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California Moves To Require 100% Clean Electricity by 2045 (bloomberg.com)
California's assembly has voted to move the state's electricity completely off fossil fuels. The state assembly this week passed S.B. 100, a proposal to transition California to 100 percent emissions-free electricity sources by 2045. A report adds: The Assembly voted 43-32 in favor of the legislation Tuesday. It would eliminate the reliance on fossil fuels to power homes, businesses and factories in the world's fifth-largest economy, accelerating a shift already under way. The state currently gets about 44 percent of its power from renewables and hydropower. California has positioned itself to lead the battle against climate change by cutting emissions even as the Trump administration has worked to roll back the state's stringent auto pollution standards and prop up ailing coal-fired power plants. Earlier this year, California became the first U.S. state to mandate solar rooftop panels on almost all new homes. It would be the second state to require 100 percent carbon-free power after Hawaii.
What if the Federal government says no to that? I mean, the feds could pass a bill requiring that people purchase a certain percentage of their electricity from coal or natural gas if they wanted too. We now have legal precedent that the feds can force you to engage in commerce against your will.
Thanks to CA mandates all CA cars went zero emissions 18 years ago.
Doubtless this mandate will be equally effective.
t would eliminate the reliance...
behold the power of... words on paper. Words written on paper by politicians, even.
In terms of states' rights and energy independence and the environment, this is a good thing. Whether or not this works out, we will learn a lot about the feasibility of eliminating our reliance on fossil fuels from California's effort; other states could then model their own clean energy programs based on the positives and negatives of California's experiment.
(I'm not sure what the anti-Trump rhetoric adds to the article summary other than virtual signaling... ??)
Due to rain, volcano's(smoke), forest fires, or any other event that disrupts their alternate energy source. Doubt they can use water, they don't have enough for their citizens. Then can always count on the red states to supply them at a premium.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
to build a nuclear plant.
with my gas furnace...
And what of my gas stove?
I sure hope this only applies to new construction and not existing homes
Except at night. Without a massive bank of batteries, what are we supposed to do for electricity after dark? Solar is obviously useless, and the winds reduce after sundown in most places. With no new nuke plants in the foreseeable future, and Diablo Canyon the only surviving facility, how exactly do we keep the lights on around here without fossil fuels or having to pay a metric shit ton for a huge pile of batteries? Our power rates are already sky high, and we've been burned badly by the San Onofre fiasco. Who wants to pay MORE for equipment to replace something that already works?
and not because it's technically impossible, but the nationally ruling party has already signaled they're going to block CA on their higher car emissions. I could see them moving against them on this too. After all, CA is so big that where they go the nation follows.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"Clean coal", LOL!!! https://www.scientificamerican...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Wind and solar energy don't reduce your need for peak capacity from non-renewables at all unless you have some way of storing energy. And yes, water behind a dam is a way of storing energy.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
All states with trade deficit to CA should impose 50% tariff to all CA products and services.
They would need the federal government to do that - as that constitutes interstate commerce.
Apparently Facebook has figured out how to power a data center just using people's personal information.
#DeleteChrome
But what's their target for the next 4 years. Or should I say before the next election. Because none of the actual politicians are going to be there in 2045 even if the target is met.
California is in a perpetual competition with itself to come up with the most freedom infringing, pointless legislation possible... if it wastes money, achieves nothing, and oppresses people, Moonbeam Brown will get behind it.
Yet they are the 5th largest economy.
Gas is even more expensive, when you factor in the externalities of CO2 release. Every non-renewable becomes prohibitive when you do the full accounting.
sounds good to me. I vote for disconnecting them from the internet as well. It is powered by a lot of unclean electricity.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Guess what? Left to their own devices humans will burn everything they can burn for fuel and they don't give a fuck about the environment, but they'll whine and cry and kick their feet when their lights don't come on and their cars won't start and it's 100 degrees out in the middle of winter. We'll run out of fossil fuels before too long and it's pants-on-head retarded to keep using them regardless, so how about all you whiners and complainers just get in line and get used to the idea that we HAVE TO CHANGE sooner or later so why not plan on it being sooner?
-Compressed air storage
-Pumped hydro
-Molten salt heat storage
-Central hydrogen storage and fuel cell facility + 2x wind farms and PV to compensate for energy inefficiency
-High voltage DC transmission north-south and east west from offshore and onshore windfarms and from PV in the central desert states for pre-dawn power
-Geothermal
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You just count (A) the motivated electrons generated in the state and being exported,
and (B) those generated out of state coming in, using, you know, math, and if (A) >= (B), you're good.
