panel people are still paying upkeep, just not paying for actual electricity

To actually answer your question instead of trying to spin it away -

“What changed dramatically…is we have had significantly bigger and more West-wide heat waves than ever before,” Mr. Randolph said. “Those aren’t built into our planning standards.”

Yeah this quote caught my eye too, but how is this possible? They’re not planning for a hotter and dryer climate in CA? I find that hard to believe.

Both intensity and frequency of extreme weather events increased much faster than anticipated.

This may be a result of climate scientists presenting conservative estimates due to the fear of being labelled alarmist.

This explanation doesn’t make much to me. CA is aggressively moving to renewables (well if you ignore shutting down nuclear) and we’re doing this because the state is alarmed about climate change.

Well, extreme weather events have become much more common sooner than expected. As to why this happened, I only speculated.

I don't think that the state is alarmed about climate change as it aims to have a carbon neutral grid by 2045, which is already quite late even following the conservatives estimations.

The article doesn't really seem to reflect the headline.

It's seems hasty to order companies to build up plants in just three years, but it's not made clear if that order is made too late by the state or if it's a reaction to the companies neglecting their responsibilities.

A bit further down there's also mentions of less foreseeable complications like wildfire damages and less power output of hydroelectric plants due to draughts.

Even further down the changes brought on by more frequent heat waves are blamed. And that makes sense, those both increase demand and negatively impact all forms of power generation, including nuclear and solar.

The idea behind this push to renewable is to force energy providers to find solutions. You don't know how to swim? Let's throw you in the water, you will figure out a way.

pro tip: don’t care too much about titles. The author of articles rarely are the one who also titles the piece.

It's the wsj, they have a right wing partisan lean, which means any discussion of renewable energy or California has to lean negative.

Edit: Surprising amount of downvotes here, didn't realize this was so controversial, the Wikipedia page talks extensively about the wsj's stances (with citations):

"The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. The Journal disputes that it poses a major threat to human existence and can be prevented through public policy and has published articles disputing that global warming is occurring at all. The Journal is regarded as a forum for climate change deniers"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal

You can read about the facts without caring who is writing it, what side is WSJ is less relevant than the facts, if you can believe the facts and eventually confirm it in other places. If you don't like the message, discuss about the message, don't attack the messenger.

I would argue the bias of the editorial board is fair game when it comes to discussing the word choices and phrasing made in the article.

IMO Wikipedia is a bias source for anything politics related. Heck the Wikipedia page for its confounder even mentions this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#:~:text=In%20a%20....

I have found this site to be much more reliable when looking for media bias.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/

I’m confused (sincerely, not concern trolling) about the point you’re making by linking to media bias fact check for NYT (which wasn’t being discussed) but not WSJ or Wikipedia.

According to the site you find reliable,

NYT: biased center left, factual reporting “high”

WSJ: biased on the right edge of center right, factual reporting “mostly factual”

Wikipedia: “least biased”, factual reporting “mixed”

Nope you are correct. It was early and I misread it as NYT. That is my mistake

That website also says the WSJ has a right lean:

"Overall, we rate the Wall Street Journal Right-Center biased due to low biased news reporting combined with a strong right biased editorial stance."

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/wall-street-journal/

Ya that is my mistake sorry it was early and somehow I misread WSJ as NYT.

Reality = right wing in 2021.

of course. the party that denies climate change and evolution is the party of reality.

I don't think most Republicans or the WSJ deny climate change these days, just differ on urgency and impact.

This poll shows 67% of Republicans think warming is happening and 56% think warming will continue in the future if nothing is done to address it.

https://www.rff.org/publications/reports/climateinsights2020...

Why continue to use weasel words (i.e., an equivocal word used to deprive a statement of its force or to evade a direct commitment) like 'climate change'? What does that mean? Aside from the truism that the climate is always changing (who can possibly disagree?) what specifically is denied and which values are accepted? Estimations of the warming due to carbon dioxide comprise a wide range of values not changed much in 20 years. Met Office UK states that the warming parameter (ECS) has a 'likely' range of 1.5 - 4.5°C and is extremely unlikely to be below 1°C and very unlikely greater than 6°C. The wide range accounts for all evidence.

Stating this is not denying anything. It's accepting the complexity of the issue rather than indulging in emotive cliches.

Last time I’ve heard any Republicans party official deny evolution was during Bush administration.

Mike Pence denies it.

Recently?

No, I guess you’re right; all the recent news about Pence is about his role in trying to overthrow the election. 2009 is the last time I see him on record denying the theory of evolution, but I also don’t see any indication that he has changed his position, and he was in a pretty high position of power within the Republican Party as recently as 2020.

