What a pair Ed Miliband and California governor Gavin Newsom make. Both seem to suffer from the delusion that they are national leaders, meeting up in London on Monday to sign a deal in which they aim to share green technology and finance. Both are committed to what they like to call a ‘global race for clean power’. And both are presiding over electricity grids which are heading for disaster.
In this, California is a little ahead even of Britain. It provides a frightening picture of what is to come as Miliband tries to decarbonise the grid, mostly with intermittent renewables, by 2030. On Christmas Day, 130,000 homes and businesses in and around San Francisco found themselves without power. This was just the latest in a series of blackouts in recent years which have paralysed parts of the state. Newsom invariably likes to blame the loss of power on climate change. The Christmas Day blackout was precipitated by a storm, while previous mass outages in 2020 and 2022 were blamed on heatwaves.
I fear that what Miliband will pick up from Newsom is how to make excuses
Of course, it wouldn’t have anything to do with the instability which is being introduced into the grid as a result of the increasing reliance on intermittent renewables. The changes in the grid in California are markedly similar to those in Britain in recent years, albeit with solar energy becoming the dominant source of power compared with wind power in Britain.
Last year, California derived 29 per cent of its electricity from solar, 9.2 per cent from hydropower and 5.2 per cent from wind. Coal has virtually been removed from the grid, while gas is down to 23.7 per cent. Nuclear is 6.1 per cent. As in Britain, the switch towards intermittent renewables has been combined with an overall drop in energy generation. The state is simply not producing anything like enough power to keep its energy-hungry homes and data centres purring away. Last year, for example, it imported 18.9 per cent of its power from neighbouring states. California thus gets to claim to be ‘green’ while consuming electricity generated elsewhere.
No prizes for guessing the slight problem in trying to build a grid in which the dominant source of energy is solar. The sun tends to go down every evening and Californians don’t always want to go to bed as soon as it disappears below the horizon. Indeed, they like to keep the air conditioning on, if not go out to the movies, cook dinner and do other stuff. This has led to a particularly big problem on September evenings, when there is less incoming solar energy than in July and August but when the demand for air conditioning can be just as high.
It was on this somewhat tenuous basis that climate change was blamed for blackouts in 2020 and 2022: heatwaves are becoming more common and therefore increasing demand for air conditioning beyond the grid’s ability to cope. You could, alternatively, rather than waiting for the climate to change back to how you would like it to be, build a stronger grid – but that doesn’t seem to feature in Newsom’s thinking.
In response to the rather obvious problems created by intermittency, California is trying to build massive battery installations. But this is an extremely expensive way of providing energy when you need it, making a mockery of claims that solar power itself is cheap. It has also highlighted one of the hazards of lithium battery installations, namely their tendency to burst into uncontrollable fires. In January last year, a massive fire at a plant in Moss Landing near San Francisco led to the evacuation of 1,500 people from their homes – as well as taking out a large slice of energy storage capacity.
By comparison, in Britain over the past year, the electricity mix has been 33 per cent wind, 28 per cent gas, 12.6 per cent nuclear, 6.7 per cent solar – and 11 per cent was imported via subsea cables. Britain and California are both embarking on the same, highly risky strategy with their power supply. The only thing that Miliband should be learning from California is how not to do it, but sadly I fear that what he will pick up from Newsom is how to make excuses. When the lights go out in Britain, too, don’t be surprised if Miliband also starts trying to blame climate change.
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