It's slightly more complicated than that, but that's the essence of it.
That's how Google etc. claim to be running on 100% emissions-free electricity.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The Feds cannot do that:
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Yet they are the 5th largest economy.
Yet, still lead the nation in poverty and homelessness.
https://www.ocregister.com/201...
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Which they did not achieve under the current governor/legislature.
Fortunately for the current governor/legislature, this new law requires that they do absolutely nothing. It imposes limits on future governments of CA, which they may abide by, or not.
After all, new laws supersede old laws, so if they can't achieve their goal, they (the future government) just have to pass a law saying "ummmm...never mind" about the whole green energy thing...
And they only have to do that if someone remembers this law in 20 years, and brings suit against them for not following it....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Global warming due to CO2 emissions is a major causal factor in the excess fires.
Should have listened to the environmentalists 40 years ago when they started warning about this, instead of going with the log it, burn it, pave it crew.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
We should have 100% clean municipal water in Michigan. And 100% clean government in D.C.
And 100% Clean coal, except if it's not actually clean we have the dump the soot into the ventilation at Mar-a-Lago.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
They can certainly pass a constitutional amendment, with enough effort. The states can't.
Indeed, states like Arizona and Alaska have their own natural solutions to homelessness. And remember when Nevada was caught shipping their homeless to California?
And despite that, California and other blue states continue to subsidize the red states. If that stopped, blue states would be awash in cash and red states (except Texas) would have some very difficult choices to make, like when Kansas nearly bankrupted itself under conservative tax policy. And then the new federal caps on mortage interest and state tax deductions will only increase the flow of money from blue states to red states, by design.
Of course none of this excuses California's rate of poverty and homelessness. There's plenty of money in the state, it just isn't distributed very well. And that's self-defeating for Democrats because poor people tend vote less than wealthier people and when they do, they tend to vote Democrat.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Actually, California's running a budget surplus. And has for the last few years.
Doesn't matter how much you make if you can't control your spending... funny how the state is so wealthy yet on the verge of bankruptcy
California's running a budget surplus, and has for the last few years.
You're thinking of Kansas, the state that went so broke following supply-side economics that they violated their Constitution.
Title is wrong: 100% clean electricity is not 100% clean energy. Fuel will still be allowed for cars and planes, which are huge greenhouse gas emitters.
This is a step in the right direction, but not toward 100% of problem solved.
Clean power, bad news for Russia. End of the petroleum age. End of petroleum economy. The Russian mafia has a plan of course.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I meet people (developers) who move from cali to reno NV all the time in order to escape high taxes. After this, they will be escaping either higher taxes (to further subsidize solar) or high taxes AND high energy prices. This law will have to come with a tax on people moving out of state, or some sort of tax on people who *used to* live in California.
I think a "sales tax" that only applied on the sale of out of state goods would be effectively a tariff and violate the ICC (unless *maybe* the item was alcohol). The SCOTUS ruling doesn't allow that that and the sites you linked to claiming otherwise are run and frequented by . . .common clay of the new west.
Wind does not always blow, and I know it is California, and the song says it never rains in California, but sometimes the sun does not shine, like at NIGHT. The problem, even with ramping up storage capacity, is that if the demand, outstrips what people "normally" use, they can't just make the sun shine longer, or the wind to blow harder. With coal, gas, nuclear, hydro power, you can "gen up" to put more power into the grid, when capacity, goes beyond what is available. Here is what may happen to California users. Say it's an unusually hot period of weather, or lots of rain with little wind. The battery storage goes down and the demand for electricity goes up. The utilities of California will have to purchase power from some other location to meet the demand. The cost associated with that, will be passed onto consumers with HIGHER bills. You can hope "clean" all you want, but unless you have storage capacity the size of texas, don't count on it. Placing all your eggs in one basket, could hurt California.
"In an unrelated note, Silicon Valley tech companies announced relocating their data centers for Texas for an undisclosed reason".
Seriously, CA, as well as America, needs to cut that sooner. As in 2035.
Add to that, they should require all vehicles be BEV, or series hybrid for certain ones (off-roads including Ag and Construction, EMS, etc). There should also be exceptions for antique cars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Only if we wash the coal really well first.
Germany has been real good about "greenwashing" their coal. You see they buy up a bunch of sawdust and woodchips from lumber mills in the American southeast. They then load it all up on ships that burn bunker fuel, when it reaches German ports they load it onto diesel fuel powered trucks and trains, then burn this "green fuel" with their brown coal and pretend that they've lowered their CO2 footprint.
