Earth Day 2024 is today and Californians are being encouraged to turn off their lights. For now, it would be a voluntary exercise in futility. In a few years, though, maybe even this summer, the lights will go out on their own, as the grid becomes shakier while the state plunges into a dim future.
“Lights out” is primarily associated with Earth Hour, which usually arrives on the last Saturday in March. “Individuals from around the globe” are expected to turn “off their lights to show symbolic support for the planet and to raise awareness of the environmental issues affecting it.” Los Angeles has marked Earth Hour by turning off the lighted gateway pylons that lead to Los Angeles International Airport. City Hall, where critics would say the lights don’t shine too brightly anyway, has also flipped the switch. The 174,000 LED lights of the Pacific Wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, the only solar-powered Ferris wheel in the world, have turned off to “honor” Earth.
But Earth Day, which has been around since 1970, also has its own tribute to primitive living. Earth Day “tips” from local governments include turning off lights when leaving a room and unplugging electronics that aren’t in use. Schools observe Earth Day by disconnecting and shutting down technology.
How odd that rather than recognize the abundance of resources on Earth Day and Earth Hour, we are expected to celebrate what economist and American Enterprise Institute fellow Mark J. Perry calls “ignorance/poverty/backwardness,” and George Mason University economist Donald J. Boudreaux sees as “a collective effort toreturn humankind to the dark ages.”
While looking like North Korea for an hour here and part of a day there might be fashionable, there’s reason to believe that California is facing a future in which the lights will go out even when we don’t touch the switches. There’s an oncoming power crunch. It’s avoidable, but policymakers have nevertheless committed – and then recommitted – to it.
If California continues on its current path of closing gas-fired and nuclear power plants, falling behind in replacing lost energy with unreliable renewable sources, and outlawing sales of new fossil fuel-burning cars and light trucks in 2035, then it will be unable to produce enough electricity to meet demand. By 2045, when the grid is to be, by legislation, connected to only renewables such as solar and wind, there will be a 21.1% power deficit.
Based on historical consumption patterns and adjusted for the 22 million or so EVs that will be on the road in 2045, California will need more than 336,000 gigawatt hours of electricity. However, the state will be producing only about 280,000 gigawatt hours unless it builds replacement capacity at a pace much faster than it has in recent history. And this doesn’t even consider the rising electricity needs caused by the state-required conversion of water heaters, stoves, and other appliances from natural gas to electricity.
But that’s merely the first chapter in a longer story. New players have entered the game, and the strain they will place on power production threatens “the nation’s creaking power grid,” the Washington Post reports. “Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country.”
Naturally California, along with Texas and Virginia, is a leading data-center hub. To grasp just how much more power will be required to operate the “gold rush of AI” and other new artificial intelligence apps, consider Google. Based in Mountain View, Ca., Google alone will need, according to the International Electricity Agency, “a tenfold increase of their electricity demand in the case of fully implementing AI in it.”
Policymakers have decisions to make that will be politically hard but, if based solely on reason, can actually be quite easy. They need to slow the retirement of gas plants and rather than shutting down nuclear power, California ought to become a leader in developing atomic energy. Nuclear has been recognized by the U.S. Energy Department as a clean, reliable and sustainable source of electricity that has a small footprint and generates minimal waste. The chair of the California Air Resources Board, Liane Randolph, even concedes that nuclear should not be “prematurely” crossed “off the list” of the state’s energy mix.
Earth Day should not be a time for looking back but rather an occasion to congratulate ourselves for moving forward, solving the problem of darkness that took man quite a few millennia to solve.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute
