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Guest Post: The Dawn Of The Great California Energy Crash
Submitted by PeakProsperity contributing editor Gregor Macdonald
The Dawn Of The Great California Energy Crash
California, which imports over 25% of its electricity from out of state, is in no position to lose half (!) of its entire nuclear power capacity. But that’s exactly what happened earlier this year, when the San Onofre plant in north San Diego County unexpectedly went offline. The loss only worsens the broad energy deficit that has made California the most dependent state in the country on expensive, out-of-state power.
Its two nuclear plants -- San Onofre in the south and Diablo Canyon on the central coast -- together have provided more than 15% of the electricity supply that California generates for itself, before imports. But now there is the prospect that San Onofre will never reopen.
Will California now find that it must import as much as 30% of its power?
The problem of California’s energy dependency has been decades in the making. And it’s not just its electrical power balance that presents an ongoing challenge. California’s oil production peaked in 1985. And despite ongoing gains in energy efficiency via admirably wise regulation, the state’s population and aggregate energy consumption has completely overrun supply.
Some will say, however, that California doesn’t need to concern itself with domestic energy production. As an innovation economy, in the manner of Japan or South Korea, many have said California can simply import greater and greater quantities of energy in exchange for its intellectual capital and the services and products it provides to the world. But the problem with such a notion is that it extrapolates the trend too far.
Only a century ago, California was an emerging giant of oil and gas production, building much of its wealth from natural resource extraction. It was inevitable that this would change over time. However, given the state’s high priced electricity, its wrongly devised transportation system (which is heavily exposed to oil prices), and its deep financial distress, the nation’s largest economy is having to exchange greater amounts of capital to keep itself running.
Indeed, the latest data shows that California energy production from all sources -- oil and gas, nuclear, hydro, and renewables -- has just hit new, 50-year lows:
California’s Great Energy Crash: State Energy Supply at Fifty-Year Lows
Since 1985 (the year that state oil production peaked above one million barrels a day), the state of California has seen its portfolio of energy production steadily decline, from an all- time high above 3,600 trillion BTU (British Thermal Units) to 2,500 trillion BTU (latest available data is through 2010). Because the contribution from both nuclear and renewables during that period has been either small or simply flat, the steady decay of California’s oil and natural gas production has sent the state’s energy production to 50-year lows.
However, during those five decades from 1960 to 2010, California’s population more than doubled, from nearly 16 million to nearly 38 million people.
Additionally, California built out its freeway system and expanded greatly into counties such as Riverside and San Bernardino. Indeed, in San Bernardino County, population quadrupled from 1960 to 2010, from five hundred thousand to over two million, with the attendant homes, public infrastructure, state highways, and freeways.
This great expansion of California’s residential and industrial topography was a tremendous value proposition back when energy, especially oil, was cheap. But now we are in a new pricing era for oil. Equally, California must also pay some of the highest electricity rates in the country. In counterpoint to the dreams of energy conservation, while California’s population merely doubled, its electricity demand rose nearly fivefold, from 57 million KWh in 1960 to 258 million KWh in 2010.
Essentially, California, like the rest of the country, has built a very expensive system of transport, which is now aging along with its powergrid.
Surely in the forty years that followed 1960, the prospect that California would have to import greater quantities of fossil fuels and electricity was no cause for alarm. However, the capital that is now required each year to maintain its aging highway system and purchase out-of-state oil and electricity, is mounting. While it’s true that California’s GDP is mighty and ranks as the 8th largest in the world, it’s also true that even smaller US states have seen their energy production not fall, but rather advance, in the era of higher-priced energy. Surprisingly, California’s total energy production is now lower than Pennsylvania’s, which is an intriguing contrast given that the Keystone State figures so prominently in the history of early oil and coal production.
Who will produce all the energy that California will need to buy in the future?
Golden State Hit by Nuclear Power's Inherent Complexity
In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, a number of countries and communities are reassessing the risk and the cost of nuclear power. Overall, however, it is the aggregate complexity of nuclear power that is driving the global stagnation and now the decline of this particular source of energy.
The complexity of nuclear power -- its enormous expense, its dependence on government financing, its long construction timeline, and its perceived and actual risk -- means that bringing new plants online is ploddingly slow and aging plants are increasingly likely to see their licenses rejected for renewal. From a recent LA Times article, California energy officials plan for life without San Onofre:
California energy officials are beginning to plan for the possibility of a long-range future without the San Onofre nuclear power plant. The plant's unexpected, nearly five-month outage has had officials scrambling to replace its power this summer and has become a wild card in already complicated discussions about the state's energy future. That long-range planning process already involves dealing with the possible repercussions of climate change, a mandate to boost the state's use of renewable sources to 33% of the energy supply by 2020 and another mandate to phase out a process known as once-through cooling, which uses ocean water to cool coastal power plants, that will probably take some other plants out of service. "Some of the weaknesses we have in the infrastructure [of Southern California] are laid bare by San Onofre," said Steve Berberich, chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that oversees most of the state's energy grid... Before the current shutdown at the plant, officials had planned only for a scenario in which one of the reactors would be off line. No one had anticipated a complete shutdown. The plant's 2,200 megawatts of power provide electricity to about 1.4 million homes, but the facility also provides voltage support to the transmission system that allows power to be imported from elsewhere to the region San Onofre serves, particularly San Diego.
San Onofre’s processing ability has been damaged by faulty computer modeling, which caused excessive and accelerated wear in its steam generator tubes. The cost and timeframe for a solution may be so great that the return on such an investment may not be worth it. But again, note the complexity involved here, which runs the spectrum from computer programming that guides the reactors' operation to the critical role that this southern California power source plays in the grid. In powergrids, nuclear power plants play an infrastructural role but are also critically dependent on receiving power from elsewhere in the grid. As Japan discovered, its own power plant structurally survived the tsunami but failed when it lost external power.
In 2010, the year for which the latest data is available, California consumed 258,531 million KWh (kilowatt hours). 26% of that total was imported mostly from other US states (54,406 million KWh) and a small amount came from Mexico. California’s two nuclear plants provided 32,200 million KWh, about 12% of the total power that the state consumes from all sources.
Roughly speaking (because supply, demand, and capacity fluctuate from year to year), the loss of San Onofre will increase California’s potential dependency on out of state power by at least another 5%. This will indeed push out-of-state power dependency to 30%.
California’s Soaring Oil Dependency
California, like Texas, has been a giant in the history of US oil production. But after reaching a peak rate of production in 1985-86 at around 1.1 million barrels per day, California now produces half that amount, at 540 thousand barrels per day.
Just as in other post-peak producing regions of the world, such as Mexico and the North Sea, there is a constant flow of hope and theorizing that once again California could increase its oil production. While it’s true that opening offshore blocks to development could eventually stabilize and possibly raise the state’s aggregate production, it is highly unlikely that onshore production can now be moved higher. The reason is that best technology practices are already well-deployed in California's onshore production -- where old, original fields continue to produce, but at much lower rates.
More important is that California now has over 35 million registered vehicles, nearly matching its population. That makes California automobile rich but public-transit poor, as the state remains highly leveraged to gasoline.
Indeed, the post-war buildout of California followed the low-density, urban-sprawl model that was replicated throughout the nation after 1950. Accordingly, cities like Los Angeles are having to make a Herculean effort to resurrect a light rail system (built on the grid of its historic trolley network, once the largest in the world).
But 60 years of automobile-driven development will not be undone easily. The state is already spending a disproportionate amount of capital each year just to maintain the existing highway system (an issue we will explore in Part II of this article). And despite that ongoing investment, Californians drive on roads with some of the poorest conditions in the country.
Let's take a look at the history of California's oil production against its historical consumption of gasoline:
The spread between the quantity of oil produced in California and the quantity of gasoline consumed started to blow out in the mid 1980s, when gasoline consumption rose above oil production as measured in BTUs. Many believed this to be sustainable. But as the rest of the country would discover, a price revolution in oil would eventually hurt the economy very badly -- and, consequently, oil consumption. In BTU terms, the difference between production of oil and consumption of gasoline reached its widest in 2006-2007, when annual consumption was running above 1,900 trillion BTUs and oil production at 1,250 trillion BTUs.
Now consumption, like production, is falling. Will consumption follow production downward, relentlessly?
The prospect that petrol consumption has peaked in California, along with the rest of the United States, is exciting if one is viewing such a transition through the lens of efficiency, sustainability, and post-industrialism. However, the dream of a non-industrial economy, like all good ideas, reaches a terminus when we consider that a majority of human services and products are still delivered and produced through physical processes. The State of California does not deliver state transportation, health care, education, police and fire protection, and public works digitally through the Internet. Instead, energy, delivered through tangible infrastructure, is required to run the Golden State.
