So yeah, in 2019, we had double the national average with major events. Wildfires sucked. But it's not like coal power would have made our wildfires better. It's the fault of our forest management, not our renewable energy.
Those states interruptions are due to storms and having green trees. Something that is no where near as common in Cali. A power interruption from storms and brown outs from lack of juice are very, very different circumstances.[/quote]
oggsmash - As I said, the major event power outages in 2019 California were overwhelmingly from wildfires. Lack of juice is not considered a major event - so it gets counted in the non-major-event total. If you look at the data in the page below, that is the dark blue in the graph. As I said earlier, for California it is 2 hours per customer per year which is the same as the national average.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45796Below are the graphs for 2017 and 2018, for reference. California is not listed in top five for those years. There is a source to download the complete data, but it's in Excel rather than easy-to-read graphs.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=35652https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37652We're at capacity for hydro. Wind and solar are already in place in the areas where it makes the most sense, and they're also useful in other circumstances where a small amount of power needs to be generated in an area where we'd have to extend the power grid (those solar panels on certain traffic lights, for instance). But otherwise, we should be switching to gas and nuclear instead of pretending that wind and solar are miracle energies, and pushing money into basic research on things like batteries and piezoelectric panels instead of subsidizing consumer end-products.
As I think you know, I fully support switching to nuclear - and I'll accept gas over coal. Still, while I agree that wind and solar are not miracle energies, they are nowhere near capacity in the U.S. For example, Arizona has less than 10% solar power, and I think that is far less than it's potential. It could easily have 30% or more solar given the environment. Much of Germany's solar investment was dumb, but there's a huge difference between Arizona and Germany in terms of solar efficiency.
And while hydropower is closer to capacity, it still has significant room to grow. A DOE report estimated that it could grow from 101 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in 2015 to nearly 150 GW by 2050.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/articles/hydropower-vision-new-chapter-america-s-1st-renewable-electricity-sourceThe main thing holding hydro back is misguided environmentalism. For example, California doesn't consider hydro power to be "renewable", and so is disfavoring hydro power as well as nuclear in its plans because of its legislated renewable mandate, and blocks any new hydro or nuclear plants.
More broadly, yes there are boondoggles from green energy companies - but oil and coal companies lie just as much as the green energy companies. They're all companies looking for a profit.