The summer of 2023 may be remembered as an important point in human civilization as the threat to critical and efficient energy supplies began to recede.
Sweden’s government has ditched plans to go all-in on “green energy,” green-lighting the construction of new nuclear power plants. Fossil fuel giant Shell announced it was scaling back its energy transition plans to focus on . . . gas and oil! Specific wind farm projects began to topple due to strong economic headwinds because the cost of the electricity to be generated was deemed too high.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his decision to open the North Sea to more oil and gas drilling. French President Emmanuel Macron is surrendering to reality and asked for a “regulatory pause.”
A little closer to home, Deep Blue California has recently announced the state is delaying the closure of 3 fossil-fuel-based power plants.
The reason? The green energy fantasies are not compatible with actual power realities.
The California Energy Commission voted Wednesday to extend the life of three gas power plants along the state’s southern coast through 2026, postponing a shutoff deadline previously set for the end of this year. The vote would keep the decades-old facilities — Ormond Beach Generating Station, AES Alamitos and AES Huntington Beach — open so they can run during emergencies.The state is at a greater risk of blackouts during major events when many Californians simultaneously crank up their air conditioning, such as a blistering heat wave.“We need to move faster in incorporating renewable energy. We need to move faster at incorporating battery storage. We need to build out chargers faster,” commissioner Patricia Monahan said. “We’re working with all the energy institutions to do that, but we are not there yet.”
The vote was not even close:
Tuesday’s 5-0 vote was a reminder of how hard it will be — and how necessary it still is — to stop burning fossil fuels.The three gas plants were originally supposed to shut down three years ago, as the Golden State worked to generate ever-larger amounts of electricity from solar panels, wind turbines and other climate-friendly power sources. But after two evenings of brief rolling blackouts in August 2020, the water board decided to give the gas plants a three-year shutdown extension.Newsom’s appointees initially expressed confidence that California would be able to build enough clean energy resources by the end of 2023 to close the polluting generators in Huntington Beach, Long Beach and Oxnard before the new deadline.But that’s not what happened.Global supply chain constraints delayed the construction of large solar farms, as well as batteries designed to store solar power for after sundown. Some proposed renewable energy facilities moved forward more slowly than expected amid opposition from local residents and arduous environmental reviews meant to protect wildlife habitat and scenic landscapes.
The most significant source of power in this state is natural gas.
As has long been the case, the largest single source of electricity in California comes from natural gas.The amount of natural gas in the state’s mix of energy resources has been reduced by about one-fifth in the past 10 years, falling from 130,995 gigawatt-hours in 2012 to 104,495 in 2022.Data from the energy commission show that a decade ago, gas made up 43.4 percent of California’s total energy mix. Last year, that number came to 36.38 percent.But in more recent years, the proportion of natural gas in California’s energy mix has not moved much, hovering each year since 2016 between 33 and 38 percent.
I am amazed that rational adults are still present in California and empowered to make such critical decisions.
Let’s add this development to the growing list of green energy dominoes that have fallen this summer.
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