In Part II: California: The Bellwether for the Rest of America, we take a look at the severely-pressured state budget of California, as well as other measurements of its economy indicating that the direction of its energy balance is entering dire territory. What exactly is the cost of California's energy consumption? And what does it mean, as companies like Facebook build data centers outside the country to access external sources of electricity, that California cities such as Stockton declare bankruptcy?
There is no miracle solution for California. Even if we assume that the country continues to enjoy cheap natural gas prices, the cost of imported electricity from NG-fired power generation will not fall, because the cost of electricity transmission will continue to rise as the grid ages and requires new investment. Eventually the price level of higher energy and lower quality public services will also catch up even to higher wage employees, because a hollowing-out effect is going to pare down the number of service providers -- teachers, merchants, construction workers, and even health care professionals and lawyers.
Such woes, however, are not unique in any way to California. They are shared by most US states right now; California is simply further down the timeline at this point. The key question here is what are the steps Californians (and the rest of us) should be taking?
Click here to access Part II of this report (free executive summary; paid enrollment required for full access).
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Here's your word for the day:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fungible?s=t
Those that propose economies based on solar and wind power never disclose that they could only support 1% of the existing world's population.
So I say, let the liberal loonies be the first to volunteer for termination.
hmmmm myabe Governor Moonbeam can recycle some free fukushima melt water when it washes up on shore.
Outages, and blackouts bitchez !
Just extend that $65 Billion MonoRail to Texas (for a total cost of $2 Trillion in taxpayer money).
ENRON siblings welcome you and will sell you surfers plenty.
yep, I worked at a co-gen wood chip burning power plant in Cali. in the early '90's and we were shutdown and ideled due to a dispute with PG&E.
I'm heading out of Cali. tomorrow, for good.
The recent elections in California continue to increase the domination of the Democrat Party, a trend that gives the primary factions that support Democrats much more leverage than almost any other U.S. state. Environmentalists are one of these key factions and they have been given legislation and regulations far beyond what they’ve been able to achieve in most other states. (Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was elected because of California’s urban populations, namely people who were familiar with his name recognition and his star status and had little knowledge of his policies – in the end he finished out his last term with Republicans extremely dissatisfied with his positions and Democrats much happier. In short, he turned out to be an environmentalist’s dream.)
Part of this huge support for Democrats in California comes from city dwellers, non-private-industry voters such as public unions and low-information voters who have no idea how energy is made and how critical it is for the state economy.
Max Schulz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and director of its Center for Energy Policy and the Environment in 2008 wrote of “California’s Potemkin Environmentalism” in Cilty Journal. Here are excerpts:
California’s environmental policies have made it heavily dependent on other states for power; generated some of the highest, business-crippling energy costs in the country; and left it vulnerable to periodic electricity shortages. Its economic growth has occurred not because of, but despite, those policies, which would be disastrous if extended to the rest of the country. …
Republican state senator Tom McClintock underscored the real problem… in a speech to a Silicon Valley group in 2001. “From 1979 to 1999, generating capacity of over 45,000 megawatts was proposed to the [California Energy] Commission,” he said. “Only 4,500 megawatts was approved. Nuclear power plants were forbidden, and Rancho Seco and San Onofre Unit One,” another nuclear reactor, “were shut down prematurely. . . . For 27 years, this state has actively discouraged the construction of new power plants, and the day finally arrived when we ran out of power.” …
A dirty secret about California’s energy economy is that it imports lots of energy from neighboring states to make up for the shortfall caused by having too few power plants. Up to 20 percent of the state’s power comes from coal-burning plants in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Montana, and another significant portion comes from large-scale hydropower in Oregon, Washington State, and the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. “California practices a sort of energy colonialism,” says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.–area investment group. “They rely on western states to supply them with power generation they are unwilling to build for themselves”—and leave those states to deal with the resulting pollution. …
Despite California’s desperate need for more power, opposition to energy projects remains nearly as prevalent today as at any time during the previous three decades. State law explicitly prohibits the construction of new nuclear plants… A de facto moratorium on conventional coal-fired power plants (which generate half of America’s electricity) has been in place for decades in California; none exists anywhere in the state. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense are working to get dams torn down, even though large-scale hydropower supplies nearly one-fifth of Californians’ electricity. …
California’s economic prosperity has relied on the fact that other states have built power plants and established sensible regulatory regimes that don’t force businesses to flee. The power plants scattered throughout the western United States, as well as the factories in the American Midwest and South, have consistently saved California from the folly of its own anti-energy agenda.”
