California energy officials on Tuesday said the state’s power planning processes were insufficient to address a crushing heat wave in August that led to rolling blackouts for two days. In a preliminary analysis that was requested by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the heads of three state energy bodies said there was no single cause of the outages.
A coalition of 21 states [including California] sued the Trump administration Friday for rolling back what they say is a “rule that is, at its heart, the gutting” of America’s bedrock environmental law.
More than 140 cities and counties in California intend to update their long-term plans over the next two years to include environmental justice, meaning air pollution, water quality, and other factors affecting disadvantaged communities would get a closer look.
Local governments across the country typically have general plans that spell out long-term visions for land use, open space, housing, safety, and other planning factors. Some local governments haven’t updated their overall general plans since the 1970s, said Erik de Kok, a program manager in the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research.
Everybody had known for days that a heat wave was about to wallop California. Yet a dashboard maintained by the organization that manages the state’s electric grid showed that scores of power plants were down or producing below peak strength, a stunning failure of planning, poor record keeping and sheer bad luck.
California could see repeated rolling blackouts in the coming months in the face of extreme heat waves that have pushed power supplies to the edge.
Residents throughout the Golden State endured power shut-offs last weekend when demand surged and electricity supplies ran short. The California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s grid, predicted it could happen again through tomorrow as a dangerous heat wave continues.
California may see a 54 percent increase in rainfall variability by the end of this century, according to new research from the lab of Assistant Professor Da Yang, a 2019 Packard Fellow and atmospheric scientist with the University of California, Davis. Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Yang and his co-authors predict the entire West Coast will experience greater month-to-month fluctuations in extremely dry and wet weather, especially in California. The lead author is Wenyu Zhou, a postdoctoral researcher in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where Yang has a dual appointment.
The study explores the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO), an atmospheric phenomenon that influences rainfall in the tropics and can trigger everything from cyclones over the Indian Ocean to heatwaves, droughts and flooding in the United States.
Amid the deadly COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide uprisings for racial justice, California’s promise to fulfill the human right to water has never been more clear or urgent.
A year ago this month, the state legislature, led by Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia and Senator Bill Monning, passed and Governor Newsom signed the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund (SB 200) into law, the result of years of frontline community organizing and advocacy.
Precipitation extremes will likely intensify under climate change. However, much uncertainty surrounds intensification of high-magnitude events that are often inadequately resolved by global climate models. In this analysis, we develop a framework involving targeted dynamical downscaling of historical and future extreme precipitation events produced by a large ensemble of a global climate model. This framework is applied to extreme “atmospheric river” storms in California.
Four elected officials representing area water districts expressed frustration with state laws aimed at water conservation during an American Liberty Forum of Ramona informational meeting Saturday, June 27.
Roughly 50 attendees gathered at Ramona Mainstage to hear the “Water Regulations Today and Tomorrow” presenters discuss the pending impacts of Senate Bill 606 and Assembly Bill 1668, which were signed into law by former Gov. Jerry Brown in May 2018.
In an effort to move forward a $576 million Anderson Dam Seismic Retrofit Project, the California State Assembly passed AB 3005 on June 8, the Expedited Dam Safety for Silicon Valley Act, facilitating the construction of the project.
Assemblyman Robert Rivas (D-Hollister, Calif.), who wrote the bill, says the overwhelming vote of bipartisan support shows the importance in fixing the dam. “The clock is ticking on a catastrophic dam failure in case of a large earthquake,” he says, “and we can’t allow bureaucratic delay to increase risks to public safety, water security and environmental protections.”
