The American Spectator : You Stay Classy, Sacramento

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You Stay Classy, Sacramento

By William Yeatman & Jeremy Lott from the March 2010 issue

The centerpiece of California's energy policy is really the absence of energy.

In many countries, electric utilities struggle to keep up with demand, and often fail. The World Bank estimates that almost 1.5 billion men, women, and children lack reliable access to electricity. They want it, but they can't have it. In new-agey California, it's the other way around. The centerpiece of California's energy policy is really the absence of energy.

If that sounds crazy -- and it is! -- consider this impressive web of regulation that the government has spun: Elected officials enacted a moratorium on new nuclear power plants. New coal plants are illegal. Large scale hydropower is unthinkable for California's environmentally sensitive voters, because it harms fish. Natural gas plants emit half as much carbon as coal plants, but they are banned in much of California because they cannot get air quality permits for particulate emissions.

In 2006, the State Water Resources Control Board ruled that 19 coastal natural gas power plants were in violation of the Clean Water Act for using a process called "once-through cooling," by which ocean water is pumped into a power plant in order to condense steam into water to be reused. This can harm aquatic wildlife, so, at the behest of environmentalist groups, the SWRCB ordered coastal power plants to make costly refurbishments. According to the Energy Commission, "[I]t is likely that plant operators will choose retirement in the face of costly retrofits."

California doesn't have generation capacity to spare, so it will have to replace these plants, most of which are located in the southern part of the state. But the south California air basin is out of compliance with air quality standards for particulate emissions. It is well nigh impossible for utilities to obtain an air quality permit for a natural gas plant from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

Existing nuclear power is also under attack. In 2006, the legislature passed a bill requiring the Energy Commission to assess the nuclear plants' vulnerability to earthquakes. In fact, the legislation was designed to stack the deck against nuclear when these plants come up for relicensing. It is unlikely that California utilities can meet demand for electricity without these 21 power plants. Yet California's elected officials, in Sacramento and elsewhere, seem to think that conventional energy is unnecessary as long as the Golden State aggressively pursues conservation and renewable energy.

That's the theory anyway. However, the state's pro-green, anti-energy policies make it difficult even for the generation of alternative energy.

California is the country's leading dairy state, and the Energy Commission has identified methane emitted by cows as a major source of renewable energy. But it is impossible to make use of this "bio-methane" from California's dairy farms because air quality agencies refuse to permit a generating facility. The state's deserts are obvious locations for generating solar power. Yet California Senator Dianne Feinstein is trying to block the construction of solar power plants in the Mojave in order to protect a species of turtle.

California's mountain ranges are ideal for wind power. For many environmentalists, however, wind turbines are unacceptable, because the giant, rotating blades kill things that fly. The New York Times recently quoted a California wind power developer saying, "Regulators are concerned about birds; now they're concerned about bats..." Next they'll be concerned about taxpayers.

Just kidding on that last point. Renewable energies are far more expensive than burning fossil fuels but that's only a start. To meet the state's current renewable energy targets (20 percent of the state's electricity was supposed to come from renewable energy sources by this year), the Public Utilities Commission reports that California utilities would have to build seven transmission lines, at a cost of $12 billion, to move electricity generated by renewables in remote regions to the urban centers where the electricity is consumed.

However, there could be a catch. Transmission lines are almost impossible to build in California due to the onerous permitting process designed to mitigate environmental impact.

No problem! said Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. When it became clear that the state couldn't meet its 2010 goals, he simply moved the goalposts. He signed an executive order that increased the unworkable renewable energy targets and postponed them -- by a decade.

California's story should be a cautionary tale of how not to manage energy policy. Instead, it is touted by politicians and all too often swallowed hook, line, and sinker by gullible journalists.

There is something like a consensus among economists that "greening" the energy industry harms economic growth. But Schwarzenegger claims California "can grow the economy and simultaneously protect the environment" and Sen. Barbara Boxer maintains that California's energy policies have boosted employment by creating "green jobs."

Los Angeles congressman and chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee Henry Waxman ushered major climate change legislation through the House of Representatives last year. He based the renewable energy parts of the bill on the flawed model of his own state.

Barack Obama bragged in an Earth Day speech last year that the average Californian uses 50 percent less energy than the average American because the state government "put in some good policy early on that assured that they weren't wasting energy."

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About the Author

William Yeatman is an energy policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

About the Author

Jeremy Lott is editor of RealClearBooks.com and RealClearReligion.org and associate editor of RealClearScience.com.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (26) | Leave a comment

Bram| 3.11.10 @ 9:48AM

I used 50% less energy when I lived near the beach in Southern CA. It never got hot or cold!

basur| 10.27.10 @ 6:42AM

I'm thinking that the pols in Sacramento are counting on an inexhaustible supply of hot air to power their energy future.

Tim| 3.11.10 @ 11:05AM

Can't wait for the next Enron to bend them over and rape them.

