As a last-minute push to save PG&E’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant from destruction makes its way through the California Legislature, the energy giant issued a warning to state residents due to an “extreme heat wave”: Flex that power, baby.
“PG&E is prepared for the heat and, based on forecasts, doesn’t anticipate issues meeting increased demand for power,” the statement said.
But please, please, please conserve because the public—I mean private, I mean both, I mean monopolistic corporation benefitting from state residents who don’t always have an alternative choice from which to purchase gas and/or electricity—utility serves more than “16 million people across 70,000 square miles in Northern and Central California.”
And according to outgoing Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham (R-San Luis Obispo), “California’s electricity grid is on a knife’s edge.”
Wow. That’s dramatic. But probably true, too.
What he means is the grid that PG&E is basically responsible for is on a knife’s edge—but that’s not what he said.
“We need to extend Diablo as a transition to future projects like offshore wind in order to maintain grid reliability,” Cunningham added.
So we should keep nuclear power pumping by giving a $1.4 billion loan to a utility that helped burn down hundreds of thousands of acres of forests, helped destroy countless homes, and started intermittently shutting off power as a way to “mitigate” future disasters because the corporation cut corners on maintaining electrical grid infrastructure to save its investors’ bottom line? It gets to pay off that loan with federal subsidies, by the way. This “loan” that robs Peter to pay Paul—American taxpayers to pay California taxpayers and, ultimately, PG&E—would benefit a private company that provides a public service and raises utility rates when it’s held liable for fire damages caused by its obligation to private investors.
This giant is too big to fail.
And everyone is conspiring to help this utility help us when said utility has over and over again declined to help itself. It failed to keep everything at Diablo ship shape enough to renew its federal license, which is one of the reasons why the utility was going to shut the plant down starting in 2024. Well, that and PG&E’s insistence that the state’s renewable energy rules pushed it to focus on developing things like solar and wind power—which hasn’t really happened either.
So the state is miles away from meeting renewable energy goals and SLO County and PG&E wasted years pushing forward a decommissioning plan that’s getting waylaid by a governor who was lieutenant governor when this whole mess started. And now we’re back to where we were then: With a questionable electrical grid, a not up-to-snuff nuclear power plant that needs to continue burning through radioactive fuel on a set of earthquake faults, and not enough renewable energy to go around. The only thing that’s really changed is that we will all be $1.4 billion less rich—except for PG&E.
That and Cunningham gets what he wants as he walks out the door: Glory for helping keep the Central Coast’s nuclear power plant operational into the future.
And Newsom helped him. How’s that for working across the proverbial aisle?
What about outspoken critic of the plan state Sen. John Laird (D-Santa Cruz)? He is acquiescing because, among other things, this legislation invests $1.1 billion in a plan to develop renewable energy. I’ll believe that when I see it. And how much of that is also going into PG&E’s pocket?
Slow clap for everyone. Way to work together.
At least when it comes to the redistricting lawsuit against the county, all the opponents continue to not work together. Were you wondering what happened with all that? Turns out text messages happened—or didn’t happen, according to what SLO County turned over as part of discovery in the case.
According to that, county supervisors sent one measly text message about the redistricting effort. Does anybody believe that? People conduct business deals over text message, but no one was conversing with SLO County Supervisors Debbie “Election Fraud” Arnold, John “This Is A Legit Map” Peschong, and Lynn “I’m On The Way Out” Compton about the Patten map during the hyper-partisan and extremely contentious redistricting process. I find that very, very hard to believe.
And so does Citizens for Good Government, which filed the redistricting lawsuit and recently filed a motion attempting to get the court to compel the county to produce withheld communications.
“It did not seem credible that only one text message was sent or received during the entire yearlong redistricting process,” the motion read.
All I’ve got to say is welcome to world of news-gathering. Do you have any idea how many times the county has given New Times a big fat nothing in response to Public Records Act request? Countless. Must be nice to fundraise for “court costs.” Maybe we should start a GoFundMe.
Needless to say, the county’s turnover of a single, solitary text message “raises some question,” according to Linda Seifert, who’s on the board for Citizens for Good Government.
The county, however, claims it’s done its due diligence, trained up supervisors on all the latest and greatest state rules about personal text messages discussing county business.
“The county complied with the law regarding the production of documents,” Deputy County Counsel Jon Ansolabehere said.
Maybe the supervisors only have flip phones? Δ
The Shredder only sends messages on paper. Send a cellphone to shredder@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Sep 1-11, 2022.
As we face a brownout from the heat wave, it is amusing to see liberals like the Shredder blaming PG&E for the fact that we’re running out of power, while at the same time they demand that Diablo Canyon, the source of nearly 10% of the state’s power, be shut down. It will be even funnier when, in view of the fact that we will be unable to charge electric cars due to the brownout, these virtue-signaling liberals are unable to drive their Teslas to the anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Districts are only useful if a geographic area of a city or county has well recognized needs that the whole electroate might ignore.
In fact, without Districts proponents of one issue or another can rally voters from the entire electorate and win.
Don’t think so?
Then how do the big city, high density areas manage to overcome the rural, low density when a staewide Prop is put before the voters?
The smaller the city, county or state, the less logicical it is to have Districts. Thos who cater to threats of lawsuits instead of fighting back against the idea of Districts betray their residents.