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San Diego To Run 100 Percent On Renewable Energy By 2035 (outerplaces.com)
The city of San Diego has announced a bold new plan to run completely on renewable energy by 2035. While the city already produces the second largest electrical output from solar energy in the U.S., the new plan further details a way to cope with the changing climate. It plans to reduce 50% of the greenhouse gas emission by 2035, as well as create new jobs through the manufacturing and installation of solar panels. "San Diego is a leader in innovation and sustainability," the Climate Action Plan reads. "By striking a sensible balance between protecting our environment and growing our economy, San Diego can support clean technology, renewable energy, and economic growth." San Diego joins San Francisco, Sydney, and Vancouver in its effort to run entirely on renewable energy.
They have created a 75 page plan. I looked at it, and it does not say how they are going to generate the power, it just says the will add a shitload of renewables. And, the word 'storage' is not stated in the entire plan except for an appendix that discusses carbon sequestration. They can't do it without storage. They do a lot of talk about cutting back on just about everything.
The mayor is a "moderate" Republican trying to appeal to a growing liberal core in the center of the city. There are a few things to keep in mind with all such plans announced by cities:
Nowhere in the plans are solid, fixed, detailed plans to ban the use of things like gasoline or the use of electricity from coal-fired power plants, so they are still going to have non-renewables. Even if every car and truck based in the city was electric, visiting vehicles would not be. Also, they are connected to the national electrical grid, so any time the solar panels and windmills are not producing all needed power, they will pull power through the grid from coal-fired plants as everybody does today.
Many of the wonderful-sounding goals stated are based on projected reductions from lots of other fairy tale policy bullet points. For example: there are energy reductions derived from reducing the water each citizen uses by 8 or 9 gallons per day. What are they going to do? Start rationing water? Order people to shower no more than thrice per week? Order people to wear dirty clothes? Most people in So Cal already use things like low-flow toilets and reduced-flow shower heads and are already often banned from washing cars and watering yards. San Diego already has severe infrastructure issues from many years of shifting maintenance funds into the union pension funds instead, and the sewer system is likely to have severe problems if the water flow through it is steeply reduced (as has happened in other cities)
This glossy pdf plan also pushes things like bike trails - that constant heartthrob of the leftists and of course mass transit. San Diego is very hilly and quite hot at many points in the year while being host to many old people who cannot be expected to ride bikes, children who are not permitted to bike across the city unaccompanied, and others who are not up to biking, or whose schedules would be destroyed by biking. Biking is a recreation; it's NOT serious transportation. Housing is already so expensive in the city (which recently admitted all it's previous plans to address high housing costs actually made the situation worse) than huge numbers of workers like 30 miles outside the city. None of the fantasy transport options proposed will work for 90% of the people.
What's most-likely to happen is that the plan will be forgotten after November. The city will put a few more solar panels on buildings and give some grants to a few politically favored entities to study the problems and/or upgrade their own facilities, and years from now they will claim credit for the cleaner air that resulted from the public gradually embracing cleaner stuff on their own as it became practical and affordable.
All such plans have the basics in common: They use slick marketing to put a big happy face on a top-down plan to gradually dictate more details in the lives of the public, removing liberty, raising costs, eliminating jobs, all to appeal to popular political fads.