California is in the midst of an enormous stupidity crisis. Californians have been sitting in the dark because … they didn’t turn the lights on.

They say they’re short of electricity. Yes, they are. Between 1988 and 1998, California’s electricity consumption increased by 15 percent. Meanwhile California’s capacity to generate electricity shrank by five percent, even as the state hesitated to build new power lines to tap into neighboring states’ power supplies.

Californians didn’t want dams across their rivers, derricks on their ocean, power lines across their borders, or fossil fuel smoke in their sky. These might interfere with all the smart things Californians do, such as hang-glide. California was going to rely on “negawatts” – dramatic power conservation. (But California regulators put price controls on electricity that lowered prices, and even Californians weren’t dumb enough to skip a bargain.) And California was going to rely on alternative power generation.

With all the puffery from Silicon Valley dot.com start-ups, wind farms wouldn’t be a problem. But it turns out that alternative power generation is an alternative, mostly, to generating power.

…read more HERE.