They do this same "greenwashing" at the physical plant where I went to university. They burn "agricultural waste" with the coal for heating, cooling, and electricity on campus. They then get to pretend they made things "green" by diverting valuable material that used to be used for fertilizer and erosion control and turning it to worthless ash.
I swear that these idiots that want to "save humanity from itself" are going to get us all killed. They are taking food and burning it. Civilizations collapsed from this.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Hint: sun rays are free. The wind is free.
The wind and sun as sources of energy are as "free" as coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. Just like wind and sun all you have to do is build the machines to collect this energy and turn it into a form we find useful.
If the wind and sun is "free" then everything we use for energy is "free".
Another problem is that we can't just pile up wind and solar energy into a storage bin like we can coal and uranium. Coal and uranium are already stored up for us in the dirt. We can draw from this store at any rate we choose, when we choose. Given the vastness of the supply of this store of energy, especially in uranium, it's as limitless as wind and sun could ever promise to be. Solar power gets real expensive at night, while coal and uranium cost just the same. Well, coal and uranium tends to get a bit cheaper at night, but that's more on the limits of our technology than any real change in our ability to dig it up from the ground.
The wind and sun may be free but the machines to harvest and store this energy are not. Good luck with your plans on a future powered by wind and sun.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Face it, the sun is setting on the fossil fuel era, and on the petroleum economies. The future belongs to renewables and batteries.
I've seen the future, and it's not powered by solar collectors. I've seen the math on the silicon, copper, aluminum, iron, and so many other materials that would have to be mined for making the solar panels, the structures to hold them up, and the wires to connect them all. I've also seen the numbers on the mining needed for a future powered by nuclear power. The difference is quite stark. The materials needed for solar power is far greater than that needed for nuclear, an order of magnitude greater. That's with current technology and nuclear power is only improving.
Now, you'll respond that solar power technology is also improving, and I will not dispute that. What we have now though is nuclear power having a head start on solar power in most every metric that is an order of magnitude ahead, and growing.
Here's all I ask of the solar power advocates, let's end all the energy subsidies and let the market choose. No subsidies for wind, or for solar, or for oil, coal, natural gas, or uranium/ If what you say is true that the future is in solar power and batteries then you should not have a problem with this, that we'll get there anyway because solar power is such a superior source of energy.
The solar advocates I've talked to would never even consider ending the solar power subsidies. I know why, because that would be a blow for solar that it might never recover from. All nuclear power advocates want is the opportunity to try. They don't want money any more, they just want permission to experiment. If nuclear power is a dead end, which I assume you believe, then where is the harm in proving this beyond all doubt with money from private investors?
I've seen the future, and it's bright from nuclear powered lights.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
You're on crack, solar panels are mostly sand.
Right, sand that is "free" for anyone to just dig up from the ground, like uranium and coal. Sand that will have to be processed into PV cells, just like we must process any ore into something useful. Then placed on structures built of steel and concrete, just like any power plant is built of steel and concrete. Then wired together with wires of copper and aluminum, like any other source of electricity. This all costs money, requires mining from the earth, just like any energy source. The difference is that getting energy from coal and uranium requires far less mining with more usable energy created.
Energy from the sun is no more "free" than energy from anything else. Thinking that solar power is "free" suggests a drug addled mind.
Cost of solar will continue to decrease by 20% for each doubling of capacity.
Exponential growth in any real system is not sustainable. This will end.
Any upward blip in petroleum price will only accelerate the solar capacity curve.
Of that I have no doubt. It will also encourage investments in wind, hydro, nuclear, and whatever else we can think of to displace coal and oil.
It's ramping up faster than anybody dreamed, especially BP, and especially Putin.
Again, exponential growth cannot be sustained. This will end. The only question is what limit solar will hit first.
Adding to the upcoming misery: Russia supplies nothing to the solar industry.
But they do export uranium and nuclear power technology. Russia will do just fine in this, perhaps even come out ahead.
China on the other hand, is doing very well, not to mention already having the world's largest and fastest growing installed capacity.
China also announced a plan to dominate in the nuclear energy market. All that proves is that nations like Russia and China are not placing the future of their nations on the promise of solar power. They are taking a true "all the above" energy strategy. Any nation that wishes to survive the impending collapse of the petroleum markets, and solar hitting the wall on it's current exponential growth, would be wise to invest in every energy technology we can think of.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I went into considerable detail on this a couple days ago here:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
If any state in the USA wants energy that is cheap, clean, safe, reliable, feasible in the short term, and with promise to stay that way in the long term, then they must invest heavily in wind, hydro, and nuclear. Oh, almost forgot, with a little bit of natural gas to speed things along on cleaning things up until something better comes along.
