Following up on MCE - Misleading Customers Everywhere, recent rolling blackouts are a sign of more to come, and we’ve done it to ourselves.
California is not using more energy than before (in 2006), when we did not have blackouts. So, what’s the difference today? All of the new intermittent renewable generation — driven by progressive politics rather than sound engineering and physics — is failing to provide stable voltage across our electric grid.
When you have low voltage “over there” it’s like a hole or a drain that robs voltage from "over here.” Low voltage is literally like a hole in the bathtub through which energy races down the drain. That’s akin to our blackout or brownout today.
Add to this California’s loss of stable base load generation (gas-fired…. and in 2025 Diablo Canyon full decommissioning) that provides reliable generation, and you should be concerned where we’ll end up.
PG&E and Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric (investor-owned utilities (IOUs)) are migrating away from generation of electric power to the delivery of energy produced by others over IOUs’ wires. “Others” would be Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs) renewable energy programs, like MCE.
But most "renewables" are not base load — they are not “reliable” — causing intermittent voltage is all over the place.
Load serving entities such as Marin Clean Energy (MCE) and the IOUs are responsible for constructing new energy generating resources to serve their “generation” customer loads.
- PG&E is good to go — now in over-supply as its customer load shrinks in direct proportion to CCAs’ growth as consumers are switched (slammed) into CCAs.
- Two years ago the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) sounded the alarm that CCAs did not have the requisite capital to construct needed new energy resources, and would leave California with major problems. CPUC’s President authored an Op-Ed in the Sacramento Bee https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article210375164.html.
Under-capitalized
CCAs are now in the drivers’ seat. It is time for your town or city
that is a governing member of MCE (or other CCA) to put on its big boy
pants — this is what towns and cities wanted when they eagerly signed up
for CCA and pushed the programs onto consumers with simplified low-cost no-problem representations of getting into the electricity business... a business which none of them are qualified to manage.
Things are going to get very dangerous and expensive with more blackouts. Unfortunately, city council members cannot balance their checkbooks; it is beyond comprehensible to believe they can run an electric company in emergency conditions.
In the meantime, you can expect prices are going up and reliability is going down.