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California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

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91–100 of 248 posts

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#91
post #2

The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals. 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-(

You do realize that most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black of some sort in the same time period. 1 rolling black out every 20 years isn't all that crazy. Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?

> Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?

I don't know, California, how about you start by spending the billions you need to make sure people just baseline don't burn to death, and then we'll see what delivery reliability looks like?

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#92
post #29

Where is all the load coming from? Aren't most of the office building (in the Bay Area) empty rightnow due to Covid?

I’d guess that cooling a single office building is probably more energy efficient than cooling one hundred houses.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#93
post #29

Where is all the load coming from? Aren't most of the office building (in the Bay Area) empty rightnow due to Covid?

As with other impacts of shutdown and quarantine, shifts in demand and consumption patterns can mean that infrastructure isn't able to supply electricity to where it's specifically needed. It's been pointed out that electricity is not storable --- it's less an energy store as with fuel and far more energy distribution as with a transmission or driveshaft, but with far more connections. Not only must the Grid make pow…

Residential solar once posed the opposite problem: generating power during the day in suburbs where it wasn't being consumed nor could it be transported to areas of high demand.

If our current problem is higher daytime residential demand, maybe power companies can stop fighting residential solar initiatives now?

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#94
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn’t blind patriotism. Maybe it's just ignorance then. Quality of life in Northern Europe is far better than it ever was in California, which in retrospect looks like a joke.

What is quality of life? Sounds pretty subjective. One person may rank weather at the top, so Northern Europe sucks. Another may rank parental leave at the top, so the US sucks. Probably the most objective way is to measure how people vote with their feet.

I think it’s an interesting point. The USA always gets compared to Europe, especially Western Europe with this so called “Quality of Life” statistic. However there are far more Western Europeans moving to the USA than the other way.

I don’t know, my siblings and I do better than our parents who put time in to raise us. We didn’t have much except each other. We weren’t without but we never had a vacation or went out to eat. Went to public schools, etc. But my parents respected each other and sacrificed a bit to raise us. I’d say my family has moved from working class into middle class and upper middle class for some of us.

Our quality of life seems pretty nice. It’s weird because when I moved to nyc many of the people that complained a lot were from well to do families and they clearly weren’t doing better. They were being recycled downwards and they seemed to resent successful people because of it. They make a lot of noise but my friends back home, many of which are doing better than their folks, don’t go on social media talking about.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#96
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just your human brain succumbing to its recency bias. As someone who has been around for way too many decades, it was like this in the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's. And corruption is way down from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt). And your "save the world from fascism" happened at the same time most of the US was segregated.

And inequality is up since the 70's, as are housing, health care and cost of living expenses, while wages have remained stagnant for nearly 50 years.

WTF happened in 1971?

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those were for fire safety, not because of excess load on the electrical grid.

They were a tactic in a political battle. Saying they were "for fire safety" is stretching things.

Wikipedia attributes the outages to fire prevention: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_California_power_shutof...

Can you provide a source for your viewpoint?

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#98
post #2

The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals. 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-(

> 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-( It was mainly Russia who did that. The US effort may well have saved Europe from Communism though.

Ask your friends from the Czech Republic or Hungary or Lithuania about how they were “saved” by Russia.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#99
post #95

Lol and I made fun of my country when this happened in Iran. Good job America.

When we didn't have power in Iran for 2 hours I used to think it's such an atrocity. It never happened for more than 5-6 hours though.

I had power outage in LA for ~17 hours last month.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#100
post #2

The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals. 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-(

> 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-( It was mainly Russia who did that. The US effort may well have saved Europe from Communism though.

The USSR saved the world from the Nazis and then the US saved the world from the USSR. I like that.

Now who will save the world from the lawless international corporatist panopticon birthed from America? Aliens?

History seems like "she swallowed a spider to eat the fly..."

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