About the politics of California's energy grid

Very well-written and enlightening. What actually happened was in fact a major humiliation for idiot fossil fuels cheerleaders. But like all right-wing pundits they don't have to worry about job security, because their jobs don't involve actually being right about anything. They're about telling target audiences what feeds their motivated reasoning and cognitive rigidity. In the vernacular, what "pushes their buttons," emotionally.

The text message dinged and bleeped and buzzed millions of phones shortly after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 6, spreading panic across the Golden State. It was the notification that so many Californians had feared and anticipated — the signal that soon the entire state would be plunged into an un-air-conditioned dystopia of its own making, otherwise known as rolling blackouts.

Conservative pundits had prophesied this moment for months, warning that California would pay for forsaking fossil fuels and choosing solar and wind and geothermal power instead. Then the mainstream media piled on with headlines asking: How could the state possibly handle a flood of new electric vehicles draining the grid when it couldn’t keep the lights on now?

...Yet at 5:48 p.m., when demand remained at an unsustainable 50,388 megawatts, state officials sent out another text, this time urging Californians to unplug their devices, ease off on the AC and otherwise do what they could to conserve power. Enough folks heeded the call that in the ensuing hour, demand fell by more than 3,000 megawatts — or almost one-and-a-half Diablo Canyon nuclear plants’ worth.

It did the trick. At about 9 p.m. Californians’ phones dinged and buzzed and chirped yet again with another message from CAISO, the grid operator: The emergency was over, crisis averted, put away the candles and get back to your binge-watching. A few days later, the heat finally eased. There were no statewide rolling outages, the grid stood up to extreme weather, and fossil fuel advocates’ attempt to politically weaponize the predicted blackouts fell flat. - High Country News