If energy may neither be created nor destroyed, where did all the energy in California go?
I recognize that California doesn’t have it’s own energy that is bound by state territories, but energy in a system is constant. I’m assuming California to be part of the earth system constant. Where is the excess energy? Potential energy in the atmosphere as heat?
Are we not producing energy quickly enough? Where is the potential energy at now? How do we get it back in a usable form?
You got it…
Energy used is returned to the environment as heat (this is even true for your body converting food).
Because our atmosphere is huge the net heat gain is swamped by local temperature variations. If you can figure how to extract all the energy used from a few degree differences in the atmosphere then I imagine you’ll become very rich.
Of course, you can use energy to create potential energy (i.e. raising a weight some distance) but when you go to get energy back (i.e. lowering the weight) you get less energy back then you put in (again via heat due to things like friction or other forms of resistance).
The state of California is by no means a closed system. Rivers, tides, power lines, cars, wind, the sun, and many other variables bring energy into and out of the state. In any event, California is by no means short of energy. Every moving object has it’s own kinetic energy. Every drop of oil has potential energy waiting to be released if it is burned. Everything that could possibly fall down has potential energy. Hell, all the mass in the entire state could potentially be converted directly into energy, which would produce the energy of several hundred million (at least) nuclear weapons.
The problem California has is that there is nowhere they can buy electricity from at the price they are allowed to sell it. A while ago, the state decided to try to get something for nothing by declaring that electricity could not be sold to consumers for more than 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour. The utilities were also required to sell off their power plants, and would then have to buy the power from the plants’ new owners at whatever the daily price of elictricity would be.
The utilities went along with the plan because they could make money selling electricity at 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour at the time. The whole set of stupid regulations was bundled up and called deregulation, and passed unanimously. In the meantime, California’s attitude towards power plants changed from “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) to “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone”(BANANA). Thus, California needed to import power from other states.
Fast forward to this year. The price of natural gas has skyrocketed. Thus, the power plant owners must raise the price they sell electricity for. They can do this as much as they want, especially if they aren’t in California. The utilities are required still to sell to the consumers at the same maximum price. When the maximum price someone is allowed to sell a commodity for is less than the lowest price they can buy it for, certain truths of economics come in to play.
In summary, California’s problems are primarily economic, compounded by a shortage of natural gas, and a shortage of power plants in the state.
The old adage “energy cannot be created or destroyed” completely ignores the effect of the 2nd Law and entropy (or unavailability). Thus the energy is not destroyed, just much less easy to use for any useful purpose. For example, when you step on the brakes in your car the kinetic energy of the car is converted to heat in the brakes. The energy is still all there, but what can you really do that is useful with hot brakes?