Matt Morehouse| 3.11.10 @ 11:05AM

I have a remote ranch in N.W. California. Getting permission to build a half mile of private gravel road across my private land required three years of harassment by the various state agencies, almost $7,000 in legal fees and paperwork totaling literally hundreds of pages.

I was planning on building a Nuclear power plant but now I'm not sure...

dissent555| 3.11.10 @ 11:39AM

I'm thinking that the pols in Sacramento are counting on an inexhaustible supply of hot air to power their energy future.

Now why shouldn't we believe them? Sounds like they have plenty.

Marc Jeric| 3.11.10 @ 11:54AM

I am a retired engineer who spent most of my career designing power plants - coal-fired, oil & gas-fired, nuclear, geothermal, solar. California is sentenced to a dismal death under the club of its eco-nazis. San Francisco will end up relying for its winter heat on masturbatory efforts of its population.

L. Ross| 3.11.10 @ 12:32PM

Nice.

C.J. Taylor| 3.11.10 @ 1:51PM

Just love pithy and witty!
Right On!!!

Blackwatch| 3.11.10 @ 1:54PM

I live 35 miles outside Sacramento for a reason--its not classy. It's a pit.

If we could just split this state in three pieces and let the libtards "own" their sh*t for a change. I would vote for that!

John II| 3.11.10 @ 4:54PM

The great majority of busybodies who run the state of California belong to a relatively small class of degenerates whose tyrannous eco-frenzies make up a kind of substitute for morality. Their enthusiasms exist in a realm beyond rational discourse; you can't argue with the creeps because, as Swift pointed out, you can't reason a man out of a position he never reasoned himself into.

Their personal lives are a staggering disaster: broken marriages, abandoned children, casual abortion, serial "partners" in every conceivable "relationship" outside of the normal, colossal neuroses, minutely cultivated nihilism and narcissism, icy hostility to traditional religion and to the human species at large. The consequent vacuum in their hearts is then stuffed with their prim green politics as a cheap substitute for interior moral order.

We are witnessing a civilizational crisis precipitated and driven by a toxic mixture of fanatic immoralists and acquiescent opportunists. California's at the cutting edge, all right, and decent people are leaving the state at the rate of about 3,500 per day. It remains to be seen how much longer such people will have someplace else to go.

Matt Morehouse| 3.12.10 @ 10:41AM

Good and productive citizens are leaving only to be replaced by illegals from "South of the Border Down Mexico Way"

PCP Smoker| 3.11.10 @ 6:22PM

But don't you get that green regulations create jobs. Millions and millions of "high- tech, sustainable" jobs.
Who cares? Let them starve to death or end up on the welfare rolls. This is the hard school of knocks for those fools, and school is in session.

sfsean| 3.11.10 @ 7:11PM

I live in the East Bay. If I can hang on for 9 years, I can retire out of state. There is no way I will stay in California any longer than I have to. What an armpit this State has become. I am thinking about moving to another country because I believe that what is happening to California now, will happen to the rest of the country. All thanks to our incompetent and corrupt politicians.

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Big Elk| 3.12.10 @ 11:58PM

Californians can thank Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown and John Burton's Frisco political machine, and crooked county registars of voters (they count the votes in California and they are dishonest as hell!) for the feces-laden hole California has become. And now, crooked Jerry Brown is running for the governorship again. For those who don't know or can't remember; Jerry Brown was the worst governor of the 20th century, aster his crime boss father, the criminal Pat Brown. Other states and the Federal government should not bail out California. As a Californian, I say, let California go bankrupt!

Big Elk| 3.13.10 @ 12:02AM

As for Feinstein, she and her husband Richard Blum have made millions of dollars for Blum's companies off of the taxpayer, Feinstgein is a crook, and the reason she doesn't want solar energy in the deser is because either she and Blum arewn't going to make any money off of the deal, or they aren't going to make enough. Feinstein and Blum belong in jail!

Mike H| 3.17.10 @ 11:28PM

Interesting. I worked on an upgrade to Mirant's Potrero plant about 10 years ago and we ran into a similar issue. An old coal fired unit was going to be converted to a combined cycle unit. Although the plant already had a permit for their once through cooling, the new project was essentially litigated to death over water use issues.

The entire facility, including its peaker units is scheduled to be closed in a couple of years. The lost generation will be made for via a new transmission project. What I find deliciously ironic is that the existing plant is one of the few black start units in the area, and considering the Bay Area’s vulnerability to seismic events, even a modest earthquake could sever the Bay Area’s power supply and leave them in the dark for weeks … even months.

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andy k| 4.15.10 @ 6:41PM

Interesting. I worked on an upgrade to Mirant's Potrero plant about 10 years ago and we ran into a similar issue. An old coal fired unit was going to be converted to a combined cycle unit. Although the plant already had a permit for their once through cooling, free WoW cards the new project was essentially litigated to death over water use issues.

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