Author Topic: Jarrett Stepman: California blackouts are a self-inflicted mess – Don't just blame PG&E for the new  (Read 788 times)

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Offline thackney

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Jarrett Stepman: California blackouts are a self-inflicted mess – Don't just blame PG&E for the new Dark Ages
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/california-blackouts-pge-jarrett-stepman
10/29/2019

...Though it’s easy to criticize PG&E, which hardly looks good in this whole mess, there is a lot of blame to go around—and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with “climate change.”

Poor land management has been a major contributing factor to the uptick in massive wildfires in the West and around the country. California is particularly susceptible.

Fires need heat, and they need fuel. At certain times of the year in California, the state is hot as dry winds blow in from Nevada, a combustible environment for fire. That’s hardly a new situation in the Golden State.

Unfortunately, there’s now far more fuel in our forests that has built up over decades because of a change in forest management strategy....

...Renewable energy has been prioritized over reliable infrastructure, DeVore recently wrote in The Federalist, while there has been an uptick of vulnerable power lines to connect distant wind farms to urban centers.

PG&E shifted its priority to the overpriced renewables at the behest of politicians, The Wall Street Journal explained in an article aptly titled “California’s Dark Ages.”

For years, the utility skimped on safety upgrades and repairs while pumping billions into green energy and electric-car subsidies to please its overlords in Sacramento. Credit Suisse has estimated that long-term contracts with developers of renewables cost the utility $2.2 billion annually more than current market power rates....

...Worse than the misguided green energy push and poor infrastructure, of course, has been the shifting forest management strategy—mostly the result of misguided environmentalist ideology—that turned large swaths of the state into a tinderbox.

“With a decline in the harvest came a decline in the allied efforts to clear brush, build and maintain access roads and firebreaks,” DeVore wrote in The Federalist. “This led inexorably to a decades’ long build-up in the fuel load. Federal funds set aside for increasingly unpopular forest-management efforts were instead shifted to fire-suppression expenses.”

One failure led to another as poor forest management has necessitated vastly increased budgets for putting out the fires, which will undoubtedly continue to be a threat....
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Offline PeteS in CA

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Quote
At certain times of the year in California, the state is hot as dry winds blow in from Nevada, a combustible environment for fire. That’s hardly a new situation in the Golden State.

This time of year was "Fire Season" in the 60s when I was growing up, and probably has been for centuries. What is new, within my lifetime, is the 4 or 5 decades of accelerating mismanagement of forest "fuel" load and Enviros blocking proper trimming around power lines.

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... prioritized over reliable infrastructure ...

Enviros and NIMBYs have gotten the courts to restrict PG&E's tree trimming and cutting past the point of danger, and have blocked transmission network capacity upgrades. Enviros and anti-utility-company groups (e.g. TURN) also blocked generating capacity expansion from the 70s into the 90s when crisis forced government to allow expansion.

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PG&E shifted its priority to the overpriced renewables at the behest of politicians, The Wall Street Journal explained ...

For years, the utility skimped on safety upgrades and repairs while pumping billions into green energy and electric-car subsidies to please its overlords in Sacramento. ...

The fuller picture of this is that PG&E and SoCal Edison (I'm not sure if municipal utilities like SMUD and LAL&P might have been exempted) were forced by law to buy a certain percentage of their power from bird chopper and bird fryer farms and other mountebank scams regardless of price.

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“With a decline in the harvest came a decline in the allied efforts to clear brush, build and maintain access roads and firebreaks,” DeVore wrote in The Federalist.

Remember the Northern Spotted Owl! Among other triumphs of the Enviros-government complex. Here's the deal, if by some sort of magic the Feds and State of California rolled back all the laws and regs used to drive forestry products companies out of California (and other states, BTW) forestry companies still won't trust government. And not trusting the Feds and state, they won't be falling all over each other to invest hundreds of millions or billions of $$ into business endeavors that government might screw over again.
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Millions now living should have died. Anti-Covid-Vaxxer ghouls hardest hit.

Online IsailedawayfromFR

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If it indeed is 'self-inflicted', I believe there would be grounds for limiting the amount of federal aid to occur in the form of disaster relief.

After all, why should other states contribute to helping California's own created mess?

As an aside, I do not support any federal money going for local emergencies anyway.
No punishment, in my opinion, is too great, for the man who can build his greatness upon his country's ruin~  George Washington

Offline skeeter

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Our Governor took some big donations from the utility this past election. That would explain his flailing around the past few weeks.