California has the most stable U.S. grid due to its renewables plus batteries Anti-renewable fans often use California as an example of a state where the growth in solar and wind has increased the risk of electricity-grid blackouts. As it turns out, though, California’s largest grid, CAISO, is the most stable in the U.S., as evidenced by the fact that it had the lowest wholesale electricity prices among U.S. grids during the past year. There has even been no grid blackout since August 2020. Wholesale electricity prices include spot prices, which are the real-time immediate cost of electricity. When spot prices drop, wholesale prices drop. Low spot prices, thus low wholesale prices, mean it is easier to match instantaneous demand with supply on the grid. Because California never had a single period with high wholesale prices during the past year, it had the easiest time matching demand, thus the most stable grid. Why? Although California has grown so much solar and wind since 2023, causing fossil gas use to decline by 61 percent, it has also added more batteries than any other grid region. Batteries respond to a shortage in demand within 20 milliseconds, versus up to 5 minutes for gas. Whereas, California has low wholesale electricity prices, it has high retail prices. But such prices have nothing to do with renewables or batteries. They have to do with utilities passing onto customers the high cost of wildfires caused by transmission-line sparks from 2015 to 2026, undergrounding transmission lines to avoid fires, upgrading an aging transmission system, using some gas and nuclear, the San Bruno and Aliso Canyon gas disasters, and upgrading gas pipes due to San Bruno. Despite California’s high retail electricity prices, Californians pay 23 percent lower electricity bills than Texans because California is the most energy efficient state, using 61 percent less electricity per person than Texas. Lastly, among all 50 states, the more renewables, the lower retail electricity prices. In sum, renewables and batteries stabilize grids and reduce retail electricity prices on top of eliminating health and climate costs of fossil fuels. Grids with the lowest U.S. wholesale electricity price eia.gov/electricity/monthly/… TX pays 23% higher electricity bills than CA due mostly to CA's energy efficiency web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/… More renewables mean lower electricity prices web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/… Video youtube.com/shorts/Ypj-PQhb8…

No, sweetie. Donetsk was a city of a million roses when its own Ukrainian flag flew above it. Back then, it was also the fastest-growing and most rapidly prospering city in Ukraine -- home to what was the finest regional airport in Eastern Europe, one of the world's best football stadiums, a state-of-the-art railway terminal, and one of the cleanest, best-maintained cities in the region. Its elites were running Kyiv, and every time I visited Donetsk as a student, riding the famous trolleybus Route No. 2 through the city, I was amazed by how many new office buildings were appearing, how much money was flowing into the city, and how many international companies were opening their doors there. Fifteen years ago, to us kids from Donbas, Donetsk felt like the center of the universe because it had everything one could possibly dream of. It was a young city of universities and libraries, where the overwhelming majority of boys and girls from across Donbas went to study, including those from my own small hometown an hour away by bus. Names like Liverpool or Detroit Rock City may mean nothing to you, but our Ukrainian Donetsk was a city of great rock clubs and unforgettable concerts. We traveled there to see Western bands perform. We bought rock merchandise at the legendary Right House store near Krytyi Market. Scorpions, Rihanna, and Beyoncé performed at the famous Donbass Arena. Schoolchildren from across Donbas were bused in to watch Shakhtar Donetsk matches. The city even had a famous monument to The Beatles. It was a city where we sang songs on guitars in its beautifully maintained parks and along the Kalmius embankment before heading out to buy the famous "green Donetsk burgers." Our older friends moved there after graduation, formed rock bands, recorded full albums, and held wedding celebrations in the squares around Donbas Arena. We traveled there to visit the legendary Radio Market in search of films, music, and books. And then you arrived. And you turned the wealthiest, most prosperous Ukrainian city into a piece of shit. You deceived many of its people with sweet promises of Russian oil-fueled prosperity broadcast from television screens, but what you brought instead was war. You transformed a thriving city into a criminal wasteland ruled by ethnic gangs from Russia, into a kingdom of Stalinist terror straight out of the 1930s, complete with torture chambers in the infamous Izolyatsia prison camp. You turned the magnificent Donetsk Airport into lifeless gray rubble, while the vast stands of Donbas Arena have spent a second decade slowly being reclaimed by weeds instead of hosting Champions League finals and Metallica concerts. You swept away an entire generation of the city's men through your forced mobilization and threw them against Ukrainian machine guns until there were barely enough people left to keep basic municipal services running. Because of you, prosperous Donetsk became a withered desert without reliable water, because your war destroyed the canal system that carried water from the Siverskyi Donets River into Donbas. For years now, people have lived with chronic water shortages and have been reduced shitting into plastic bags forever. You dragged Donetsk back like seventy years in time. You turned it into a depressed backwater, devoid of hope and future. Even ten years ago, tens of thousands of people, the most active, the most talented, the most entrepreneurial, fled the city and found refuge in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. Many of them still remember our Donetsk with tears in their eyes, the Donetsk that existed before the arrival of the "Russian World." You transformed it into something that even my pro-Russian acquaintances are shocked to see when they return after years of occupation. It was you who trampled the million roses of our Ukrainian Donetsk into shit beneath the tracks of your tanks and the boots of your death troops, turning them into a foul swamp of death and despair. And that stain will forever remain on the conscience of fascist Russia, which brings nothing but destruction, decay, and death wherever it goes.