California has been going backwards with their unreasonable hating on nuclear power. Maybe some of this is justified with seismic activity in the state but there are means to address this.
What is exceedingly frustrating is that the politicians that made this promise will not be in office to see it through. This is no different than Obama signing a pledge to have the USA reduce it's carbon footprint only days before he left office. He didn't even bother to make it binding in any way by sending it to Congress.
If these politicians were smart then they'd be doing wind, hydro, and nuclear right now. If they were honest on following through then the pledges on making this happen would be within their terms in office.
I'd like to see a politician make a JFK style promise, "in this decade", once in a while. Anything longer beyond 10 years is outside the power of any politician to promise anything. A promise on the scale of 10 years is having a working plan in 2 years, 2 more for breaking ground, 2 for building something tangible, 2 for testing, and 2 for making it happen. On this scale we can see it happen and call them on it if the milestones haven't been reached.
The video on that Bloomberg article spent a lot of time explaining the "experience curve" and how it can improve performance and bring down costs on renewable energy. That same thing applies to nuclear power. Nuclear power costs keep rising because it is rare for anyone to build more than a handful of any one kind of reactor. If the US federal government would just allow people to get this experience, and keep it, by issuing licenses for new reactors more than once in a decade then nuclear power could experience the benefits of this experience curve too.
Solar power was once far too expensive until people decided to make long term investments in bringing down costs. If the politicians in California made this kind of investment then they could enjoy this from nuclear power just as they could from solar. By betting everything in solar plus batteries they set themselves on a path with no competition, and therefore only a bunch of people in industry working to maximize on tax credits against other companies in the solar market instead of making something that can thrive outside California mandates. Pit solar, nuclear, wind, and hydro against each other in a free market means near assurance of reaching their goal. Betting everything on solar and storage is just setting themselves up to fail.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The 1974 CA Paperless Toilet Law, whose deadline was extended 30 times since its passage, has had its deadline extended yet again due to authorities struggling to contain the illegal toilet paper rolls flowing into California from other states. CA legislators are pushing through a bill in Congress to place identification markings on the cardboard rolls so that their origins can be traced and to establish a federal toilet paper roll registry.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
There are multiple major factors: 1. The primary cause: Ending forest management and trying to return it to an semi "virgin" state. - Ending controlled and managed logging which removed dead, diseased and otherwise unhealthy trees. - Lack of control allows the Pine Bark Beetle infestation to wipe out huge sections of forest. - Ending grazing contracts, allowing grass and brush to grow uncontrolled. 2. Despite trying to have a "virgin" forest, we fight the fires which are essential in the self management process, allowing the bark beetle to continue to spread, and allowing the tree and brush density to increase to nearly 3x healthy levels. 3. Increased CO2 levels promote additional growth, which adds more fuel. We either need to manage it properly, or leave it completely alone.
Look at that, a strawman and an ignorant swipe at capitalism all in one shot. You just went full liberal, never go full liberal... What's next, you gonna teach us how to count to potato? No... I'm thinking of California. You know, the state that despite being the 5th largest economy in the world ranked 29th on the economic performance index for 2017 and 47th in economic outlook... you know, the state that came in dead last among all 50 states in quality of living according to a US News & World report... You know, the state that's so shitty they're spending over $1,000,000 for people to literally pick up shit off the streets in San Francisco. You know, California... the state where thousands of high paid professionals pack up and leave every day for places like Texas and Utah or Arizona... You know, California, the state where the overwhelming majority of residents can't afford to pay rent, let alone buy property. Good 'ol California, the state where they're driving away big businesses like Carl's Jr who'd been there for six decades (off to Nashville) and Toyota (off to Dallas) or Jacobs Engineering (also to Dallas)... etc, etc, etc But, yeah sure, your whole "derp derp, Kansas went supply side and that's the problem, derp derp" reasoning makes way more sense. Lemme guess... Trump's not your president, you think there's 483 different genders, you can never decide which bathroom to use, you think taxes are theft, and you call yourself a libertarian... am I right? You go ahead and keep on "resisting" lil buddy, I'll stick to the facts.
This means that, in my conservative state, we will have 100% clean electricity by 2145! I'm looking forward to it!