No, they’re not a climate-change story. It’s about rampant insanity and corruption of rent-seeking “green”-energy firms.
And this seems like cheating: Texas lures California businesses with promises of electricity.
What did socialists use to light their homes before candles? Electricity.
[Late-morning update]
California is approaching Puerto Rico territory.
Speaking of which…
[Thursday-morning update]
California is “winning” its way into the Stone Age.
And is the state becoming pre-modern?
Apparently. Pat Brown has to be rolling in his grave at what his idiot son has wrought.
[Bumped]
It’s odd. When I was a kid, I remember being told that Lenin believed Communism was Soviet power plus electrification. Now it’s apparently Soviet power plus de-electrification.
I’m surprised there are not riots in California about now.
I’ve been thinking since I heard about these fires and evacuation, how do you notify people in mass to evacuate without power? I asked this elsewhere and got a response they were using reverse 911 and cellphone texts. My experience in mass power loss after hurricanes is that cell towers are without power too. But I suppose backup generators and residual power in the phones may make this worse.
What I didn’t consider is that people are losing perishable food, because they can no longer refrigerate such food. How long can that last in a population as large as California? This is a problem whether your home is about to burned down or not.
And of course, all the power blackouts haven’t stopped wild fires from igniting and spreading.
There aren’t riots because the power outages have mostly affected more rural and conservative areas. Cut off power to LA for a few days, and then we’ll see some riots.
What the Democratics seem to ignore is that the civil war they seem to desperately want will probably be a “low intensity conflict,” and guns won’t be the primary weapons.
Imagine what Coastal California would be like after a few truck bombs are used on Hetch Hetchy and Owens Valley aquaduct pumping stations. Or on the powerlines running from all those powerplants located outside California. One of the fires responsible for half of the acreage that burned in Yellowstone in 1988 (the North Fork) was accidentally started by a single cigarette butt. Will California ban smoking during wildfire blackout season?
Gonna be interesting times ahead.
SF Chronicle story that said the cell phone service failed in many areas. The towers are supposed to have battery and generator backup, but aside from the usual problems with that, access to the towers gets cut off by the wildfires.
Ah yes, battery backup. Why even have a generator backup, when you have a battery? Why, put a battery on something and it will run forever on free energy.
Sadly, I suspect they don’t understand the battery is only there to last long enough for the generator backup to kick in. And then it only runs so long without fuel, and when you have few to no pipelines and fuel trucks are scorned for being both ICE running vehicles carrying the juice of Gaia’s Satan which must be taxed heavily as the sin it is; then the generator probably won’t run too long.
I’ll also add in emergency, those few cell towers are getting hit with greater volume than usual. They are the only source of information in and out. People want to know what they can about the fire, hurricane, mass event, while also checking on loved ones and letting the world know they are ok. And they are all doing it right now, not when work gets slow or during the next commercial break. Good luck getting a SMS text through, much less a phone call.
QoS will only get you so far, especially back to relying on battery and generator backup.
This looks useful: Westell: Powering Your Cell Towers (PDF).
A tower could be 1.5 to 2.5 kW, and it needs about 4 hours of battery backup plus a diesel generator. The cost for all that runs about $174 a day.
One issue is that these widespread days-long power outages mean the company has to keep refueling diesel generators on all of their towers, not just one or two as would occur in a more localized outage. I’m not sure they’re even equipped for that, aside from perhaps telling T-Mobile sales people to load up some 5-gallon gas cans and start driving around. The hardest towers to reach will be the ones with fires nearby, but those are the towers that people need most.
how do you notify people in mass to evacuate without power?
I imagine they’re still organized enough to send emergency response people around to give out the warnings even when the usual methods don’t work.
Losing food was one of the first things I thought of because it happened to me a few years back. Stuff in the fridge are usually things you go through quickly, so there might not be too big of a loss there but how many people have extra freezers to store food in, especially meats?
There was a comment over at Instapundit from a guy whose brother runs a business that deals in boutique dairy products. He bought a generator to keep his walk ins cold. Then he got fined by the city for it being too loud, so he paid the $1000 but they came back when he didn’t shut it off and charged him $5000 a day. True? I don’t know but it sounds plausible. The guy has hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock going to waste because Californians are mentally ill.
Cute. You think the short-sightedness of California politicians started with Jerry Brown.
Right? Pat could easily have tied Jerry up in a burlap bag and thrown him in the river. Talk about short-sighted.
Apparently. Pat Brown has to be rolling in his grave at what his idiot son has wrought.
A good reason to avoid political nepotism.
Rand, why are you blaming the power companies?
To paraphrase Mencken, California is getting the power companies it deserves, and good and hard.
Were I running a power company, where I subject to this that and the other regulation that I couldn’t properly cut away brush under power lines, were I then blamed for a wildfire and then taken to court and sued to bankruptcy, my reaction would be, “Forget this, California. Next time there is a drought, I am switching off your power so no one gets hurt.”
Think of this as an Atlas Shrugged-type situation.
I guess blackouts that affect 5% of the state population, mostly in Republican deplorable counties, isn’t going to endanger Democratic supremacy.
Heck, they’ll probably take an element of my suggestion and use “winds driven by climate change” as the excuse to shut down power to all the red counties on election day.
Pretty impressive. Burning down the house in the dark. But, say they happily have 18 new gun laws signed just last month to keep them safe.
The more I think about it, the more I think that Cali needs a version of Frank Herbert’s BuSab. Cheers –