California environmentalists have discovered that when it comes to renewable energy, you can have too much of a good thing. Thanks to heavily subsidized solar panel installation, the state now has too much power, sending electricity prices negative, but only during the daytime. At night, Californians are out of luck.
As spring arrives and summer approaches, California is once again going to be throwing away solar energy that the state is incapable of storing. In 2022, of the 2.4 million megawatt-hours of electricity that the state wasted, 95% was solar energy. Wasting that electricity causes electricity prices to rise, making for yet another perfect mess of California policy.
California’s renewable misadventure has been full of contradictions like this. Take, for example, the fact that renewables are the largest source of California energy during peak sunlight hours but the highest demand comes around 7 p.m., requiring the state to rely on the natural gas it is trying to eliminate. Or that California has tried to eliminate nuclear energy, which is just as “clean” as solar while being infinitely more reliable, only to backtrack and desperately try to keep the last nuclear plant open before losing 10% of the state’s energy.
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Or that the state is far behind in its solar energy battery storage production while rapidly approaching the deadline that will force people to buy cars that use electricity from the state’s unready grid instead of evil, dirty gasoline. It is fair to say that this is all less than ideal.
California decided to spring down a path of renewable energy that was dreamed up by activists without ensuring that the infrastructure would be in place to keep electricity prices down or, more importantly, keep the grid from periodically being on the brink of collapse. Solar panels that generate energy that can never be used and a grid about to have its natural gas crutches swept out from under it is no way to run a state, which means it is exactly the way California Democrats want to run it.
