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Jan. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
34:39
California’s Rolling Blackouts, Explained | Michael Shellenberger
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California's in real trouble, and so I think that when people ask about the forests, when they ask about the blackouts, when you ask about homelessness, when you ask about the housing shortage, they all stem from the same underlying problems, which is that The state is stuck in a kind of 1960s romantic ideology that makes it very expensive for newcomers and young people.
It actually concentrates the wealth in a very small number of families, and it ends up in this kind of social dysfunction where the electricity grid is failing.
Our forests are failing to some extent.
They're failed.
The fires were a massive failure.
Rolling blackouts in summer and early fall have become an expected phenomena for many Californians.
My guest today is Michael Schallenberger.
He's a 30-year veteran environmental activist and author of the book, Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
Today he discusses why we are seeing these blackouts and what policies utility companies need to abide by in California.
He also touches on how these policies are connected with the wildfires, and he shares what the best potential source of energy is in terms of reliability, carbon footprint, and efficiency.
Welcome to California Insider.
Michael, it's great to have you on.
Thanks for having me.
Excited to be here.
And we want to talk to you about this perfect timing to talk to you about this issue.
There's rolling blackouts in California.
And we want to know the root cause of these blackouts.
Can you tell us what's going on?
The simplest explanation is that we just didn't have enough supply because we've been shutting down nuclear plants.
Faster than we should have.
Overestimating our capacity.
So in the proximate, it was really the fear of cascading failures, which is uncontrollable blackouts.
That was the real risk.
And we narrowly avoided it.
But the problem was it was a heat wave.
We weren't prepared for all of the electricity demand that was coming from air conditioning.
We weren't prepared for the fact that the heat wave would be covering other states than California, who had similarly high electricity demand and who similarly, and thus did not have that electricity to sell to California.
Since we import almost a third of our electricity, which is an astonishing quantity to import, you know, we have a beautiful natural environment in California.
And so we are very anti-development.
That's the core of the problem.
And so that it went too far to the point where it covered nuclear plants and natural gas plants that actually have a relatively small environmental impact.
People don't realize that, but tiny amounts of land generate huge quantities of electricity, particularly from nuclear, but it is also largely true for natural gas.
In this kind of religious zeal to be renewable powered state, There was just strong, powerful advocacy from the establishment, from the supermajority Democratic Party to just do renewables.
And so we shut down more natural gas and nuclear plants than we should have and didn't have enough supply.
And now, you say we didn't plan.
And when I look at my electricity bills, it comes from private companies.
Who is in charge of this planning and what is the role of, what's the connection between these private companies and whoever that's in charge?
Yeah, so I mean, one thing to understand about electricity is that it's similar to sanitation, clean water coming into your house, dirty water going out.
It's similar to railroads, which is that it is what economists call a natural monopoly, meaning that the society has basically decided, you know, 100 years ago, 120 years ago, that we don't want multiple companies stringing up electrical wire to all of our houses.
I mean, if you can imagine, electrical wires are complicated, and in fact, The blackouts that we had last fall in California were a consequence of the electric utilities shutting down the power for certain neighborhoods where they worried that the electrical wires were touching vegetation and would cause fires during a particularly hot and dry period.
Well, they had failed to maintain the wires.
The wires are very expensive and difficult to maintain.
And so the society decided, you know, 100 so years ago that we just didn't want to have, it'd be crazy to have five different electrical companies stringing up wire everywhere.
So we said this is what we call a natural monopoly.
It's a monopoly for physical reasons.
It's not ideological.
Both conservatives and liberals support these natural monopolies.
And then we would regulate it.
Well, we deregulated it in part by allowing for different suppliers to the utilities.
But nonetheless, it's a single company.
And so really, what I think of these electric utilities as something more akin to government agencies.
They're basically controlled by the government.
There's private actors making money in them.
But really, the reason that the governor is responsible ultimately for electricity in California is because the government exercises so much control over the private utilities and the supplier of those utilities.
Now, what are the implications of this system that we have created with utility companies having a monopoly but being regulated by the state?
Well, I think the one thing we've learned is that it's not a good idea to mess with that too much.
It's a pretty simple model.
There is a huge amount of corruption.
I don't mean often...
It's not corruption in the way that we see it in places like Brazil or India or Sub-Saharan Africa, but it is corruption that occurs where basically people that get appointed to be the regulators of these utilities are basically working for the governor And imposing his rule, basically, over the utilities are often not independent people, and there's often risks of things being traded for them, gifts and jobs and institutes and various things.
