Turning Brownouts Into Blackouts

1. So if you own 5 acres and typically use a lawn tractor to cut your lawn, I guess now you need a 500′ extension cord?

   Also what are commercial landscape/lawn maintenance companies supposed to do? Or construction companies?

2. I’m really curious how they think they’ll be able to make a “zero emission” generator in 2028. The only realistic option would be nuclear, and I know California won’t go for that. Maybe the CARB people think you can make an electric-powered generator and plug it into itself?

   Last one leaving California, please turn off the lights.

   1. > I’m really curious how they think they’ll be able to make a “zero emission” generator in 2028.

      They’re starting to call large battery packs “generators” now, even though they don’t generate anything…they only store power that was produced elsewhere. It’s about as honest as calling the Chinkvirus clot shot a “vaccine.”

   2. When the last one leaves California, the lights will already be out.

      And generators are no problem; you can just run them off house current…

3. I have a few thoughts on this total bullshit

   First. Power companies can not guarantee 100 percent uptime. It’s just the way it is. Nothing against them. That’s why critical places like hospitals, police stations and gas pumps have generators.

   Which leads to my second thought. Is this about control? Outlaw “inefficient” generators. Which ones will be available? Probably next to none. Honda, Yamaha and other major manufacturers that make small generators and even medium ones are not going to make every last model available for California. (Just look at the available firearms in California with that stupid roster).

   This effectively means unless you already own and old one – which will eventually break down and be irreplaceable at some point or if you aren’t wealthy enough to by a new green one- you are screwed.

   Think about people who have CPAP machines. Or people who are heat sensitive and need air conditioning. Or people who need heat no matter what etc. no generator for them could mean life altering or life ending if power goes out.

   Also. In general most Americans pay to buy cars for freedom. The freedom to go anywhere they like. When they like. This is not always an option with public transportation.

   Suppose the government decides – you have driven too much. Your carbon foot print is too high. Your electric car can not be charged at this time. We’ll drip feed your house just enough electricity to keep the lights on… if any power is available at all (California)

   Finally. Power isn’t green. Is it? Electric? Where does that electricity come from? It surely does not come 100 percent from windmills and solar. That’s a pipe dream. So. What happens when coal is burned to make power? That’s better than gas? What happens to all of the batteries in 10 to 15 years when all these electric cars get scrapped for electric cars generation 2.0?

   Gas works well. Gas has worked well for a long time.

   As Sarah Palin said before “DRILL BABY DRILL!”.

   1. I don’t think the same limits apply to fixed backup generators in California. Not a huge surprise, the wealthy can put in a fixed generator which does nothing most of the time, and has a company to come by and service it on a fixed schedule. Middle and low income families have to buy machines that can be purposed to other things.

      Additionally, there is the question of whether there will be fuel for non-fixed installations. If California is basically writing off gasoline and diesel as moto-fuels, then there is the question of availability for a disaster anyway. May as well go across the border for your fuel too.

      But Biden is dead set on making gas/diesel go away for the entire USA — so running a gasoline or diesel generator may become impossible anywhere, as there won’t economic incentive to produce moto-fuels in an affordable manner. Only for charge through industries that can pass enormous costs on.

   2. Honestly, as inefficient as conversion of energy to hydrogen for storage is, I’d prefer that option…

      At least you can buy a few tanks of Hydrogen before a natural disaster, and run your fuel cells off of them.

      The solar “backup generators” (read: big lithium ion batteries) are basically dependent on the sun and undamaged solar cells (delicate things in reality). Night is when you need the power to stay warm, and converting electricity to heat is a classically bad use of electricity.

      I would think the biggest area solar “backup generators” fail is during winter storms. Typically never clear after a winter storm, and usually freakishly cold, and lots of snow pack on living quarters.

      I guess we buy propane until it also is no longer available? Or produce methane from our sewer tanks 🙂

   3. Remember that Cali gets a large part of its electric from hydro in the Northwest and nuclear in Arizona, rather than generating their own. By 2024, the Cartels will be smuggling generators across the border at Yuma, along with all that Chinese Fentanyl.

4. “California will be stationing some Stasi state agents in the parking lot to report the car numbers back to the Fuehrer HQ”

   Yup. Back when I lived in NYFC (Staten Island) they built an Ikea in Elizabeth NJ, right over the bridge. It was in a reduced tax zone (3% sales tax instead of the normal 6%, as compared to NYFC’s 8.25%). I went there one time to pick up a few things and have some meatballs, and a week or so later I got a letter from NY reminding me that I was responsible for the difference in sales tax between Ikea and NYC, and to please send a check to this address. The City had sent some poor schmuck to Ikea to write down NY license plate numbers.

   My reply was terse, profane, and anatomically improbable.

   I wanted to organize a bunch of people to go to Ikea, buy the cheapest thing they had, and mail in a check for 5 cents of tax owed, the processing of which would cost the city FAR more than the revenue gained.

   Mark D

5. These things are fine for cities, but outside cities it’s just stupid. What are you going to do when some idiot cuts the power line? Or are they expecting everyone to have Tesla Powerwalls and masses of solar power? And I can just imagine how long a Powerwall will last if you plug a ride-on lawnmower into it.

