We’re all fossil fuel lovers in a foxhole
This is Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter for people who want to know what’s up with clean energy. I’m Julian Spector—I live in Los Angeles and report on the clean energy industry for Greentech Media.
I took off last week to rest on the shores of Malibu. I wanted to find out if it’s still possible to want to live there with the knowledge that sooner or later, dry winds will whip a wildfire through the canyons to the coast with terrifying speed, burning all that comes before them. The answer is yes.
Now I’m back, and sifting through the lessons of the historic power crisis that hit California in August. I know many of you readers don’t live in California, so you may wonder if this has anything to do with your life. I would posit two points:
This is an excellent opportunity to indulge in schadenfreude at us Californians’ expense. Do you really want to pass that up?
California has become a proving ground for a future where we fight climate change and create a clean and equitable energy system; setbacks in that quest matter for anyone else aspiring to that goal.
Subscribe here if you haven’t yet, it’s both good and free.
In this issue, I’ll tackle:
Clean energy didn’t “cause” our rolling blackouts
But it didn’t help renters such as myself, because we can’t own our own energy supply
And clean energy didn’t help at the statewide level, because we didn’t have the right tools to make a difference
Also, I made gazpacho, and I think you should too
The California power outages I wrote about last time deprived electricity to hundreds of thousands of people, forcing us to consider that energy is actually pretty crucial to the lives we want to lead. Since that happened after the state invested many years and billions of dollars into building a low carbon economy, we need to ask whether that brighter future performed as advertised.
This matters to me personally because, shortly after firing off my last Bright Ideas, my home lost power—three times in 24 hours. This was not due to the rolling blackouts, which did not actually affect L.A., but to a more mundane overheating of local grid equipment. Instead of reporting from afar on the topic of outages, I experienced life without electricity amid 90+ degree heat. It’s actually pretty hard to work from home in those conditions. Or cook from home, or read a book after sunset or extract your car from a closed garage.
The rise of wind and solar did not cause California’s grid problems. That’s actually a contentious statement, which I’ll back up.
But clean energy did not get us out of it. Joe Biden and whoever else is fighting for more carbon-free power in America’s future will need to understand what happened here and answer the critiques that have already emerged. What good is clean energy if it doesn’t help you when you need it most?
When you’re staring down a threat to your electricity supply, do you pull the trigger on fossil fuels? (Photo credit: US Army, 1959)
Do math better, California
California ran out of electricity because it no longer had enough power plant capacity in-state to meet demand.
Dependable older plants, powered by gas and nuclear, are shutting down. We’re not building new gas or nuclear—we’re building solar. The thing about solar is, it only produces when the sun is up. We have so much solar now that California really doesn’t need to worry about running out of power while the sun is up. We just have to make sure there’s enough when the sun goes down.
Something went wrong in the bureaucratic math there, because we didn’t have enough without importing electricity from other states, and those states had their own problems in the heat wave.
This led folks who already dislike renewables to conclude that renewables were the problem. This is silly.
Imagine you run a store, and hire lots of staffers to work from 9 to 5. You’re expecting a rush after 5, as customers get off work and want to go shopping (this is a nostalgic pre-COVID analogy). But you choose not to hire enough evening shift workers to keep up. When the inevitable commercial chaos arrives, does it make any sense to blame it on all those 9-to-5 workers going home when they were supposed to?
A subtler and more accurate argument would be that focusing only on building as much solar as possible isn’t sustainable. Instead, you need stuff that works after dark: batteries! Other states are tackling this issue explicitly, like Arizona and Massachusetts. California says it is, but hasn’t delivered on its promises yet.
No clean energy for Julian
When you think of clean energy, chances are you imagine a rooftop with solar panels on it. If you’re really hip, you might picture a box of batteries stuck to the wall, which puts the solar power to work after sunset.
My partner Samantha and I are renters. That means, we can’t just put panels on our roof or bolt a battery into the wall. We don’t have permission to make structural alterations to the house, nor would it make any sense to invest thousands of dollars with the possibility that we’ll move again in a few years.
There are ways to access clean power without building it in your home. You may have gotten mailings from companies that bundle clean power so you can feel good about offsetting your consumption. Some states have community solar, which lets people subscribe to solar produced at a bigger project nearby.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of giving me carbon-free electrons when the delivery mechanism of the grid is not working. The snazziest suit won’t help you in a job interview if it’s stuck at the dry cleaner.
As the power cut out for the third time in one day, debilitating my oven in the midst of a four-hour slow roasted pork shoulder recipe, I had to reckon with the fact that the clean energy revolution I spent the last four years chronicling had absolutely nothing to offer me as a customer in that moment.
No wonder it’s challenging to make this stuff seem relevant to people’s lives. You take all the renters off the table, then scratch anyone who owns a condo or a home that’s shaded or otherwise unsuited for solar production, and you’re talking about a much smaller population. Everyone benefits from less air pollution, but personalized clean energy is a long ways off from universality.
Clean energy didn’t save the day for California
This next part will be a little uncomfortable for the environmentalists and climate hawks out there. When the grid crisis hit, carbon-free sources had very little to offer. Fossil fuels got us through it.
As mentioned above, the crucial hours now fall when the sun goes down. After 6 p.m., there’s just not enough solar production left to make a difference. Wind wasn’t showing up in a meaningful way. California hasn’t installed enough batteries to pick up the slack, by a long shot. The hydropower did its job, as did nuclear, but neither had the ability to increase production drastically when it was needed.
So we burned gas, a lot of gas. Take a look at how carbon emissions changed when the crisis hit:
Data from grid operator CAISO show carbon emissions from electricity production skyrocketing as the grid approached the breaking point, which hit as the sun set and solar production dropped. (Annotations by Julian)
It doesn’t have to be this way. You just need to build on-demand clean energy BEFORE you get rid of too much on-demand dirty energy. California mixed up the order of operations there. A lot more batteries are in the works for the next few years, to make that solar production useful after sunset. Until then, our generally pretty clean energy system depends on burning fossil fuels in a pinch.
I made gazpacho, and so can you
As a kid, I never understood why my mom got so excited about ripe summer tomatoes. They’re just tomatoes, I thought. But that’s not true, especially if your grocery store or farmer’s market carries the multi-colored flavor-bomb heirloom varieties.
Now it’s time to turn them into soup. I prefer the smooth, blended Spanish style, which is eminently sippable. And I found some thought-provoking suggestions in Chef José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed, the free-wheeling cookbook that brought us garbage broth in the early days of quarantine. He presents gazpacho more as a way of life than a recipe: it’s a method for turning whatever fresh goodies the earth provides into a crisp, refreshing soup.
For starters, load up a blender with a hearty amount of chopped fresh tomatoes, a few peeled cloves of garlic, a peeled and chopped cucumber, and a few slices of crustless bread torn into small pieces.
Throw in a quarter cup of sherry vinegar, my MVP condiment of the summer, and some actual sherry if you have it.
Blend that to a pulp, and start pouring in olive oil while it’s spinning to create an emulsion. When it tastes right, season with salt and pepper, and chill.
That’s it, that’s the recipe. Put it in a jar and sip it at the park.
Andrés envisions more exotic arrangements too: cantaloupe gazpacho, or a blood red version with blended cherries. Whichever way you go, you don’t need to actually cook anything. You do, however, need a source of electricity to power the blender and chill the fridge. I had that this weekend, and made the most of it.