 The CalISO has started rotating power outages. Governor Newsom today addressed the recent rolling blackout. We failed to predict and plan. Energy conservation is what the California Independent System Operator wants to see. The overall picture is that the California grid ran out of energy. Critics say California's rolling blackouts this summer were caused by decades of costly and poorly planned decisions to replace coal, nuclear and gas-powered plants with solar and wind. Speaks to the delusion of California policymakers, they really convinced themselves that they could manage all of this increased demand on renewables, which are fundamentally unreliable. Michael Schellenberger is the president of Environmental Progress, which advocates for greater reliance on nuclear power as a way to reduce CO2 emissions and provide reliable energy. California banned the construction of new nuclear reactors in 1976 and has been incentivizing companies to close older plants by piling on burdensome regulations ever since. Schellenberger says this loss has made California more susceptible to blackouts. We were looking at about a 4,000 megawatt shortfall. The two nuclear plants, the one that shut down, the one they want to shut down, total 4,400 megawatts. So it would have just provided the energy that we didn't have. The other thing is that the nuclear plant, unlike the solar farms or the wind, is reliable. Like 92% of the year, the only times you can't have it is when you're adding new fuel to the plant. Policymakers also started closing down natural gas plants because they produced more CO2 emissions than wind and solar, ignoring warnings that doing so would lead to shortages. And Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed an executive order asking the state legislature to ban fracking for oil and gas. But the problem with wind and solar is that they only provide consistent energy under optimal weather conditions. And they just shut down too many of them. There's a lot of fancy dancing to explain how it wasn't a result of renewables, but it was fundamentally that the sun goes down at the exact moment that peak demand starts to climb. But a major operator of California's grid says that it wasn't renewables like wind and solar that caused the blackouts, but a lack of easily accessible backup energy. Renewables have not caused this issue. This is a resource issue, not a renewable issue. Some defenders of renewable energy even say that fossil fuels are the real culprit, and that critics like Schellenberger are distorting the facts in service of their preconceived biases. The August blackout they point out was directly caused by the failure of a natural gas generator. Those fossil fuel technologies have trouble performing in the heat. In fact, solar generation doesn't have trouble performing in the heat. Energy analyst Amol Fadke is the co-author of UC Berkeley's 2035 report, which argues that America should transition to 90% carbon-free energy generation in the next 15 years. But the natural gas generator that failed was a backup system, which flipped on only because the state's energy capacity failed as Californians blasted their air conditioners to deal with a heat wave as the sun went down and the wind slowed. Those had to come online because they are the backup for the renewables that... No, those were kind of planned generation. The way you plan the power system is that you know the sun is going to set. Fadke says a failure to adequately plan backup power was the real problem. And in fact, I would argue that having a lot more renewable energy will make the... and storage will make the grid even more robust. As California has increased its reliance on renewable energy, it has also become increasingly reliant on energy imported from neighboring states. They're counting on their neighbors too much. And those neighbors need their power plants because they're hot too. Engineer and investor Mark Mills is a faculty fellow at Northwestern University and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He says that California's push to replace traditional power plants with renewables has created a shortage of what's known as dispatchable capacity or generators that can be flipped on when there's a spike in demand. And what would happen in a normal grid is another gas turbine would fire up and there'd be no blackout. What happened in the first blackouts is that they didn't have dispatchable capacity. And worse than that, there was a wind wall. So it's simultaneous to the gas turbine not coming online. And then you have to force blackouts to keep the rest of the grid lit. None of that would have happened if you were using conventional capacity. And the more wind you add, the less dispatchable you have, the more likely you'll have those events occur because you'll have fewer and fewer dispatchable assets. Just simple logic. Fadkey says the solution is for California to build even more solar power plants and invest more money in giant batteries that can store power from the wind and sun during off hours. In the long run, if you have enough batteries to transfer that solar energy during the day into the evening hours, you are good. And the good news is that the cost of those batteries has dropped by 90% since 2010. The constant babbling about batteries is an embarrassing failure to understand arithmetic. Mills has calculated that storing a barrel of oil's worth of energy in a battery costs at least a hundred times as much and that it would take about a thousand years for the world's largest battery factory to produce enough to store two days' worth of America's energy needs. Batteries are never going to get cheaper to store energy than storing oil in a barrel until we develop a room temperature superconductor which doesn't exist, could exist in theory, and could become cheap in theory sometime. If that ever happens, we could store electricity as cheap as oil in a barrel, changes the world. Mills also points out that the intensive mining required to produce batteries has a major environmental cost. Wind and solar are very diffuse energy sources so the amount of land required is order magnitude 10 to 30 times more than for hydrocarbons. Because you're diffuse energy sources, you have to build lots of machines. And when you build lots of machines, you have to mine more stuff. America doesn't like mines anymore, so we depend on mines as most people by now know. Cobalt, half of its mine in Democratic Republic, Congo, Chinese mine that rare earths, we don't anymore. The biggest nickel mines in the world are in the Arctic, Russia. Australia does a lot of the mining for the world. We can mine more, but the increase in mining that the green energy path will require will be the biggest increase in mineral extraction the world has ever seen. Instead of producing our own oil and gas and energy, which is 80% of our energy, we will import energy minerals from somebody else. That will increase imports, increase strategic dependencies, increase deficits. You may think that's fine, but it's a real cost that no one's counting. It's dishonest. But the 2035 report estimates the cost of not quickly pivoting to renewables at $1.2 trillion in health and environmental damages and 85,000 premature deaths by 2050. It recommends a combination of emission standards, government subsidies, and tax incentives to ramp up solar, wind, and battery production as quickly as possible. Why not just say we're going to set a standard and then however you get there, figure that out rather than tipping the scale towards solar and wind? Yeah, I think that's the first best option. I would say that I think the simplest option, but which is not politically acceptable, is tax the polluters. I mean, you have to pay your fair share of what damage you do. But Schellenberger says that nuclear would provide the clean and abundant energy that both sides want. If only California and other states would stop creating incentives for them to close down and allow new ones to open up. Just keeping the nuclear plants online would have kept prices down significantly. If California had a vision of being like France, 75% nuclear, getting our cooking and heating from electricity, well that could be a very good deal for both consumers and the natural environment, but nobody's talking about that. And Mill says that ironically, the technological innovations that would be required to fulfill the environmentalist's dreams rely on continuing to have abundant energy right now. If you want to go from appellers to jet engines, if you want to go from combustion to nuclear fission, if you want those kind of phenomenology changes, if you want to store electricity as cheap as we store oil, you need a different whole new solution. We always have new discoveries, but they don't come from directed development, where a government says, make that wind turbine better, build me more wind turbines. To get the kinds of shifts that people are talking about in society, to get something as profound as discovering of nuclear fission, takes discoveries in basic science. So you produce energy at the least possible cost to have as much profit to invest in basic science and invest in adaptation and resilience. There's a respectable chance a lot of America will follow in California's path. I think that's the path we're on. This is what their plan is. So if you are concerned about the blackouts, the six-fold increase in electricity prices, the bad management of our electrical grid that causes fires in places where we should have less fires, not more, then, yeah, you should be concerned about what's happening in California and not want it to be imposed on the rest of the U.S.