Even the 2009 incident you're referring to is not really a denial. He is quite careful to neither explicitly endorse it nor deny it. My guess is that he actually is quite on board with evolution, but did not want to alienate a huge chunk of his electorate, who are, in fact, evolution deniers. This segment has been declining in relevance over last decade, hence my comment, that accusing Republicans of being evolution denialists is rather outdated, as that was a Bush-era thing.

You have to be delusional to believe pence has any power. He was chosen to appease a certain part of the party needed to get enough electoral votes.nothing more

You may be right about that. Trump thought Pence had the ability to unilaterally declare the victor of the 2020 election, for example.

in 2016, pence was chosen to appeal to evangelicals, who may have been off put by trump's persona. Nothing to do with 2020 considerations.

The republicans passed a resolution asserting that the climate does indeed change.

We need more nuclear, not less. Nuclear is the safest power source (measured in deaths/gwh), is reliable, high capacity and its waste is managed much easier than waste from solar panels and batteries.

Being anti-nuclear at time of climate crisis is moral and intellectual equivalent of being anti-vax during pandemic.

Honestly I think this is good and inevitable part of living with renewable energy. Renewable really is different - there are times of the day and days of the year when electricity is scarce and expensive, other windy sunny days when its virtually free.

People will either pay more or save money by changing their lifestyle to match the weather and seasons. Variable pricing and demand management means people don't wash their clothes or charge their cars on cold nights, they charge during the day or when its windy. Maybe people have to pay more to use AC on the hottest days and people will choose to go to the beach/mall/office instead.

We do not need to sacrifice our prosperity in order to decarbonize our electricity grid. What you are suggesting will result in more inequality, more avoidable deaths and slower progress. What you are advocating for is counter productive and will inspire a backlash that will make your goals harder to achieve. We need to be pragmatic.

California has had rolling blackouts now for a few years, and it gets hot enough that the height of summer is absolutely risky for the infirm and elderly. I don't imagine making the problem worse is going to help those who depend on medical devices either.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/us/california-power-outag...

That's the core of the problem though right, sacrifice something today to help reduce the greenhouse problem in the future.

No, that is specifically the core worldview of a century old strain of environmental activism that has been repeatedly dunked on by reality & technological progress at nearly every single turn.

“Sacrifice someone today to help reduce the overpopulation/famine/nuclear war/greenhouse problem in the future, or else doom!”

>Honestly I think this is good and inevitable part of living with renewable energy.

"It's good that the little people suffer, it will make them pay attention and live a more virtuous life."

Who are you to make that choice for people? Heat waves and blackouts kill lots of people. Your position seems religious, and impractical. You’re treating energy use like sin. It is in my opinion an awful way to view the world.

we need more energy, not less! if you want to be an ascetic because you have an irrational fear of nuclear energy go right ahead. but we need to be bringing TWs online to run those carbon skimmers and nuclear is the only real route to do so

> People will either pay more or save money by changing their lifestyle to match the weather and seasons.

Absolutely. People will soon adapt to Renewables by heating their homes only in summer, when electricity is cheap, and not in winter, when it is expensive. They will also use electric lights more during the day, when electricity is plentiful, and not at night, when it is scarce. This isn't really new; after all, for millenia, people responded to droughts by simply eating less in the years with bad harvests, and they were happy, weren't they?

In a world powered by Renewables, electricity in worthless during summer days and priceless during winter nights. What a glorious future indeed!

> People will either pay more or save money by changing their lifestyle

Or this will massively backfire and we’ll roll back to dirty power.

I don’t understand the antinuclear orthodoxy. Just when I thought the Baby Boomer/GenX cultural dividend couldn’t throw another turd in the punch bowl, we get dated ideology around nuclear power threatening to throw back decarbonisation by at least a generation.

I don't know what "antinuclear othodoxy" is but it seems reasonable to oppose a technology that creates waste products that cause mutations in the genetic code for thousands of years, and for which we have two cases where reactors have made land uninhabitable. Even worse, companies have a tendency to under-invest in maintenance and over-estimate resilience. When the consequences are uninhabitable land for decades, centuries, or possibly millenia, this is a dangerous technology to use.

Just to clarify, nuclear power plant waste never harmed anyone, so the concern is quite misguided here. You can safely stay next to a dry cask storage [1].

By opposing nuclear one votes for more solar and wind, which come with fossil fuel support these days.

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#current

It's based om empirical evidence that nuclear is not safe, namely the chernobyl and the fukushima disasters. And if you count the cost of cleanup after those disasters, also not economical.

