I discovered an interesting, and rather depressing, bit of information concerning the State's renewable energy policy. I had heard that the State put a new law into place that created a mandate to obtain 33% of our electricity before 2020. Silly me, I thought that was the mandate. However, I just found out that it isn't actually that, it is actually a mandate that the IOU's (Investor Owned Utilities such as PG&E and Southern California Edison) are mandated to procure 33% as much renewable energy as they sell. At first that might seem reasonable, but wait - it results in some rather unpleasant consequences.
The first of these consequences is that rooftop solar is not included in the mix - the mandate only covers power that is procured and they don't procure electricity from my solar collectors. That means that they have no mandate, or incentive, to make sure that any local source of renewable energy is promoted (beyond the soon to be expired California Solar Energy Initiative that created State sponsored incentives for a relatively small number of solar systems (up to a 2% penetration). Because of this, all of the government money, government subsidies, tax breaks and efforts are going to large, industrial scale renewable power plants rather than to small scale, distributed sources of power. This law was obviously designed to funnel lots of money to the big power plants while side-stepping the home owner and small businesses.
The second interesting impact of this law is that there is nothing in it to ensure the overall system is positively impacted by the renewable energy. It is just measuring the production of power at the "meter" where it is produced, not at the system efficiencies (or inefficiencies). This explains why it is considered good business to build and operate inefficient gas fired power plants to backup wind production even though the resulting inefficiencies result in wind producing little, or no, additional power on the grid. It doesn't matter how much conventional power is needed to make wind work - it isn't counted and therefore not part of the mandate. The current situation where wind creates little or no impact to the grid either in terms of energy produced or green house gas reductions is irrelevant to the situation. Nobody is concerned about actually decreasing our use of non-renewable energy sources, or in the reduction of green house gas production. The only thing that is important is to create large generators of renewable energy in order to make large profits from both the government and the rate payers.
The extra cost of the backup power and backup power plants is a non-issue because it is paid for by the utilities, which of course charge whatever they need to in order to cover their costs. All they have to do is show the PUC that their costs have gone up and they are allowed to raise their rates to include the new costs (with additional profits of course).
This explains a lot to me. I couldn't figure out why nobody cared about the impacts to the entire energy system - the don't care because it is not included in the mandate. It also explains why there is such little attention being paid to the small distributed power sources - that is also not included in the mandate. The government is committed to supporting the requirements of the mandate, but nothing else. This is why all of the money is funneled to really bad designs. By the way, currently the IOUs have contracts in place for achieving 125% of the mandate by 2020, therefore it was not an inconvenience to them to agree to the mandates - it just means that they will make that much more money because they will get subsidized for work they were already going to do. It also means that there is no need for additional contracts for additional wind power plants - there are enough already under contract to accomplish the mandate plus a lot.
The current insanity of installing large wind and large solar power plants is best described as a swindle ("to take money or property from by fraud or deceit"). The fraud and deceit part is the contention is that it is doing something useful, when in fact it is doing nothing of the kind.
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