Opinion: California’s deluge has a hydroelectric silver lining
California is an elemental maelstrom branded as a laid-back idyll; a “beautiful fraud” as environmentalist Marc Reisner put it. The pitch has faltered in recent years, as first wildfires and now torrential rains have claimed lives, wrecked infrastructure and displaced whole towns. Yet the atmospheric rivers deluging the state today may offer a silver lining of sorts later this year, during California’s summer blackout season. Risk of wildfires is one factor that can prompt electricity shutoffs in California during the summer. A more prosaic reason is that hot evenings can raise demand for air conditioning just as the sunset switches off the state’s vast, but variable, solar energy, pushing the grid to its limits.
-Written by Liam Denning, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities.