Energy

Here in California, about the only legitimate energy source is unicorn farts.  The only by-products of burning them is energy and fresh water.

In our headlong rush to leftie woke-ism, California ignores anything that seems even marginally reasonable and then takes the express bus to Crazy-town.  This is especially true regarding power generation:

In much of the country a powerful energy boom is providing a serious stimulus to economic growth. But in California, where fossil fuels are considered about as toxic as tobacco, we are lurching toward an anticipated energy shortage that will further exacerbate the state’s already deep geographic and class divisions.

California, in a typical feat of “virtue signaling,” has committed the state to getting half of its electrical power from renewables such as wind and solar, up from 16 percent today, within the next decade. This drive has meant the rapid abandonment of electricity generated by nuclear power as well as natural, gas which together comprised nearly 70 percent of all electricity production in 2015.

This may not end well. California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Picker suggested recently that we could soon return “the kind of crisis we faced in 2000 and 2001.” The rapid abandonment of existing reliable energy sources makes the state, in the estimate of the Institute for Energy Research, “vulnerable to rolling blackouts.”

How can a 1st-world economy like California even function under 3rd-world utility conditions?  And let's not forget about the impact on the people themselves:

The price of our leaders’ green virtue will fall particularly hard on working-class Californians who already suffer the nation’s highest rate of people living in poverty. They also tend to live in less-temperate geographies such as the Inland Empire, the high desert and the Central Valley. Expect the recent moves to expand the ranks of the million Californians who suffer from “energy poverty,” defined as spending 10 percent or more of their household income on energy-related expenses.

Our economic dependency is worsened by the fact that California, once a major energy exporter, has adopted a bizarre policy that restricts not only local production but restricts imports from places such as North Dakota and Texas. Instead of embracing these Trump-leaning states, our leaders seem happier to get most of our crude oil shipped in forward-looking despotisms like Saudi Arabia.

How does California become Green-topia?  By ignoring reality:

California has taken bold action by shuttering its coal plants, planning to shut down the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant so it can increase its share of renewable energy, or that’s what the Greenies out there want to believe. In reality, the Golden State simply imports electricity generated by coal, natural gas, and nuclear facilities from Arizona and Nevada and pretends they are “green energy” leaders.

In fact, no other state imports more electricity than does California...

California’s policies promoting renewables at the expense of dispatchable generation place it in an odd predicament, it must pay other states to take the excess electricity generated by renewables when their generation is high, and it must also pay other states for their power when renewable generation is low.

This doesn't sound like a winning strategy.

That's the disaster brewing in California.  Let's extend this power-generation issue to the entire country and see what realities the so-called Green New Deal bumps up against:

The Green New Deal—proposed in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Sen. Edward Markey (D–Mass.)—would require a vast expansion of coercive government power in order to achieve its goal: "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources" in only 10 years.

The plan, which has been endorsed as of this writing by at least six Democratic presidential candidates, would not only require a complete reordering of the American economy; it could happen only by trampling over property rights, local and state control, and the autonomy of the American private sector...
 
Since the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, power would have to be shifted via high-voltage transmission lines quickly from place to place across the whole country to prevent local blackouts. The proposed solution to that problem is the North American Supergrid, consisting of about 50,000 miles of high-voltage power lines. Yet these also tend to provoke considerable landowner and environmental activist opposition. For example, it took the American Electric Power Company 14 years to obtain approval for a 90-mile high-voltage transmission project in West Virginia and Virginia.

To bypass objections to building a national supergrid, the Climate Institute suggests that Congress grant eminent domain authority to regional transmission organizations—i.e., independent bureaucracies that operate power transmission assets and provide wholesale transmission services within a defined geographic region. Handing the right to seize people's property to such entities might be an efficient way to get things done, but they are not elected bodies and their possession of such powers might not be constitutional...

The only presently operating offshore wind farm is Deepwater Wind near the coast of Rhode Island. It consists of five turbines rated at 30 megawatts total. Proposed in 2008, that project began operating eight years later. A 2016 plan for powering the United States with 100 percent renewable energy, devised by a team of Stanford and Berkeley researchers, would require building 156,200 5-megawatt offshore turbines. (This plan, by the way, is the closest thing we have to a roadmap for 100 percent renewable energy—and even it suggests a timeframe of 30 years, rather than 10, at a cost of $14 trillion.)

The prospects for onshore wind power are somewhat better. There are about 96 gigawatts of such capacity currently installed. Fulfilling the Stanford plan—which calls for 328,000 new 5-megawatt onshore turbines—would require only a 17-fold increase over the next decade.

Solar photovoltaic farms currently installed in the U.S. meanwhile have a total capacity of 60 gigawatts. According to the Stanford plan's calculations, the country would need to build another 2,324 gigawatts—at a rate of 234 gigawatts per year. In a December 2018 report, the Solar Energy Industries Association said it actually expects installations to rise to 14 gigawatts per year by 2023.

Practically speaking, this is impossible.  So why would people push this at all?  Answer:  it's not for power-generation purposes, it's for power purposes.  Their own power.