It's pretty common with most utilities that are structured this way, but no one's improved on that model.
Every several generations, there needs to be reform of these public utility commissions, what they're called the regulators, But, you know, I think what they've tried in the past is to introduce more market mechanisms, and that didn't work.
It actually made the situation worse.
We had blackouts in 2000, the year 2000, because of the so-called deregulation, but it was only a half regulation since you can't...
There is no way to deregulate a natural monopoly.
It's just a natural monopoly.
And so I think that's one of the implications.
But I think the bigger implication...
Is that California is just the worst managed state in the country.
I mean, if the rest of the United States were managed like California, you know, we have like 100,000 people on the street, most of whom are either mentally ill or using very hard drugs.
Our forests were so badly maintained that they all went up in flames, that a huge amount of them went up in flames in very high intensity fires over the last several weeks because we had failed to properly manage those forests.
California is in real trouble.
And so I think that when you ask about the forests, when they ask about the blackouts, when you ask about homelessness, when you ask about the housing shortage, they all stem from the same underlying problems, which is that the state is stuck in a kind of they all stem from the same underlying problems, which is that the state is stuck in a kind of 1960s romantic ideology that makes It actually concentrates the wealth in a very small number of families.
And it ends up in this kind of social dysfunction where the electricity grid is failing.
Our forests are failing to some extent.
They're failed.
The fires were a massive failure.
So I think it's a cautionary tale.
I think also California It is still setting the standard for the rest of the United States to go, and I think that is rightly seen as a point of concern when you see problems really of just basic civilization management, of just managing cities, managing electrical grids, managing the boundary between homes and the natural environment.
Those boundaries and those structures are breaking down, and that's why I think so many people are paying attention to California and have so many concerns about the state.
Now, can you tell us more about these policies?
What are these policies?
So it depends on the issue.
So let's just take the forests and the electrical grid, since that was the main issue you were asking about.
There's really two separate things.
I'm going to generalize and say there's two kinds of forests.
There's actually more than that, but right now most people think there's only one kind of forest.
And they tend to think fires are bad, and both are wrong.
And so there's two kinds of forests.
Think of one of them as mountain forests, Sierra Nevadas, just forests like we associate.
The other forest is more like a shrubland.
It's near the coasts.
It's short trees.
Also, we call it oak woodlands, where there's some oaks mixed in there.
But we have too many fires in that shrubland, or what in California we call the chaparral, and not enough Low-intensity prescribed fires that burn on the forest floor in the Sierra Nevadas.
Now, there's a question around some of the forest health could be achieved through fires, but it could also be achieved through what President Trump famously called raking, which is just mechanical harvesting or thinning of forests.
When you interview people, there's not a lot of, it's not actually a controversy.
We use fires when we should.
We use mechanical where we should.
The point is that we just haven't been doing either of them enough.
And the reasons for that are because it's not been a priority.
I mean, there's just no other way to put it.
And what has been a priority has been renewables, climate change, shutting down nuclear plants.
And also what has not been a priority has been the second kind of fire where we have too many fires, which is the Chaparral, the Shrubland, the Oak Woodlands, What needed to happen there was reduce the risk of transmission lines, of electrical lines starting fires, and that's just the simple work of clearing the vegetation from both sides Of electrical wires and that work wasn't being done because they were distracted by renewables and climate change and shutting down nuclear plants and natural gas plants.
So I think what, you know, the hope is that this was a wake-up call.
Certainly the governor for the first time seemed to acknowledge that there's a problem with attempting to rely strictly on unreliable solar and wind energy.
One of the energy sources that went down and was not available that resulted in the energy scarcity of energy shortages that we saw a few weeks ago was the failure of a 1000 megawatt wind farm.
Now there was also a failure of a 400 megawatt gas plant.
But you do have some expectation that not all gas plants, because they're complicated machines, are going to work.
But you would never rely on a wind plant, on a wind energy, because it's wind.
Why would you not rely?
The wind comes and doesn't come, is it affected significantly?
Yeah, you know, there's some amount of regularity in very sunny places for solar, but even solar is a problem because the sun sets at the very moment that demand for electricity rises.
So the sun's setting between 5 and 9, depending on the time of year.
But five to ten is peak demand.
That's when everybody comes home, starts cooking, starts eating, watching TV, listening to the radio.
Usually every member of the family is doing all of those things and on their phone these days.
