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   Daniel Lakeland (dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 03-May-2024 23:00:11 JST Daniel Lakeland

   In around 1979 my father together with a small number of electrical power engineers and activists sued the California Public Utility Commission to try to force them to allow solar and combined-heat-and-power cogeneration. He was naive about how much entrenched power there was. The CPUC was captured by Pacific Gas and Electric, and argued successfully that it was incredibly unsafe and impossible to allow people to generate electricity in their homes. 50 years later there's so much solar cogen

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     Daniel Lakeland (dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 03-May-2024 23:00:10 JST Daniel Lakeland

     in reply to

     My father died 15 years ago or so without ever seeing this come about, but if a larger group of people with more power had forced this issue through the courts in the late 1970's we could have had fairly widespread solar and combined-heat-and-power generation in CA by 1989, dramatically reducing greenhouse emissions from CA over the last 30 years.

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     Daniel Lakeland (dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 03-May-2024 23:00:11 JST Daniel Lakeland

     in reply to

     That they have to actually WASTE electricity in the middle of the day. This graph shows the total electric demand minus renewable generation capacity (dark purple), that amount went negative today around 10am, so they have to waste electricity.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.