Even as reporters and residents reveal additional deadly, destructive consequences of the Los Angeles wildfires and people, worldwide, see more Los Angeles and California government errors that contributed to the conflagration, another, northern, California fire rages, and testifies to the dangerous central plans of Gavin Newsom and his fellow California Climate Cultists.
It's the Moss Landing Power Plant, in Monterey County. It hosts the world's largest lithium Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), with a capacity of 750 megawatts (MW) and 3,000 megawatt-hours (MWh), and the California government (with federal subsidies) expanded it to that size in August 2023.
The fire will burn at temperatures between 2,700 and 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the fumes are potentially toxic, and could damage not just people, but thousands of acres of nearby farmland. But despite all this, Joe Biden just “directed” more subsidies to this and other forms of unworkable, catastrophically dangerous, Climate Cult sinkholes.
First, the battery blaze.
In order to understand how and why a giant battery facility like this exists in a state with plenty of potential access to oil, natural gas, and coal, it is essential to understand how deeply and broadly the charlatan Climate Change collectivists have manipulated the market for, and the creation and provision of, energy.
One of those is the 2018 California government mandate that all new homes must get half of their electric power via attached solar panels by 2030.
This not only was in immoral imposition on home builders, sellers, and buyers, it warped the market in favor of solar panel makers (the biggest of which are in China, where the panels are made cheaply thanks to the plants using plentiful electricity from coal plants) and the mandate has visited terrible consequences on home-owners, California taxpayers, and, now, residents in Monterey County, many of whom have had to evacuate to escape the dangerous toxic fumes.
As Straight Arrow News recently reported, this government mandate on new home construction -- purported by the Climate Charlatans to be a wondrous addition to their decades-long lineage of government manipulation of what should be a free market – led to what could have been anticipated, but the politicians ignored: very bad unintended consequences.
The foremost of them being that the solar panels on homes don’t generate power at night, when people are home. They generate power in the sunshine, when people are away and don’t use the power. And since the homes are not equipped to store all that power, and since, in their infinite so-called “wisdom,” Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) collectivized the homes by connecting all their arrays to the central grid, PG&E syphons away that power.
But, as Straight Arrow explains, this has led to tertiary problems.
Pacific Gas and Electric and the handful of smaller companies allowed to handle the California power system do not have the storage capacity to hold all the power this new socialist system sucks away from separate homes, so they try to store some of it in batteries, like the batteries this facility contains, in Monterey County.
But even those storage systems cannot keep the power for long. They only hold the power for upwards of four hours, before seeing massive losses. So corporations like PG&E actually sell much of that "juice" (enough to power half-a-million homes for a year) to interests in other states. This wasted amount is more than eight-times what was wasted in 2017.
This has led to 51 percent higher electric bills for California homeowners, and a waste of nearly $1 billion in electricity in 2024, alone.
And, lest we forget, this is the state where PG&E not only runs its spark-shedding power lines over state or federally (unconstitutionally) “owned” lands (causing fires such as the Camp Wildfire that killed 85 people in 2018, for which the corporation was found guilty on 84 felony counts), it is the state the Climate maniac Newsom wants to see packed with MORE electric vehicles, and to which the US EPA just gave the nod to ban traditional cars by 2035.
Related: Revealing Gavin Newsom's Hypocrisy in Wildfire Management and Political Tactics
So, when we see reports on this current blaze in Monterey County, we can trace numerous government errors and machinations, mandates, and lies that led to this implantation of wasteful, dangerous, expensive technology.
The Wall Street Journal reports that between 1,200 and 1,500 people already have been evacuated from their homes around the inferno, and:
“Schools were closed Friday in northern Monterey County. County health officials advised residents to stay indoors with windows and doors closed and to turn off ventilation systems.
Officials nationwide are grappling with how to address fires started by lithium-ion batteries, which burn rapidly and can emit toxic fumes.”
No kidding. And, seven months ago, the “Gateway” lithium battery site fire, near San Diego, burned for eleven days.
But, despite all of these facts, and in the face of the stark reality that the political forces controlling California’s government, those that have run the US Presidency and numerous agencies for many years, and many international Climate grifters, have worked to stifle California’s bountiful petrochemical energy supply, President Joe Biden in his final days in office has added to the insanity.
Seeking Alpha reports that Friday, Biden and his goons announced his new $15 billion “Loan Guarantee” (i.e. a tax-funded, blow-market-rate loan) to PG&E to expand its “investment” in, among other things, so-called “Climate Resilience” projects and, you got it, more battery-based storage facilities.
Literally, as the Monterey facility burned like the surface of the sun, Biden sent more tax loot to the corporation, to light our cash afire.
Perhaps some of your friends live in the Los Angeles area, where the devastation is like nothing the residents there have ever seen. Many of my friends in that region have lost their homes.
Perhaps some of you recall the multiple Napa Valley fires of the past decade, one of which forced a friend of mine to leave his home to the flames, and he had only seven-minutes of warning.
The desperate lithium fire situation today in Monterey, the desperate living situations for those who have survived the LA fires, the tragic losses of so many due to so many previous blazes, are all brushstrokes in the same vivid and ugly picture.
It’s a picture of Climate Cult lies, political influence, pork, and utter dismissal of the US Constitution, markets, and freedom.
If only more people could use the blinding light of these terrible fires to illuminate the corrupt political connections and ham-handed mandates. If only people could separate from the government grid, we would all be better off.
But at least we can sound the alarm, and keep doing so, to alert more folks, and ask them to embrace freedom.
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