   I can, however, sympathise with the issue of leafblowers. Apparently they are particularly polluting:

   ‘Today, a commercial operator using one backpack leaf blower for one hour generates the same smog-forming emissions as a car driving 1100 miles. ‘

   1. I’ll need some additional evidence before I believe this one.

      Driving a car 1,100 miles while getting say 30 mpg, burns a little over 36 gallons of fuel.
      Operating a backpack leaf blower for an hour will burn maybe a half gallon.

      I don’t care how efficient that car is. Each gallon of gasoline burned produces approximately 19 pounds of carbon dioxide. 36 gallons from the example above produces a total of about 684 pounds of CO2.

      The backpack leaf blower burning a half gallon will produce about 10 pounds of CO2.

      I’m sure the leaf blower is not as efficient as the car, no catalytic convertor, no electronic fuel injection etc. But in order to make the argument that the leaf blowers pollute more, that data is going to have to be seriously manipulated.

6. What about silicon valley’s tech world?

   I’ve never seen a datacenter, even a small one, that didn’t have a generator as backup. Sometimes two.

   The medical lab where I used to work had two locomotive sized generators, which would run 24×7 some weeks in the summer. We were paid to do that by the electric company. or got credits.

   Far as internal combustion engines go, ever been to an older city in the winter? There’s a smell to it. You know what that is? Oil fired boilers.

   I’ve never heard any one of these greenies get on that. Only thing you’d hear is how awful the poor people will suffer in the winter due to heating oil prices.

   There was a lawn service doing work around here that was all electric. The big mower looked like a friggn zamboni. Must have had a dozen car batteries in it. Must have gone under since I haven’t seen them in awhile.

   Can’t wait to watch what happens when they start hassling the little brown people that do lawns.

   1. It’s coming. You tube has been rife with videos about heat pumps the last few months.

      Even heat pump hot water heaters. In the summer, it has the potential to lower your electric bill by moving some of the unwanted heat in your home, into your hotwater tank.

      Also, heat pump clothes dryers.

      One must wonder about the reliability of these systems however. I sure would.

      Back in the 80’s there were ground sourced central heat pump systems. But there was always issues with the components dissolving from corrosion, etc.

      Maybe technology can overcome these items… but I would have to see cold hard unadulterated numbers to believe it. Or six neighbors get them and not have any big issues for 10 years .

7. There’s a Home Depot in Tijuana.
   .

8. And unintended consequences of this: vehicle engines will get larger, have inverters installed, and run very inefficiently to power RV’s…

   Hopefully the CARB (BTW, when I lived and voted in California I never voted for any CARB agent) has figured out how to prevent earthquakes and other natural disasters…. Cause recovering from them in the dark will be difficult.

   1. Technically speaking, I don’t think you need an inverter. Cars already generate alternating current via an alternator and convert that to DC to charge the 12v battery. Converting that DC back to AC seems inefficient to me (but I’m no engineer).

      1. You have too anyway. Car alternator does not run at fixed frequency (engine idle speed changes, output frequency changes). It could be argued it *is* more efficient to keep it AC, step it up through a three phase transformer, then rectify and invert (saves the step up stage in silicon). But there is a weight penalty for the transformer.

         Would take some precision calculations to determine increase in weight of vehicle with transformer, vs. solid state step up before inversion stage.

         I would note, many of what are considered the “best” home power inverters actually still use a big heavy single phase iron core transformer. So there is that…

         1. BTW, you still need magnetics in a Solid State voltage step-up application, but they can be MUCH lighter than a big iron transformer.

         2. Yeah.. exactly what I was thinking. I was just about to say you forgot about the magnetics.
            😉

9. And when is California going to get on the stick and start building nuke plants to provide all this required electricity?

   Stop laughing; I’m serious.

   1. So are they. Never happen.

      1. Along the lines of “God makes shortages, man makes famines.”

         1. In the 80’s, CA had nukes located in Sacramento (Rancho Seco), San Luis Obispo (Diablo Canyon), and San Clemente (San Onofre); Seco and Onofre have been decommissioned and largely dismantled, Diablo Canyon is scheduled to be.

10. I want to take a truckload of $500 generators there after the ban and sell $1000 candy bars with a free generator with every purchase.

11. I suspect the real reason for this is so no one can be outside of any sort of dependence on some sort of public provision.

    This won’t impact the big tech locations or .gov facilities. They will be exempt, just like the lockdowns went after a gym owner and not wal mart.

    The people who will pay for this bullshit is the rest of us because Stihl will be too craven to tell Cali to fuck itself, and too cheap to maintain separate product lines

    1. Stihl and others now have some extremely good electric lawn and yard power tools, so I doubt they’ll be too worried. 60V mowers can cut a quarter acre home lawn on a full charge, and buying a second battery and charger will more than offset the cost of fuel after a couple of years of ownership. Plus you can use the same batteries in string trimmers, backpack blowers, edgers, chain saws, tillers, etc. The upfront costs for landscapers will be high but once all the spare batteries/chargers have been acquired they’ll be just fine.

       As someone who loathes the hours-long droning of high powered gasoline backpack blowers used by the commercial landscapers in my suburb I’m not against the small engine ban in general, but including portable generators and pumps is utterly ridiculous. For a state with earthquakes that can render hundreds or thousands of square miles powerless for months, this is utterly short-sighted and dangerous. If your lawn doesn’t get cut or your leaves blown for a week who gives a crap, but very few people are equipped to live without electricity for more than a few hours.

       1. OMG, you can’t have people not maintaining their landscape, the Code Enforcement People will have fits.

          1. Cage match between code enforcement groups? Bring on the popcorn!

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