Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

You’re trying to replace our last nuclear plant with wind even though

- lack of reliable nuclear caused last summer’s blackouts

- there’s no wind during the heat waves that trigger blackouts

- it will further raise our prices, which already increased 7x more than rest of US

https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1397305581820542978

“People wonder how we made it through the heat wave of 2006. The answer is... We had San Onofre [nuclear plant] of 2,200 MW, and a number of other plants, totalling thousands of MW not there today,” said Calif. grid operator during 2020 blackouts.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

“There was very little electricity from wind during the summer heatwave in California ... the same weather pattern, a stable high-pressure bubble, is the cause of heatwaves, since it brought very low wind for days on end along with very high temperatures”

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

“Had California spent an estimated $100 billion on nuclear instead of on wind and solar, it would have had enough energy to replace all fossil fuels in its in-state electricity mix.”

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

“In a filing to regulators last year, the California Independent System Operator warned that the system will reach a ‘critical inflection point’ after the Diablo Canyon [nuclear] plant is shuttered”

utilitydive.com/news/californi…

Renewables advocates claim renewables are efficient but in California it will take 11.5 GW of renewables, storage and nat gas to replace 2.2 GW of nuclear

“It's a really staggering number”

utilitydive.com/news/californi…

Renewables advocates claimed solar, wind, batteries would make natural gas unnecessary but blackouts in California in 2020 & Texas in 2021 proved that weather-dependent energies require more natural gas infrastructure not less, further raising costs

environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2021/…

“The investors who develop solar and wind supplies can only do so because the state and federal laws allow them to socialize the risks of their unreliability.”

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

“Wealth spent on weather-dependent renewables is wealth not spent making the grid more resilient by maintaining & weatherizing reliable nuclear plants. Money that could have gone to making electrical grids more reliable thus instead went to equipment that made them more fragile”

“Wealth spent on increasing the amount of electricity transmission wires is wealth not spent clearing vegetation from around electrical lines, which has been a major cause of the fires that led to the bankruptcy of PG&E in California 2019, & power outages in 2019 and 2020.”

“Policies have subsidized and mandated less efficient sources of energy, weather-dependent wind and solar, which require far more land, transmission, and other infrastructure. Energy prices have risen, thus threatening economic growth, living standards, & societal resilience”