If you get a bill in the mail for a monthly charge of $1,873.90, who would you expect to be paying? A mortgage company? A landlord?

Not in California. That bill covers electricity for a suburban house near San Diego, according to the Wall Street Journal. Thanks to the state's refusal to use fossil fuels and to fund green-energy sources, the costs have come due for utility customers, in a state where power costs are rising faster than anywhere else in the country:

California is doing all it can to expand renewable energy production and rebuild its electrical infrastructure after flaws led to a series of devastating wildfires. 

The state’s big utilities are spending billions to bury power lines and insulate wires, while at the same time moving quickly away from fossil fuels by building big solar and wind farms and transmission lines to carry the power. 

First off, the wildfire problem doesn't come so much from the above-ground power lines, which have been around for decades. It comes from the state's refusal to perform the necessary forest management to keep these power lines safe, as had been the case until radical environmentalists began objecting to those efforts. At some point it makes sense to bury the lines, but that could have been done rationally over a longer period if the state cleared the trees and brush near the lines on a regular basis.

This is emblematic of the Golden State's irrational energy policies. Rather than assess long-term needs, including growth, California's ruling Democrat clique has consistently caved to the radical environmentalists. Their version of the Green New Deal has cut off scalable power generation sources and replaced them with highly inefficient solar and wind farms that produce unreliable levels of electricity and can't be scaled without seizing more and more land. Sacramento has chased out fossil-fuel sources and providers, literally so in the case of Chevron, while forcing vehicles onto a grid that already can't keep up with increasing demand. 

Democrats got these policies passed in part by promising voters subsidies for participating in the program. Now they're plotting on how to welch on the deal:

California has seen some of the sharpest increases in the country—electricity prices in the state have nearly doubled during the past decade and are now higher than those of anywhere but Hawaii. The consumer advocate’s office at California’s utilities regulator has called the trajectory “untenable.”

Lawmakers, regulators, utilities and consumer-advocacy groups in the state are battling over how to fix the rising power costs and questioning who should pay for them. Legislators are trying to make the state’s utilities regulator dial back a fixed monthly charge that big utilities will levy on consumers next year. Other politicians have tried to repeal a major cut in rooftop solar subsidies that had made it more affordable for some households to generate their own power.

California's ruling clique took this page right out of Animal House (NSFW):

This one paragraph perfectly illustrates the incompetency of the state's policy makers:

California now has so much electricity during the day in some months because of its growing portfolio of solar power that the grid operator is turning increasing amounts away—roughly 840,000 megawatt-hours in April alone, enough to power more than 930,000 homes. There aren’t enough batteries to store the excess. Then, not enough power is generated after dark, when it’s needed most, as people come home, turn on their air conditioners and watch TV or do household chores.

Gee, who would have thought about the fact that people need power more at home when the sun goes down? Man, you'd have to be some kind of a Biblical prophet to have predicted that! Or just someone with a lick of sense who wasn't obsessed with Chicken Little-ism over the weather. The same geniuses who want to tell us what the high/low temps will be in 2050 can't figure out what happens when the sun sets.

Anyway. The problem doesn't just impact residents but also businesses in California, and smaller businesses more than others. They typically have narrower margins and much less economy of scale to absorb what are essentially tax increases created by idiotic government policies on energy production. If anyone wonders why people are fleeing California, just read through this report and look at the electricity bills hitting California homes.

But this problem isn't entirely unique to California, either. Texas got caught with its pants down in early 2021 because their politicians had begun to take out scalable and workable energy production in favor of solar and wind, as well as not properly winterizing any of these energy sources. Since then, Texas has largely fixed the latter problem but is still dragging its feet on adding additional scalable capacity, which leads to shortage conditions in summer. Texas is nowhere near as bad as California, but it's been moving in that direction for too long thanks to the climate-change radical activists, and so have too many other states.

We had all better take a lesson from the coming economic collapse in California. These energy prices are unsustainable, and anyone with mobile capital is already fleeing when they can. The rest will be stuck in the rubble of what should be one of the better economies in the world -- and used to be, before the radical clique took over in Sacramento. 

Also, the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today's show features:

• A Basement Honeymoon for Harris? 
• What do the polls tell us -- and what do the media tell us about the polls? Andrew Malcolm and I take a close look at the latest CBS News/YouGov poll, and what it tells us about the fundamentals of the race. 
• We also discuss how Donald Trump lost his focus last week, and debate whether a scandal story about Harris' husband will have any impact at all -- and whether it should.  

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!