So there's just a lot of electricity demand, and that means you've got this crazy ramping.
So that's just solar.
Wind, I mean, wind is just, I mean, there's some of, they claim some amount of predictability, but obviously when you have an unexpected heat wave, Or what they would say is an unexpected heat wave, because they try to have it a little bit both ways.
Like, on the one hand, they would say, we know from climate change we should expect more heat waves.
And then they were like, we could never have expected this heat wave, which both increased demand from electricity for air conditioning and then also was the cause of the heat wave.
Was that there wasn't any wind, since wind is what cools us off.
So that's part of the problem with relying on unreliable renewables.
Now we have very reliable hydroelectric dams, but those are excluded from all of the government subsidies for renewables, since the effort has been basically, and I refer to it in Apocalypse Never as a kind of religious movement.
There's obviously big money to be made, And there's political power associated with it.
But really, in California, you can just see the kind of the real romantic, you know, religiosity of our desire to rely on renewables and the problems that that's been creating.
And with this heat wave, some people think that we do have to pay attention to what we're doing with the global warming and that they see the heat and they see the fires.
And what do you think of that?
Yeah, I mean, look, climate change is real.
It is having consequences.
It is one of those consequences is longer fire season for the forests.
Another one is that more is just higher temperatures.
That's why it's called global warming.
And that includes more heat waves.
So that's true.
But that isn't the whole story and that's not often the determining factor.
So here's the thing you need to know about the relationship between climate change, fires and forests.
The forests that have been really burning in this last few weeks and that have resulted in this historic fire and deadly fire has been driven by the accumulation of wood fuel After a century of suppressing the good fires on the floors of the forest.
So we have about five times more wood fuel in the forest than was there 100 years ago.
And that was, you know, they just didn't know any better.
That's the sort of sad story.
It's just not anybody to really blame.
It was not bad intentions.
And again, it could have been managed over the last 20 or 30 years when everybody recognized that this was a problem and it wasn't dealt with.
But nonetheless, I think what's important to understand is that the forests that were healthy, where there had been what they call prescribed burns, and other forms of cutting, including selective harvesting or selective cutting, they survived the mega fires.
They survived the high-intensity fires, which is the most inspiring story to come out of this and nobody knows it.
These high-intensity fires were burning across the crowns of the trees, the tops of the trees.
We don't want that.
Those really hot fires are really unnatural and bad.
Not all unnatural things are bad, but in this case it is.
But they would then arrive in a healthy forest and the fire would then drop to the floor of the forest, which is exactly what you want, and it would just do the burning up of the kind of woody debris and the leaves and the wood fuel that you don't want to accumulate.
So what, for me, As an environmentalist who wants to actually see solutions to problems and not just moralize and politicize tragedies, for me, I go, well, the lesson is that we need to do prescribed burns and take care of all the rest of our forests in the way that we did with this particular forest, which, ironically enough, is owned by an electric utility for reasons that don't really matter.
But nonetheless, that's the main event.
Now, there's a question of how is climate change contributing to the fires?
Sure.
Did it dry out the woods some more?
That's what everybody points to?
Yeah, yes.
Would we have had these fires even without climate change?
Yeah, probably.
Like, I don't interview anybody that says, well, gosh darn it, if it weren't for climate change, we wouldn't have had those fires.
That's like nobody's actually saying that.
None of the leading scientists, and I've been interviewing them for over a year now.
So, you know, I see it being politicized.
I see, you know, Democratic politicians.
I'm a moderate Democrat myself, but I don't think it's right to say things that are not true.
And that's basically what's been going on, is that you've had some opportunistic climate activists, Democratic politicians, some scientists, some journalists.
Mostly what's happened, because I've now written like four pieces on this over the last year and a half, and I've been out there on Twitter about it, is that the journalists kind of go, Well, it's both.
Everybody recognizes that there's wood fuel buildup and climate change and that they're both important factors.
They'll be like, oh, everybody knows it's climate change and wood fuel buildup.
But that's misleading because it implies that without climate change, there wouldn't be the fires.
And it suggests that as long as there's climate change, we're going to have fires like that.
And neither of those things are true.
In fact, they're both falsified.
I mean, you could, you know, I mean, So that's the trouble I have with it.
I think it's like saying, so I think it's hard to get people's head around.
I was trying to figure out if you could say, you know, climate change is really neither necessary nor sufficient for these fires.
That's what I would say.
It's neither necessary nor sufficient.
In contrast, the accumulation of wood fuel, five times more wood fuel load or debt, as they call it, Is both necessary and sufficient for these fires?
Now, does that mean we shouldn't do anything about climate change?
No, we should do something about climate change.
We are doing something about climate change.
U.S. carbon emissions declined 2% last year.
They declined 10% from electricity.
They've been declining in rich countries for the last five decades, and mostly from the transition of coal to natural gas and to nuclear.
So we should do something about climate change, but we should stop Giving it the power that it's being given, I think, around these fires because it's misleading.
And do you think with the utility, going back to the utility companies and the power outages, do you think that it's been a wake-up call for the policymakers that are after these policies, and do you think they're going to make a change?
Yeah, so, I mean, this is where the corruption stuff comes in.
There is, and this is why it's also kind of political, and it's really about what the society wants.
So if the society is dead set on doing renewables and no nuclear, then the governor, unless he's courageous, and so far we haven't seen much of that, then he will basically continue on this path of shutting down the nuclear plant and doing more renewables.
But since he now knows from experience, and indicated as much in his remarks, That that's dangerous for him politically to allow there to be blackouts.
That's not good for him politically.
That he's going to make sure that doesn't happen.
And that just means that we're going to burn a lot more natural gas.
I mean, that's just kind of the bottom line.
And what about the nuclear?
So the nuclear, there is some downside to the nuclear.
There's some risks, right?
How does the nuclear work?
Yeah.
So you just want a quick overview of how to think about nuclear energy?
Yeah.
The first thing to understand about nuclear energy is that it is primary use as a weapon.
That's the most important thing to know about that.
And that when we forget that that's the case, we miss something very essential about why people are so afraid of it.
There's a long history here, but basically the left in particular has always wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons, has constantly tried For a variety of reasons, I, and I think most other experts, think we never can get rid of either nuclear weapons nor nuclear energy, and that even if you hate it, as many people do, it is truly our burden and responsibility.
And I think you start with that, because once you understand that, because I think if you really just think that we can somehow get rid of it, and literally, there's been Scenarios where people thought, well, if you killed every nuclear scientist and engineer in the world, it still wouldn't do it because nuclear fission comes right out of physics.
It was done in the laboratory.
This is the whole point of the making of the atomic bomb, which is the greatest history ever written on nuclear energy.
It's guys in the lab splitting atoms, and as soon as they do that, they know that they're going to be able to make a weapon out of it, and they're going to be able to make energy, make heat out of it for power.
So once you understand that it is like fire, the gods gave us fire, I'm not saying, I'm not making a religious argument, I'm just saying we got fire somehow, and now we have this new fire, and it's like our burden, and once you understand that you have to take care of it, so I'm just going to leave all the people behind, I just want to get rid of it, because now we're moving on.
What do you do with it?
And I think what you try to do is you try to get the best out of it.
That's the first thing you would say, and we know how to get the best out of it in terms of energy.
It's super simple.
The same people should build the same kind of nuclear power plant, the same kind of reactors.
The more boring nuclear is, the safer and cheaper it is.
Full stop.
It needs to be boring because it's very technical.
It's very difficult.
There's so much pressure on it.
The regulations are so high.
They're too high.
They're exaggerated.
They regulate bike racks.
I mean, it's crazy.
But nonetheless, it is that way and it's probably not going to change for a long time.
You want to have boring nuclear.
So that means that you want to keep the plants you have.
You want to build more plants similar to the plants that you have.
And then really the society needs to just deal with its hang-ups about the technology, which include the fact that there are weapons in the world, that even if you think that they are one day going to go away, that day is nowhere near at hand.
We're farther from that than ever.
That mostly the catastrophic apocalyptic fears haven't emerged.
You know, there was even some after the Cold War, there was a bunch of people who were like, well, you know, it worked to have, you know, us civilized Americans and Russians at using deterrence, which is the fear of weapons, which is why we never went to war.
But what happens when those barbarians in India and Pakistan get the weapon?
Why they are going to blow each other up?
Well, no.
Do you think it's about the weapon?
Do you think that the thought is about the weapon?
Or is it the fact that sometimes there's leaks and we've seen those things happen in the communities and people are fearful of that?
There are two motivations behind anti-nuclear ideology, and I consider myself an expert on anti-nuclear ideology.
I've been trying to understand it in myself, because I changed my mind about it 10 years ago and then in others for that time.
There's two things.
The first is the fear of the weapon, which then expands itself and spreads itself through psychological displacement onto nuclear power plants.