Nuclear power including disasters like Chernobyl kill less people per GWh than normal operation of coal plants. Shutting down nuclear plants which get replaced with fossil plants results in both less immediate safety (even if you'd expect the next Chernobyl to be incoming here) and more environmental harm. Heck, even considering specific aspects like cancer and radioactivity, coal plants cause more cancer per GWh than nuclear including Chernobyl, and coal plants release more radiation (in fly ash that then lands on surface and/or gets breathed in) per GWh than nuclear plants including their leaks.

Your argument is a common misconception which is doing a lot of real harm to our world - while the perception is that nuclear is not safe and expensive to clean up, the reality is that fossil fuels are even less safe and even more expensive to clean up - I mean, we can't really figure out a reasonable way to clean up the greenhouse gas effects of historical fossil plants.

Like, I'm not saying that nuclear is free from side-effects, but the point is that burning fossil fuels for electricity is so extremely dirty in their normal operation that they overshadow any and all of the nuclear risks. If the expected result is that the gap will be filled with coal, then reducing nuclear power is both increasing direct risks to local people and also harming the environment; it's literally all drawbacks with no reasonable benefit.

What does this have to do with boomers? Who do you think built that plant?

I think the origins of the anti-nuclear movement are generally associated with the flower-power/Summer of Love/anti-war/early environmental movements of the late 60s/early 70s, which are generally associated with the baby boomer generation.

Diablo Canyon began construction in 1968. The oldest baby boomer would have been 22. Seems reasonable to conclude that the decision to build the plant predates them.

EDIT: Confused by the downvote—does someone disagree on the timeline?

Anti-nuclear movement (1960-1980)

"The initial objective of the movement was nuclear disarmament, though since the late 1960s opposition has included the use of nuclear power. Many anti-nuclear groups oppose both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The formation of green parties in the 1970s and 1980s was often a direct result of anti-nuclear politics."

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement

> since the late 1960s opposition has included the use of nuclear power

Confused—isn’t that what I said?

Yes.

I am agreeing with you.

I just wanted to provide some factual reference to support your point further. I did not down vote you nor do I know why you're being down voted.

Roger. I considered that but just wanted to clarify, thanks.

More likely they will blame whomever is in office and it will be yet another wedge issue.

I tend to agree, I can't see how we can get to a zero carbon world without some discomfort. Politicians who tell you we can achieve it without changing our lifestyle are lying.

"Zero carbon" is not a serious or viable goal, and the only politicians I'm aware of who are promising this are ones with big green constituencies that need to be mollified. Yes, they are lying, because their voters want what is impossible. If that's your voter base, then the politicians who get elected will be the ones who lie to you.

FYI, China is going to open 120 new coal plants this year, adding 100 million tons of coal capacity. It is already emitting more carbon than the Western world, and it's just getting going. There is no green movement there to placate, so they adopted efficency goals of reducing carbon emissions per unit of GDP. Primarily, they want to clean up the air, which means long term moving away from burning coal to generate power as well as cars that burn gasoline. But they are not willing to do this at the expense of economic growth - nor should they. They will reduce usage of coal once sufficient capacity for alternatives is in place, and not before. Nor will they stop doing things like flying planes or making plastics when there are no alternatives.

What is a viable goal is reducing the amount of carbon per dollar of GDP as more efficient processes are adopted, but it's not going to go to zero. As the reasonable costs of climate change (according to the latest IPCC report) have been estimated from 0.2% to 2% of global income, it makes little sense to cut GDP by 3% in order to save a reduction in 2%. So apart from those green constitutencies who are convinced the sky will turn red and the clouds will start burning, the rest of the world is not going to reduce carbon emissions at any cost. That's a non-starter.

That carbon/GDP ratio can however, fall quite a bit, for example with large scale adoption of nuclear power, so it's a bit puzzling why the same same absolutist groups also oppose nuclear power. I really wish they would join us pro-nuclear types. Similarly there seems to be a lot of opposition to things like hydrogen fuel, when that's the most likely replacement for planes and heavy trucks, due to its energy density. So really if we want more efficient use of energy, we should be investing in developing better energy sources rather than trying to convince the world to "change lifestyles". Who knows, maybe in 100 years fossil fuels will be looked at in the same way as burning wood for steam is today, but it's not going to happen by changing lifestyles, it will happen with technological breakthroughs.

I largely agree with what you said but:

>As the reasonable costs of climate change (according to the latest IPCC report) have been estimated from 0.2% to 2% of global income

That assumes we keep carbon below 450ppm and is only up to 2030. Also it only gets down to the bottom end of that range if you pick the most optimistic models.

It's easy to argue for ascetism for other people.

It's easy to stick you're head in the sand and ignore the problem.

