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California Poised To Hit 50 Percent Renewable Target a Full Decade Ahead of Schedule (cleantechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Every year, the California Energy Commission releases its Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) report, which gives details about the mix of energy experienced by all utilities within the state during the preceding 12 months. The report for this year, released in November, shows that all three of the state's investor-owned utilities -- Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric -- are projected to derive 50% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. That is a full decade ahead of schedule. PG&E reports it used 32.9% renewable energy in the past year. The figure for SoCal Edison was 28.2%. San Diego Gas & Electric led the pack with 43.2% renewable energy. Now that the 50% goal is within reach, California is looking ahead to its next milestone -- 80% renewables by 2050. "Once we get to about 50 percent, we're going to start to run into new challenges -- the second 50 percent will be trickier than the first 50 percent," Brown notes. Part of the challenge will be balancing the grid using new technologies to avoid the need for fossil fueled "peaker plants" to provide additional electricity when demand is high.
California Electricity that is.
There are several plants in the state that do nothing but make electricity for California.
I call BS. Houston power starts at $0.087 per kWh. And power from PG&E for the Paso Robles area (central coast) start at $0.199 per kWh and go up. That's over twice as much. Using GasBuddy.com, gas in CA averages $3.07 per gallon, and in TX it is around $2.12 per gallon.
Paso Robles, CA is around 1.44 times the national average for cost of living, Houston is at 1.02 - just about average for the US.
Property tax rates in CA are fairly low compared to TX, but the average home in Houston is around $220,000. In Paso Robles, houses are twice that price. Sure, property taxes are a bit lower in CA, but we also have a 13.3% income tax compared to 0% for TX. If you make just about anything more than $10,000 per year, your property tax "savings" in CA are swallowed up by State income tax.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The State of California does not consider hydro as a renewable resource:
California, the second-largest U.S. hydroelectric producer, set goals for renewable energy sources in 2002 and 2011... But the state set a limit on the inclusion of hydropower. It allows utilities to count only the hydropower produced by smaller hydropower projects—those capable of producing 30 megawatts or less—toward the renewable mandate.
Yep, only tiny hydro installs (typically private, on private land - good luck getting a permit to make your own hydro plant and flood some land deemed valuable to someone) count. The big hydro we have installed in California - about 99% of all of it - is NOT renewable per the State. So yeah - no hydro for us!
Large hydro plants typically come with huge amounts of environmental destruction - while today it would be unthinkable to flood Yosemite valley to use as a source of water and electricity, Hetch Hetchy Valley is said to rival Yosemite in beauty, yet it was flooded 100 years to to build O’Shaughnessy Dam.
Smaller hydro projects can be built with less (or no) environmental destruction.
Your entire post represents perhaps the most gigantic misunderstanding an/or willful misrepresentation of facts about health care I have ever read, and I've been discussing the matter for several years with people here and elsewhere as someone who works for the public health care sector of Finland.
Let's get something clear:
1. The US health care system is the most privatized model in advanced economies, you're the only OECD member state that still doesn't have universal coverage
2. The US model is the most expensive model on the planet per capita, The combined tax+private spending is about 2-3 times that of most western economies, and even that's an understatement, because the per capita cost in your case divides the sum of total costs with all Americans, that is, including those who do not in fact have coverage. Therefore the total cost per citizen actually covered is even higher.
You have it entirely backwards. It is the lack of universal public insurance model that's causing the costs to skyrocket. In here, the government has a vested interest in making sure the system is cost-effective, because it ends up being paid for by the tax payer in most cases (well, we do have private clinics and insurances but those are used only by a tiny fraction of the wealthy for mainly non-urgent procedures). For the government, health care is a cost, like the police and the fire department. The government also suffers if people are not treated, because high levels of untreated people lead to increased unemployment, loss of productivity and tax income.
The current center-right government has been trying to open up our model and move it more towards the direction of an american model but maintain the universal nature, so that private hospitals could provide basic healthcare and the cost would be paid by the tax payer as it is now. The claim is that increasing private presence on the production side would increase efficiency and hence decrease cost, but this is blatantly false, which is why the bill has been slammed by every single expert analysis because data from the world, especially the US is clear that such a change will only increase costs as the private chains will start to charge overheads, which the public system obviously does not do, and because health care demand is inelastic. That is, increasing supply will not affect the demand, so building more (private) infrastructure to partially compete with the public one will only raise the costs for both the private and the public side, as each instance now treats only a part of the patients while having equal fixed costs. I wrote more about this and gave an actual example of how the inelasticity makes an entirely private market highly inefficient in keeping costs down for example here.
Healthcare is one of those subjects in which the political discussion is often entirely detached from the scientific data we have on performance and cost-effectiveness. Again, all western nations besides the US have been running universal models - some based on a single payer model like here in the Nordics, others based on a mix of public and private insurance like in Germany - for over half a century and we've been doing so consistently with lower costs and equal or better treatment outcomes to that of the US. People live lon
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Yes nuclear doesn't release CO2, but >>>
1. California's geology is not well suited to nuclear -- a patchwork of fault lines. At this time, no one knows where they all are, much less which are active. No one wants to build a multibillion dollar nuclear facility, then find out they've built on top of a blind thrust fault. (i.e. a fault with no surface indication).
2. Current, proven designs are steam boilers that need lots of water. For the most part, California doesn't have lots of long term reliable water inland. There's lots of coastline of course, but virtually none of it looks to be guaranteed to be stable.
3. The California culture is strongly antinuclear and costs will surely be exacerbated by endless lawsuits.
4. Recent nuclear plants in the developed world have had MAJOR problems with cost and schedule.
5. If you look at the historical costs of nuclear accidents, they show signs of having a highly skewed ("paretto" / "power-law") distribution. i.e. occasional industrial accidents whose costs can sanely be covered by an insurance pool ... and occasional catastrophic accidents with costs comparable to a war.
My feeling, and you're surely free to disagree. The world can be powered by wind. solar and nuclear. But the nuclear part may genuinely be risky.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey