Sammy Roth is an energy & environment reporter for the LA Times. Last week he asked a serious question on Twitter: Would it really be so bad if we had occasional blackouts as the cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels sooner?

Serious question for energy/climate people…

How bad would it be if growing levels of solar on the grid — and continued gas-plant closures — resulted in occasional, relatively limited power outages on hot evenings? Assuming that only lasted a few years?

— Sammy Roth (@Sammy_Roth) July 14, 2023

I’m not an energy writer for a major newspaper but this immediately strikes me as a terrible idea. Yesterday he wrote an entire column about this starting with this rephrased version of his question:

What’s more important: Keeping the lights on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, or solving the climate crisis?…

Gas plants…supplied 42% of California’s electricity last year, according to a federal tally…

Could we get started ditching gas sooner — and save some money — by accepting a few more blackouts for the next few years?

Immediately, I see several problems. The first one that jumps out at me is the word “lights” in is first sentence. Here’s what we actually know about blackouts in California. They only happen in the summer, usually when there’s a heatwave. There is a specific time of day when they are most likely. That time is between about 4pm and 7pm. Why then? Because two things are happening during that time.

First, the energy produced from solar power is starting to drop off. I have solar panels installed on my house so I can tell you that from about 10:30 to 2pm they produce a lot of power. Today, for instance, my 8kW system was generating 7.38kW around 12:30 on a clear, sunny day. That’s close to the real world max for the system. But by 4pm generation has dropped off to less than half of that and continues dropping quickly from there.

The other thing happening in the afternoon is that the heat that has been building up all day in attics and on concrete tends to peak. This is the the time when people most need fans and AC to cool their homes. Eventually, by maybe 8pm the sun goes down and everything starts to cool off. You might still run the AC a little but it won’t be running as hard as it was in the late afternoon.

So if you think of these two things together on a graph, solar generation is dropping off and AC usage is going up, this is the moment when there is going to be a blackout if we don’t have some reliable alterative source of power like nuclear or natural gas.

Getting back to Sammy Roth, the problem with the blackout isn’t going to be that people are sitting around in the dark. If it happens it will probably been on a long summer day hours before the sun goes down. The problem is that people will lose their ability to cool their homes when it’s most needed. Indeed, that’s what some people told Roth when he asked.

When I posed it to John Moura — director of reliability assessment and performance analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corp. — he only half-jokingly described it as “a dagger to the heart.”…

Of the hundreds of people who responded to my question, most rejected the idea that more power outages are even remotely acceptable — for reasons beyond mere convenience. A former member of the L.A. Department of Water and Power’s board of commissioners wrote that “someone dies every time we have a power outage.” An environment reporter in Phoenix — where temperatures have exceeded 110 degrees for a record 20 straight days — said simply, “Yikes.”…

“It’s not really about keeping the lights on. It’s about keeping people alive,” Moura said.

Exactly right. Downplaying the idea of blackouts as “keeping the lights on” only shows you haven’t really thought about this very hard (or you’re trying to deceive people). Roth also comes up with another objection to his own plan which is explicitly partisan. If the grid goes down, the right will seize on that as proof renewable energy doesn’t work.

You’re damn right! And do you know why the right would do that? Because blackouts would be proof that it doesn’t work. Put another way, the right would complain and they’d be absolutely right to do so.

The head of CALISO which operates the grid in California said something similar: “They didn’t sign up for a clean, affordable, less reliable grid,” he said. “They signed up for a clean, reliable and affordable grid.”

Roth says he agrees that the less disruption the better, but then goes ahead and adds that maybe it’s just a sacrifice we should be prepared to make:

After reporting on clean energy for most of the last decade, I’ve increasingly come to the conclusion that solving climate change will require sacrifices — even if only small ones — for the sake of the greater good. Those might include lifestyle changes such as driving less or eating less meat. They might also include accepting that large-scale solar farms will destroy some wildlife habitat, and that rooftop solar panels — despite their higher costs — have an important role to play in cleaning up the grid.

Maybe learning to live with more power outages shouldn’t be one of those sacrifices.

Sitting in a sweltering home with no power during a heat wave is not a sacrifice anyone should have to make. Frankly, it’s weird leftist ideas like this that convince at least half the country that environmentalists are all lunatics.

The correct answer here isn’t hard. The state needs more power. It’s fine to build more solar and more battery storage but we also need more nuclear and more gas plants. Those are going to be needed for many years to come. Anyone who claims otherwise is probably okay with having you (or your elderly parents) sit in a sweltering home with no power during a heatwave.