And all these weird fears about leaking.
There is no, by the way, nuclear waste is a metal fuel rods that can't leak.
There's nothing to leak.
So the only leakage stuff you've heard about the water is related to the water that goes into the plants and comes out.
Or around an accident.
So then there's the fear of the accidents, but I even think that the fear of the accidents is related to fear of weapons.
In fact, when you hear people talk about the plants and nuclear weapons being used, when you hear people talk about, like, Fukushima, Chernobyl, they talk about them as though they were, like, weapons that were used, right?
As opposed to, like, no, the fuel melted, it's totally different.
In a weapon, the fuel explodes, you know, it's highly enriched.
But there is a separate thing, which is anti-nuclear, which is the love of renewables.
Small is beautiful.
We should all go back and live like we did in Elizabethan England.
Or, you know, you see this noble savage.
It's just the noble savage stuff.
You're happier when you're poorer.
If that's not practical and nuclear doesn't get used, do you think natural gas would be a source?
So we are in a long century of gas.
So I believe that there are concrete energy transitions.
We all used wood 250 years ago.
We all used wood and dung.
Okay, there was some coal being used for heating, but it was still a wood-powered society.
Industrial Revolution is a revolution from renewables to fossil fuels.
So now we use fossil fuels.
And you have progress within fossil fuels because you go from using coal to petroleum for trains and And ships and other things.
And you go from using coal to natural gas and electricity and cooking and heating.
That's all been going on for the last 50 years in most rich countries.
We're just going to be doing a lot of gas for the next century.
Like, no question about it.
Everybody thinks that.
I mean, except for the most fringe people, most people think we're going to just do a lot of gas.
So then you say, What matters as an environmentalist, as an environmental activist, as a climate activist, what matters is nuclear.
Because gas is going to be fine.
Gas is so cheap, it's just ridiculous, and there's so much of it.
It's everywhere in the world.
It means that very few countries are going to need to use coal.
Some still will, and they should have the right to if they're using wood.
But many countries are going to have access to gas.
And if it's piped in, it's really cheap.
But even LNG has gotten a lot cheaper.
That's the liquefied natural gas on the ships.
So the main event is nuclear.
And the reason nuclear is so hard is because it's got this intense, historical, spiritual, I would argue, baggage associated with it.
I do think of it as a spiritual problem in the sense that We are burdened with this incredible power.
It's so radical.
Sometimes people go, how do we solve climate change?
Solar panels, wind, nuclear, CCS, geoengineering.
And I'm like, that's just, you're just missing the fact that nuclear is this one thing in there that completely changes the relationship between countries.
North Korea is not, North Korea is a different country now than it was three years ago.
You can't, and it's never ever going to give up its weapon, not at least in any time scale that matters.
And that's wild.
In the history of human relations, that's wild that a little country like North Korea could have a weapon that would prevent it from being invaded by a powerful country.
So that means, you know, and look, you know, the best nuclear weapons experts in the world think that more countries are going to get the bomb.
I mean, I think there's a lot of people that think that Iran and Saudi Arabia will get the bomb.
You know, there's people that think that, you know, that You know, that we may see Japan and Korea get the bomb.
You know, France and Britain had the bomb.
We really didn't want them to get it.
I was working on this history of nuclear and, you know, the fascinating thing was the United States has always tried to stop other countries from getting the bomb.
And then once they get it, it's like, what are you going to do?
You know?
It's a funny technology because I don't think the success of it depends on the machines.
I think it depends on whether the society actually makes a change in consciousness, as hippy as that sounds.
Here's the tricky thing about the fear.
Nuclear is the most dangerous technology in the world.
Nuclear power plants are the safest way to make electricity.
That's the thing.
I can't simplify that any more than that.
Now, the industry, and as a pro-nuclear person, you say nuclear energy is the safest way to make electricity in the world.
That's true.
Nuclear weapons are the most dangerous things in the world.
That's also true.
It's hard for people to have those two things in their mind, especially since if you can make nuclear energy, you are developing capacity to be able to make a weapon.
So now the way that the pro-nuclear people in the nuclear industry has tried to deal with it is to say that there's no connection.
But that's not true.
And so you can't, like, So if you do more of it, you can be used for the wrong reasons, too.
Yeah, and we have systems in place to make sure India and Pakistan don't kill each other anymore.
And that's not because they had a meditation retreat together.
That's not because they found karmic harmony or something.
That was just straight up And so we have ways to keep ourselves safe, but the problem is the truth is we should be nervous about nuclear.
You should have some amount of fear, and you should take advantage of the great gifts that it brings, which is completely pollution-free power.
And if you have pollution-free power, your environmental footprint on everything else can go to almost zero.
I mean, you're truly 100% nuclear means you can have greenhouses that produce huge quantities of food on tiny amounts of land.
You can have endless fertilizer produced from the air.
You can have hydrogen gas that's pumped into our homes that's completely pollution free.
You can have your cars completely pollution free.
That's the paradox, is that you have a completely ecological society with nuclear, but it's one where there is still a little bit more anxiety because you're using a dangerous technology.
But that's just what the reality has been since 1945.
Now, going back to the power issues that the state is facing, do you see the state producing more capacity?
Do they have the plants?
Were they going to shut the plants?
So they decided not to shut these plants and produce more capacity?
Yeah, so I mean the status is that we've had more than two nuclear plants, but we have one nuclear plant that's operating.
It is scheduled to be closed in 2025.
I personally have been fighting to keep it open and my organization has for five years.
Most people think we're going to lose.
I think we're going to keep it open.
I can't tell you why or how exactly, but the blackouts and the supply shortage It gives very good reason for the governor to keep it open.
I mean, we were facing a shortage of like 4,400 megawatts.
Well, Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, the one that's operating still, is 2,200.
So why would you go to a situation where you didn't have 4,400 megawatts of nuclear and then remove another 2,000 megawatts?
It's crazy.
The other nuclear plant that was shut down in 2013, which is called San Onofre, which is near San Diego, Also is about 2,200 megawatts.
It should have kept operating.
I mean, the excuse they gave, and at work they suckered most of the newspaper journalists who don't know anything.
They told everybody that it was broken, that the nuclear plant had a problem.
This is how This is why I say I think fear of nuclear weapons just bleeds its way into everything.
So if you say to somebody, that nuclear plant is broken.
It's dangerous.
It's broken.
We should take it down.
As opposed to like, no, it had a steam generator, which is how they turn the water into steam to turn the turbine, that needed to be replaced.
It was bad.
So replace it.
It would have cost 800 million to replace it.
Rate payers and shareholders combined are going to spend $20 billion to shut it down.
It's shocking.
It's shocking.
Now, some of that money was decommissioning money that had been saved up over the years.
But the longer the plants operate, the more money it's putting into this decommissioning fund.
And nonetheless, if you're an environmentalist that supports nuclear or you're concerned about climate change, the point is that you want to add more nuclear reactors to the existing plants you have, not shut them down.
You know, so anyway, to your question of what will happen, I have no idea.
I mean, obviously, I'm trying to create the future.
I'm not trying to predict it.
Or at least, like I said, I don't think I can predict it, so I'll try to shape it.
But the state does need to get more power from somewhere.
So they're going to try to...
Do they have to allow more plants?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's going to come from nuclear and natural gas.
I mean, that's it.
I mean, there's no coal plants to get it from, and nobody wants coal, and there's no need for it.
So it's going to come from natural...
It's just...
See, this is the thing, you can add more solar right now, but the way in which solar, if you'll see the peak of it in the middle of the day, the solar comes and just peaks, and then it goes down starting when the sun is going down.
You can add more solar, but you can't change the sun.
The sun's still a problem at night from 5 to 10.
And that's just going to be met through nuclear and natural gas.
And you could be like, well, hopefully there'll be some wind somewhere on the grid.
Electricity is life or death.
If you don't have enough electricity to power air conditioners, people die.
Like, full stop.
If you have cascading failures, That's worse than the Congo, where at least your failures are predictable.
Cascading failures is uncontrollable blackouts.
Well, that can kill people.
Full stop.
This is not something where you're like, well, let's hope, let's pray to the solar and wind gods that there will be enough wind that day.
No.
The governor's not going to do that.
He wants to be a politician.
He wants to have a career.
That's the way you commit.
And by the way, after the blackouts in 2000, that was a big reason why they recalled the governor and why Arnold Schwarzenegger was ultimately elected.
It was because of these blackouts issues.
You're talking to me.
Because it's crazy the idea you'd have blackouts in our society.
Now, do you have any other remarks for our audience about this issue?
Yeah, let's keep the conversation going.
It's now I got my studio set up.
Excellent.
Excellent.
We'll have you back on.
Thank you so much for being on.
Have a great one.
Nice to meet you.
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