I saw an interesting opinion piece yesterday entitled “Mandating Grid Dependency” by someone named Jim Cardoza. It concerns California’s increasing push to make everything electric: Cars, heating, cooking, whatever.
This being California, the push toward all-electric everything is not merely being encouraged, but increasingly mandated. Any legacy energy – gasoline production and sales, natural gas appliances sales and repair, propane water heaters or heat sources – are being blatantly phased out and/or heavily regulated to the point of extinction.
This is, of course, at a time when electrical costs for California citizens has increased 47 percent since 2019. As Cardoza put it, “There seems to be something incoherent about making electricity
exceptionally expensive while simultaneously requiring citizens to use
more of it.”
But California politicians seem to be blind to the biggest elephant in the room: In a state 100 percent dependent on electricity, what happens during a power outage? Cardoza puts it this way: “Yet the financial cost may not be the greatest danger created by electrifying virtually everything. There is another cost that is largely ignored: concentrating life’s necessities in a single system creates a single point of failure.”
This push to electrify everything violates the single most important rule for preparedness: Three is two, two is one, one is none. Redundancy is crucial. To forcibly mandate the elimination of redundancy is dangerous to the point of insane.
“The issue, therefore, isn’t whether electric cars, heat pumps, solar panels, induction stoves, or electronic payments are good technologies,” writes Cardoza. “The question is whether politicians should deliberately eliminate or discourage alternatives, making citizens dependent upon one centrally regulated infrastructure for nearly everything.”
What are your thoughts? Should electrical everything be mandated for the sake of a net-zero goal, or is this a fool’s errand?