Or we could just use nuclear and not have discomfort.

Nuclear won't help you fly across the Atlantic.

Sure it will. Split water, make hydrogen, burn it in gas turbines: https://www.cleansky.eu/sites/default/files/inline-files/202...

We have to line up a lot of things we haven't done before to make that work. Great in theory but the reality today is if I fly across the Atlantic it will create a ton of extra carbon in the atmosphere.

Out of all the things we do air travel looks like the least likely thing to be de-carbonised to me.

Do you actually think this will make a difference wrt to climate change when most of the carbon pollution in the new few decades will be coming from fast developing countries and China?

Carbon emissions are a problem caused by the rich, trying to cast the blame onto China is a red herring.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16941-y?fbclid=Iw...

I wasn’t blaming anyone. I was just stating a fact. Americans consuming less energy is not going to prevent countries like China and India from consuming more energy coming from dirty sources such as coal. Americans consuming less material on the other hand can decrease carbon output in China but that will mostly like just be replaced by material consumption from the fast-developing nations.

Carbon emissions from India are 1.9 tons per capita, for China it is 7.38 per capita and America is 15.52 tons per capita. China would be lower still if it wasn't a factory for American consumer goods.

Looking at per capita is useless when those countries have a combined population of over 2 billion (~6x US population). Climate change and the Earth doesn’t care about per capita, it only cares about the total output of carbon. The reality is that American output has most likely peaked, while China and India will keep growing for decades to come.

Per-capita emissions are extremely important when you are trying to get the political will to make changes.

I'm so torn on this. In a perfect world, where human greed doesn't allow corner cutting, upscaling nuclear would be a potentially great choice.

However, in the world we actually live in, even so-called "efficient" and "group focused" societies like Japan build nuclear reactors in a tsunami flood zone to save money.

I feel like in order to make nuclear viable for future plants, we'd have to create and implement some sort of one-of-a-kind anti-greed, anti-corruption, anti-corner-cutting culture that would run smack against the usual government lobbying culture we have in the US at least. And we'd have to get buy-in from ALL parties. AND we'd have to build based on the probability of extreme weather events becoming a common reality.

It's not impossible, but it would require a major societal change.

And all that greed, corruption, corner-cutting resulted in two major accidents, which killed fewer than 60 people in total. What a condemning track record!

One of these accidents happened in the Soviet Union, in a reactor type that could never be licensed in the US. The principal cause was operators ignoring safety regulations under political pressure. Do you really think, whether the US builds or doesn't build PWRs and BWRs would have impressed the SU one way or another?

The other accident happened in Japan. The principal cause was a rather extreme tsunami. What turned it from a minor mishap into a major accident was that modern politics invalidated the original safety concept. (The BWR's containment has to be vented before core damage occurs, but that was no longer politically acceptable in 2011.)

The lesson to learn from both accidents is that politicians have too much power and engineers have too little.

All because the market mechanisms don't pay sufficiently for consistency of supply, allowing cheap solar to take all the load when the sun is shining.

You can run nuclear some of the time but it doesn't make sense to pay for it by the minute. Turning it off will make more money for the generators because prices will skyrocket. Regulatory failure all round.

"During the Medieval Warm Period, there were at least two century-long megadroughts with only 60-70% of modern precipitation levels. Paleoclimatologists believe that higher temperatures due to global warming may cause California to enter another dry period, with significantly lower precipitation and snowpack levels than observed over the last 150 years.[7]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California#P...

It seems at this rate, California won't realize it needs desalination plants until it's too late. Desalination plants need a whole lot of power, so California should be preparing for that by building up their energy production capacity.

We should permit a few fossil energy plants to provide a high baseload generation for the heavy industries.

Nuclear is too unpopular and renewables cannot provide the high baseload generation needed for the heavy industries.

No, we should ignore the nuclear naysayers and keep existing and build more nuclear plants.

California resident here - worrying to see smart people react to rage-bait like "scrambles" and then pile on the pre-formed opinions. Power industry has super-smart analysts and then a big cadre of private investor analysts, and management, that do nothing but research this, since the day you were born. Nothing is "surprising" in this field. This is pure manipulation wording, and you are falling for it in these comments.

It was dumb when Germany did it, it still is when California does.

Look into your super smart analysts and private investors, check which lobbies and which industries they get paid by, they're the same guys that told us petrol was safe during the last 120 years

I've never experienced any rolling blackouts in any us state, and I've lived in 3 others, before living in California.

curious you mention that -- please refer to the popular movie "The Smartest Guys in the Room" or the book upon which it is based.. you can thank TX

Read http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid... and see if you still think these analysts are omniscient.

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