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_californias_environmentalism.html
Seems like a good policy. No one can beat the cost of hydro and coal is pretty cheap. They are getting the power without the pollution. Their problem is manipulation of markets like Enron traders used to do to drive up the costs.
No, it actually hasn't been good policy for California; there's been good upside but the downside is tipping the balance. California policy makers remind me of the blind self-righteousness of environmentalists who drive a hybrid while criticizing me for owning a Porsche. Then, when a replacement is needed for their Made in China electric car batteries after three years, their discarded batteries are sent back overseas to be buried and pollute Chinese soil. Again, from Max Schulz in 2008 regarding California:
The state has some of the highest energy prices in the country—nearly twice the national average, a 2002 Milken Institute study found—largely because of regulations and government mandates to use expensive renewable sources of power. As a result, heavy manufacturing and other energy-intensive industries have been fleeing the Golden State in droves for lower-cost locales. Twenty years ago or so, you could count eight automobile factories in California; today, there’s just one, and it’s the same story with other industries, from chemicals to aerospace. Yet Californians still enjoy the fruits of those manufacturing industries—driving cars built in the Midwest and the South, importing chemicals and resins and paints and plastics produced elsewhere, and flying on jumbo jets manufactured in places like Everett, Washington. California can pretend to have controlled energy consumption, but it has just displaced it.
It isn’t just the high price of power that’s compelling California businesses to shift operations to other regions. The state’s unreliable power grid has its economic costs, too. A 2003 U.S. Department of Energy report noted that “a recent rolling blackout in the greater San Francisco Bay area caused an estimated $75 million in losses in the Silicon Valley.” A 20-minute outage at a Hewlett-Packard circuit-fabrication plant, the report observed, “would result in a day’s production loss at a cost of $30 million.” As Jack Gerard, then-president of the National Mining Association, put it in a 2001 speech: “Events are proving that the most expensive kilowatt is the one that’s not there when needed.”
The shortages are starting to rattle some Silicon Valley heavyweights. Intel chief executive Craig Barrett, for instance, vowed in 2001 not to build a chip-making facility in California until power supplies became more reliable. This October, Intel opened a $3 billion factory near Phoenix for mass production of its new 45-nanometer microprocessors. Google, meanwhile, has chosen to build the massive server farms that will fuel its expansion anywhere but in California. The most celebrated is an enormous installation along the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon, a facility that will house tens of thousands of computers, requiring mind-boggling amounts of power. A 1.8-gigawatt hydroelectric power plant will offer Google power for a small fraction of what it would cost in the Golden State. The irony is that the Silicon Valley companies that have become the face of California’s twenty-first-century economy are increasingly building the facilities that will give them their future value in other states.
Yes, that makes sense for Google because hydro is the cheapest power by far. You can't put hydroelectric power plants where there are no suitable sites.
California had pretty low power prices before they deregulated electricity.
The solution in CA is more investment in wind, solar panels, and mirror-collected stirling systems in the Desert. There's also the potential of wave power.
The time is soon coming for TPTB to get off their asses and commit to a form or energy that is neither dinosaur goo or anything that glows in the dark. Those days are fast coming to an end, and there are now plenty of other sources of energy.
San Onofre's problems with the tubes was the idiots were pumping 4 times the water volume than the tubes were designed for. Almost as bad as the metric conversion problem that killed the Mars probe a few years back. Details....details, they're so pesky!
Does anyone really care? I don't. California can go to hell. Actually we should wall off the state (instead of Mexico) so they can't get out. They think there is a free lunch and they can mooch off someone else. GO FUCK YOURSELVES, CALIFORNIANS.
Brilliant.
Let's also get rid of Mississippi, Alabama, Iowa, Florida, Michigan, Colorado, New York, Texas, North Dakota and 40 others that I won't bore anybody with right now.
Jesus Christ it's so fucking easy to spew virtual vitriol at a bunch of strangers who have absolutely nothing in common other than a single demographic.
And that's what make ZH such a special place. Like a virtual special bus.
Too cheap to metre ey? Let's just hope the sun doesnt hit us in the face any time soon because there might be a slight diesel-shortage. And uncooled nukes makes the creatures of earth unhappy campers in a hurry.
Power those suckers up with proper repair and lets get this show on the road.
Well we just need more Mexicans and all of our problems will be solved, forever.
That's what the media and TPTB tell me, so it must be true.
Sure glad I painted our roofs with white rubberized paint, have a swamp cooler, installed radiant barrier, and self-installed a solar system. Our June bill was 10 bucks. looking around for used batteries and need to research a solaheart or similar water heater. Anyone saying solar doesn't pay, should stop talking from their poop holes.
We haven't always had a grid or AC... that's what shady porches, lemonaid, and ceiling fans were for. People are too fucking soft. And everyone should learn to like the heat in summer and cool air in winter. Why do we FIGHT the seasons so much?!?!? I go to homes that are warmer in winter and cooler in summer than when in the PROPER season...
Just curious, what latitude/state are you in?
I'm in s/e PA and it's really hard to get the solar cost benefit to work.
Thanx!
About 38 degrees in the Sierra Foothills. Location doesn't matter as much as most people think. Along with the orientation of panels. I've seen bell-curves of optimal panels vs. ones facing west, and the only difference exept for a tiny bit of 'peak' was the graph was shifted right (later in the day). Look at Germany. I think a places like Carmel (fog) or Santa Barbara (June-gloom) might be worse off than somebody having a northern lat.
Electricity usage around here is mostly AC. A family from Boise in a month, had a $2400 monthly bill!! Granted there was a pool, but the wife wasn't ready to put up with a hot McMansion! Whoops. Most ACs stay on ALL DAY. Mine will cycle on and off, even when it's 101 outside. Also, it doesn't come on until 2-3pm.
"First, is effeciency." Get yourself an Energy Detective and WattsUp and address phantom loads. I know people in Seattle and Oregon with PV and they're quite happy. First thing is to just be aware. It's quite simple. Things like cooking with the hood fan blowing (so you don't have a lit FIRE inside the house you're trying to cool).
I wish I had more links. Tried one from the Zero Energy Home Project of Florida State and it's asking for a username now. Will take another look sometime. Uncle Google has many answers. (seen Home Power Magazine?) cheers
Check these out:
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/1961-1990/redbook/atlas/
And this is fun: http://www.csi-epbb.com/default.aspx
Gentle climates make people stupid.
Sure glad I built my house in a White Oak Forest. Sun never hits my roof in the summer and in Winter,
I get full sun. Its sheer magic. All my sunblockers go on the garden in the fall. And as long as I don't cook inside during the summer, no AC needed.
I'm in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Bread Basket of the Confederacy...
Hulk, you are my personal environmental hero of the day!
The intelligent use of deciduous trees is way too clever for the average "bulldoze this fucker flat" construction crews that have built nearly all Amercan homes for the past 50 year or so.
I have large oaks in front of my south facing windows. Same deal. I'm just saying, with a little thought, A LOT can be done. You do use electricity, no? Was your bill less than 10 dollars? Would love to use a micro hydro set up but I don't have running water. Make the best of WHERE you live. You are, that's good. A nice wood-stove is on the GOOD list for sure.
Some jerk-fuck responded that mild climates breed stupid people. I'm surrounded by stupid people because my house is the execption around these parts. Is 115 degrees in summer, MILD?!?!? Is SNOW in winter fucking MILD?!?! I don't think so, so STFU. I see the worst of both.
80% + of all solar energy was subsidized by the European taxpayer. How’s EU financial situation today?
The next chapter will focus on new clean coal energy. Yes, you guess it.. those new penny pinching, ‘I can’t remember how to fill my electric hybrid car with gas’ are going to get bitch slapped with the clean coal energy tax. Each time they charge up the US taxpayer subsidized SAVE THE EARTH CLOWNCAR [which may burst into flames] during your garage charging..
The peeps will begin to find out they are repaying the State Capitalism crew back the money they thought fell from the ass of Messiah’s Unicorn automotive rebate team.
Just research the diesel car/truck market back 15+ years ago. Same playbook. Ask someone in the transportation industry.
"Who will produce all the energy that California will need to buy in the future?"
Maybe delusional Bernanke can print some more paper money & they can burn that?
Past
Work Report of the Working Group on Energy Strategies and Technologies
Present
http://www.cciced.net/encciced/
Eventually, the taxpayer’s will figure out the money laundering scam.
Atomizer - thanks for the Bernays quote. Hence the apathy of all the inmates of the asylum.
Will people be angry when they discover all the manipulation and propaganda they've been subjected to?
We could have an American version of the Cultural Revolution because the sheep will understand the culture is their prison, constructed for them by guys like Bernays.
For what's is worth, I worked on the admistrative side of the Moss Landing Power Plant upgrade, years ago in California. This is what I know. The team that was there before we got there was so woefully inadequate, it defies the imagination as to why they were paid to begin with. This was almost a mom and pop outfit! We're talking Duke Energy here. What were they thinking? The documentation and the plan was so screwy, that one is amazed as to why they would go ahead. Or maybe it's like government plans, it doesn't matter, none of this will affect the bottom line. It's all baked in somehow, perhaps with rolling blackouts to gin up sales figures, or perhaps the market forces. Who knows? I came months after the National Guard and other govt. operatives came to crack the whip. But the question remains. How well oiled is this machine to extract the most from the population anyway it can? Everybody in the game claimed "they didn't see it coming..." or it's equivalent. They lie. The plant was idled just when it needed to be to cause the most pain.
Look to the sun, California!!!!
A solar powered bullet train is the answer to all your problems. The sun's energy is FREE!
Don't take the night train.
Pacific Gas & Electric (Sempra Energy) currently completing brand new power line from the desert where there is an abundance of renewable, all they need is to have someone cut all the red tape for them to quadruple that in no time at all
Do your research bitchez
"California knows how to party."
Boomerang effect of Hollywood's output. That's entertainment.
Stay thirsty, my friends.
Boomerang effect of Hollywood's output.
What is Hollywood's output? Is this a complicated way to say 'shit's hit the fan'?
My closing statement..
1981 volkswagen rabbit diesel commercial
What is your price for diesel today?
Current financial crisis predicted in 1981||Movie: Rollover
Unlike most countries, the oil produced in California is owned by an oil company not the state. California pays the same for oil no matter how much they produce and it pretty much all goes out of state so it makes no difference.
Other states should have cut California's power after they reelected scum like Pelosi and Feinstein.
We Californians could argue that this place is a magnet for all the stupid people that your states produce so in essence, we're doing you a favor.
You're welcome.
Fuckin' eh!!!
Of course, a lot of the people smart enough to look around the Midwest and realize how much their future would suck if they stayed close to Mommy and Daddy also went to California.
This is why California has both Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
How about that persistent Cali Bubble?
Revisiting a friendly bubble in Culver City – A median home price of $680,000 and typical household income of $66,000. An example of a $300,000 pending price cut and the hidden impact of home equity loans.Of course as the over 11 million negative equity homeowners in the US now painfully realize is that you switch from paying rent to a landlord to paying rent to the bank.
http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/bubble-culver-city-shadow-inventory-h...
boo-hoo-hoo for "Cal-leaf-forn-ea"...they can make jobs and get their energy from geothermal, allow solar out in the Mojave (at the expense of some frog or lizard) and even bring thorium power into the mix. Leadership...........where's a tissue....
Once the $50B high speed rail line is built, that will reduce energy consumption by a rounding error of .001%.
Do you want to hear a good story? After the DOE gave Solyndra the taxpayer monies to build the new Solar plant expansion facility, burrowing owls were mysteriously found on this open plot of land next to the highway. Guess how much that cost the US taxpayers?
Welcome to UN Agenda 21
Environmental Impact Analysis(Pg. 8)
"San Onofre’s processing ability has been damaged by faulty computer modeling, which caused excessive and accelerated wear in its steam generator tubes." It's just a computer glitch?
The above is pure distraction. There is enought known, at least since March 2012, that any honest scientific study of public materials will demonstrate that executive decisions enabled the 4 Steam Generators to be manufactured and installed without serious oversight and revew of obvious, untested technical challenges that were suppposed to be evaluated before the 4 SGs were manufactured by Mitsubishi.
The SG design bypassed rigorous oversight because it was purported to be like-for-like [if the operator merely claims the new replacements are like the units being replaced , then full regulatory evaluation is not required], which is a regulatory loophole that bypasses otherwise mandated vetting of all new materials, combinations and arrangements not in fact demonstrated to work as claimed. It's the old confidence-game of "Trust me, I am your friend".
