The Biden administration once praised Los Angeles as a leader in greening the power grid before blackouts disrupted life for the city’s residents on Saturday and Sunday.
Los Angeles is aiming to have 100% of its electricity come from green sources like wind and solar by 2035, and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm declared in 2021 that a federal study on the feasibility of the city’s energy transition proves that greening the grid “is not only possible, but preferable.” Over the weekend, the city’s power grid faltered and left tens of thousands of customers in the dark, and power grid experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the city’s residents can expect more of the same going forward thanks primarily to its plans to rely increasingly on intermittent generation.
“It’s very unfortunate to see Californians suffer under unwise energy policies. The forced transition to politically favored energy sources is a painful and costly process, and it’s totally preventable,” Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF. “California policymakers can’t change the global temperature, but they can certainly take better care to keep the air conditioning running on hot days.”
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More than 100,000 homes in the Los Angeles area lost power at some point over the course of an ongoing, days-long heat wave in the area, according to CBS News. The outages briefly disrupted a University of Southern California (USC) football game on Saturday, and a Sunday concert at the Hollywood Bowl was canceled due to lost power.
Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass blamed the outages on “extreme heat.”
Generally, power demand increases when it’s hot out because more people turn on air conditioning units to stay cool; on Friday, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) advised customers to set their air conditioning to 78 degrees and to not use appliances between 4 p.m. PDT and 9 p.m. PDT in an effort to conserve energy. Officials similarly called on residents to conserve energy by cranking up thermostats for a ten-day period in September 2022 amid a heat wave.
The state has a target of reaching 100% green energy generation by 2045, and Los Angeles has its own municipal mandate for green energy with a 2035 deadline. In a 2021 press release announcing a study purporting to show that the city’s quick energy transition plan is feasible, Granholm said that the paper proves “that the clean energy transformation is not only possible, but preferable.”
However, this transition poses major risks for Los Angeles and the state because policymakers are essentially mandating reliance on intermittent, more expensive forms of energy generation while prematurely shutting down reliable fossil fuel-fired generation, as energy sector experts have previously explained to the DCNF about similar situations in other parts of the country. Moreover, different policies — such as California’s 2035 electric vehicle mandate — are driving up electricity demand at the same time, which could be a problem given concerns about the adequacy, reliability and affordability of power supply in the coming years.
“They’re wanting to have more demand for electricity to replace demand for fossil fuel. They want demand to increase. At the same time, they’re not maintaining our grid and they’re telling everybody to use less electricity,” Edward Ring, the California Policy Center’s director of water and energy policy, told the DCNF. “What a short-term fix that is: let’s use less electricity, but overall, let’s use more electricity. Because inevitably, no matter how efficient you are with the electrical service loads that you’ve got, it’s going to go up if you have all these EVs driving around. They’re kind of at war with themselves. It’s a policy that can’t win.”
Neither LADWP nor the Bass’ office responded to requests for comment.
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