...the California Energy Commission using something other than "percent talk," which, whenever so called "renewable energy" is discussed is used in lieu of real numbers, again, to obscure reality.
The largest source of electrical power generation in California in 2023 was dangerous natural gas, the waste of which is dumped directly into the planetary atmosphere, where it is killing the planet. Its combustion with direct waste dumping into the atmosphere produced 94,192 GWh of electricity. This compares with the solar junk spread all over wilderness areas converted into industrial parks for the "solar will save us" fantasy, which produced 41,344 GWh.
California Energy Commission, 2023 Electricity Sources
In California, as is the case nearly everywhere else, energy demand peaks in the late afternoon and early evening. (I've been following the CAISO charts on demand and supply in California for many years, and often reference it here.)
Today the solar output peaked at 19,667 MW at 11:55 am, whereas energy demand peaked at 33,901 at 19:00 hours (7 pm) PDT. At that time, solar energy's output was 4,791 MW and rapidly falling. At this hour, 9:38 PDT as of this writing, solar energy is producing negative power -12 MW, bleeds into the large number of wires connecting all this crap together.
California, as it needs to link all kinds of unreliable junk together, is laced with powerlines, some of which cause major fires when they spark in heatwaves, whereupon everybody sues PSE&G. Of course, if so many redundant power generators were unnecessary, there would be less wires and presumably less fires caused by them.
The 2023 data, linked above, shows that the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, on a 12 acre footprint, two relatively small buildings, produced more electricity than all the wind industrial parks in California spread over thousands of square miles of destroyed wilderness. All day long, this plant has been producing 2,267MW +/- 2 MW, reliably and continuously. With 15 such plants, on less than 200 acres, less than one square mile, all of California's electricity demand might be met using very little land area, and without dumping climate gases into the planetary atmosphere.
All of the solar and wind infrastructure in California (and elsewhere) will be landfill before today's newborns finish college (if there is college to finish). Future generations will need to clean all that shit up and replace it somehow, doing so in a world with depleted resources and extreme temperatures. This, as I take it, is a crime against the future.
It is unconscionable to say that less gas is acceptable. Only NO gas is acceptable to me.
The longer we lie to ourselves, the more we act to destroy the future of humanity and indeed, all living things.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
= new reply since forum marked as read