Must...not...say...it....
there *IS* no power shortage, just money-hungry power generators that are fucking over the energy distributors by having so high rates...
This is wrong. California doesn't have the power because every attempt to build major power plants there in the last ten years has been foiled by environmentalists, during the same period their population has skyrocketed and their computer industries have grown exponentially. Then they created a so-called deregulation plan that put price controls on the buying and selling of power, forcing utlities like PG&E to have to buy all their excess power needs on the spot market, the single most expensive place to go. And since those same price controls prevent the utilities from passing those higher spot costs on to customers, you get a utility (or a state) that literally can't afford to buy the needed extra power. THAT is why you have a power shortage out there. NPR's argument only makes sense if you believe the entire power system ought to be immediately nationalized so that those nasty capitalists can't make their evil profits off their work.
And even THEN you'd still have real shortages. Back during the height of this mess a couple months ago, there was much grumbling up in the Northwest statesabout them having to send power to California when they were starting to run low themselves, and they made it clear that if and when things
truly got tight, they were going to produce for themselves first, and California second.
And you only need look at any given second- or third-world nation to see how effective nationalized and/or socialist power systems are. I suppose it would more fairly spread out the blackouts across the entire nation, far more often...
and that Bush refuses to step in and kill deregulation because he thinks the generators should be allowed to make as much as they're charging....
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. The only thing he's doing different from Clinton is refusing to force out-of-state companies to send power to California when they have a legitimate worry that they'll never get paid for it, no matter how high or low their prices are. Does he even have the power (heh) to unilaterally nullify California state law?
Can anyone explain to me how it is that the California power crisis is unfolding in winter and early spring?
Well, those rolling blackouts from a week or so ago happened because the temperatures in SoCal were ~85-90°, which were unusually high for that time of year.
posted by aaron at 12:44 PM on April 6, 2001
You accuse me of bringing up a straw man, and then respond with a straw man? I don't know that anything was inherently wrong with what California had until the "deregulation" bill, in terms of their price control disaster. California's terminal case of NIMBY/BANANAism is largely unrelated to that, however, and their current lack of electrical self-sufficiency would have come about regardless. Which would have resulted in some amount of higher energy prices, regardless.
And save the cost, which is largely a function of higher energy costs and their systems of taxation systems, what about all those third-world power grids in Western Europe which work pretty well.
Third-world grids in Western Europe? Huh?
(Yes, the link is from the Sierra Club, but if what they're laying out is true . . .)
More like half-truths, which aren't much better than falsehoods. What the Sierra Club says about the Sierra Club is probably true. But then they try to falsely equate the Sierra Club with "environmental groups." They may be an environmental group, but all environmental groups are not them. And plenty of other groups and individuals have blocked everything for all sorts of different reasons. (If I recall correctly, that plant they mention was blocked by Cisco because Cisco didn't want a big eyesore next to their swanky new campus. That's just as pathetic as all the other reasons, though it begs the question: If not there, why no plant at all anywhere else?)
And it's nice that the SC supports more-efficient natural gas plants. But they're still natural gas plants, which means they'd be just as caught up in the supply-and-demand cycle as the current plants. And the ad doesn't say anything about the ancillary questions: If these plants had been built, would the more outmoded plants have been allowed to continue production, or would they have been forced to shut down? How much opposition to these plants was there from anyone other than the Sierra Club and other power companies, and how long would this opposition have been able to prevent the plants being built? The ad says the plants would have provided power to 1.2 million homes. Would all that power have gone to homes? Wouldn't much of it have been eaten up by the huge power-hungry computer economy expansion in the state since the proposals were made in 1995? Etc.
posted by aaron at 2:16 PM on April 6, 2001
Wait until fuel cells start becoming available on a large scale, which will start to happen as soon as the end of this year. When people start putting those puppies in their basements, it's going to turn the whole power economy upside down, in a good way. I read one study that said by the end of the decade, the average household will be regularly selling power back onto the grid during the daytime.
posted by aaron at 2:50 PM on April 6, 2001
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posted by tiaka at 11:02 AM on April 6, 2001