Simply ask Edison the execs who stated the new SGs were like-for-like, "The old SGs lasted 28 years. The new replacements lasted about 18 months. Do you still think they are like-for-like?
Ask the manufacturer Mitsubishi, "Did you ever claim the new SGs are like-for-like? Did the NRC ask you, the manufacturer, if they are like-for-like?"
How come the Mitsubishi contract reportedly states that manufacturer's liability for Mitsubishi is limited to only the raw SG fabrication cost of $134 Million?
For backgrounder, see
http://www.fairewinds.com/content/san-onofre%E2%80%99s-steam-generator-failures-could-have-been-prevented
Definitely not "like for like". Another good link:
http://www.fairewinds.org/content/san-onofre%E2%80%99s-steam-generators-significantly-worse-all-others-nationwide
Just read in that little column at the end of Fortune (hey, it was free and I like to see people humiliate themselves in print!) that the power authority for some region of CA declared that they will be doing controlled rolling blackouts this summer. The rationing begins, rejoice, slaves! It is for your own good!
Another Enron business model.. Burn baby burn!
did california ever pay canada back for the electricity they took ? last i heard, they still owed $300M
+ fuck california
- fuck california, in the ass...
pollsters says......
What a load of BS. California isn't in the "dawn" of it's energy crisis, it's late afternoon. California had rolling blackouts more than a decade ago. I can remember checking the grid operator's website in the morning to see what the load estimates and whether there would be rolling blackouts in my area.
California's energy problems are entirely self inflicted and have nothing to do with San Onofere. It's an example of the future if you let a bunch of lunatic far left wacko's run your government. Costly, ineffective regulation have driven power generation out of state.
Only the anti-nuclear crowd seems to think shutting down SO is an option. Like most any issue, it's just a question of who is going to pay. One of the reactors will probably start up in September at partial power.
According to the author, every state in the Union should be energy independent? How silly is that? Maine better get Halliburton and Exxon up there pronto. I suppose the alternative is high speed trains? LA to SF for $100 billion. That would pave a lot of roads.
On the bright side, we'll have a TSA office at every train stop.
/sarc
Probably worse stocks than Calpine. Nice post even if it pisses off the Jerry Brown's of the planet called California...
The whole deteriorating roads thing in CA is self-inflicted. (1) The CA dept of transportation does the road work in CA. They are unionized and unbelievably slow and expensive. I lived there and watched CalTrans spend ten years on a single road building project. I forget the per-foot numbers but they were laughably gigantic. Any attempt to change that structure has been foiled by the legislature. (2) CA legislators have chosen to spend their constituent's money on stuff other than roads for decades. Result, deteriorating roads but lots of snazzy social programs, self-esteem awareness programs, grief counselors, trains to nowhere, and lavish pensions plans for public employees. Having outspent their revenues, they whine that there's not enough money for roads because of the budget deficit. But self-esteem trucks on.
The people of CA have not sent their legislators packing, something that should have been done years ago. So who's fault is it? I've concluded over the years that progressive politicians really can't help it. They are what they are and are going to do the stuff described above no matter what. The voters can't seem to figure that rather simple proposition out. Until they do and wholesale clean house in Sacramento down to the last progressive, they will stew in their own juices.
At least CalTrans workers live in California. So the money goes back into the economy.
Unlike the silly little road project where they let the Chinese build a new crossing for the Bay Bridge. In China. Lowest bidder, and about 38 cents came back to California at the end of the day.
Overpaying locals for work is still a hell of a lot better than low bids that send ALL THE MONEY OVERSEAS.
What is orange and sleeps 6?
Your mama's bloomers?
San Onofre should be shut down, sooner than later. Built on a fault line, and more beachfront than Fukishima. It wouldn't take much of a tsunami to swamp that sob. If it was hit by a wave, bye bye Socal as we know it.
Short of building a nuclear power station on top of a volcano, it's hard to imagine a worse place to site one than on top of the San Andreas fault. They could hardly claim they didn't know the risks after an event could they?
There's a CA lovin' serial junker on the loose! ZH needs a junker filter for these shitheads! Pussied over-clicker!
Liberty!
http://shutupnsing.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/the-liberty-movement/
Mitt will get things fired up when an oil slick washes up on his pristine LaJolla beach front. Tar balls on San Diego beaches are needed quick!