For international #energytwitter friends watching CA...what happened with the blackouts? A thread.

This darkly gleeful article from the @wsjournal ed board is dead wrong. We can say definitively that these blackouts are not due to renewables. (1/9) https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-blackout-warning-11597606724

People seeking to politicize this event have and will continue to use it to make their favorite argument – whether that is against the Green New Deal boogie man coming to get you in your state, or for a new technology that could have saved us. (2/9)

Here’s what we know. Steve Berberich, CEO of @California_ISO, said “renewables are really not a factor” in this event – and two large natural gas plants were unexpectedly unavailable during critical times on Friday, with another tripping offline Saturday. (3/9)

Anne Gonzales, also from @California_ISO, said if both had been in service, they would not have had to call for outages. It is well-known that natural gas facilities can have trouble performing in high heat. (4/9)

@California_ISO also noted lower than expected production from a wind farm, although this kind of thing is generally accounted for in normal grid operations. At no point did solar fail to provide the services the grid operator counts on. It's no surprise that the sun sets. (5/9)

But CA has a complex, multi-layered set of institutions that oversee electricity, in part a hangover from the 2001 energy crisis. One agency forecasts demand, another makes plans to meet that demand and directs what utilities buy, and yet a third runs the grid. (6/9)

Now these agencies are pointing fingers at one another over this. Many in the clean energy and utility communities have been calling out the need to buy more energy for several years, but the agency in charge of those decisions has been slow to act. (7/9)

KEY POINT: this was an avoidable problem. It is sadly a failure of planning, not of #cleanenergy.

We can plan for success by using the approaches laid out in @Sammy_Roth's great article in the @latimes: https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-08-19/how-california-can-keep-lights-on-while-meeting-clean-energy-goals (8/9)

Addendum: it's worth noting that across the US, the standard for reliability is 1 event in 10 years according to @NERC_Official. The last event like this in CA was 20 years ago. And the number of customers affected pales next to wildfire-related power shutoffs last year... (9/9)