As Democrats tout their Green New Deal at their virtual convention, an ugly picture is emerging from California as to what that looks like.

According to Deadline Hollywood:

As temperatures broke records across the state, California energy officials announced the first rolling blackouts in the state since 2001 and warned that the state was bracing for what could be the largest power outage it has ever seen, likely on Monday.

And it was pretty bad, Caracas-bad if you lived in the wrong parts.  Yet this is the California that touts itself as "the model" for Democrats' climate action and what the Democrats holding their convention this week would like to impose on the rest of the states if, God forbid, Joe Biden gets elected president.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who's in the middle of this, and probably hearing from his Silicon Valley baron allies, is finally admitting the truth about the failure of green energy to deliver actual energy when it's needed, calling on the state to "sober up."

According to Breitbart, which is the only news agency out there not editing these "inconvenient truths" from its stories:

One reason the state lacked power, officials admitted, was its over-reliance on "renewables" — i.e. wind and solar power.

There was not enough wind to keep turbines going, Newsom said, and cloud cover and nightfall restricted solar power.

"While we've had some peak gust winds," he explained, "wind gust events across the state have been relatively mild."

...and...

"We failed to predict and plan these shortages," Newsom admitted boldly, "and that's simply unacceptable." He said he took responsibility for the crisis, and for addressing it immediately, so that "we never come back into this position again."

Newsom said the state would try to address shortfalls through conservation, and through procuring new sources of energy.

Though the state would continue its "transition" to 100% renewable energy, Newsom said, "we cannot sacrifice reliability as we move forward in this transition."

Sure enough, it was the state's greenie energy mandates, which require at least half of all energy produced in the state be from "alternative" energy sources by now, which, as can be seen, are not only pricier, but far less reliable and efficient.

According to Politico:

"It seems as if certain power plants for some reason were not able to deliver on the commitments to supply reserves and also supply energy," [said Michael Wara, director of Stanford University's climate and energy program and a member of the state's Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery Commission.]

Because the Friday outage started around 6:30 p.m., when solar is ramping down and gas-fired plants are ramping up, gas is the likely immediate culprit, Wara said. "The timing of all this strongly suggests problems with gas plants," he said.

Green energy, see, is desperately dependent on dirty-fuel gas plants to keep the virtue-signaling going.

What Newsom's butting heads against is called reality.

Democrats, whether in convention or in the solid-blue statehouses, are convinced that all they need to do to get America to go green is to wave their hands and command mandates.  Turns out these mandates are in direct conflict with hard matter.

Over at Power Line, John Hinderaker wrote in a memorable and brilliant post on Aug. 5 that there will never been all green energy — based on the massive resourcing it takes to enact this inefficient source of power:

Basic problems with these energy sources include inefficiency and intermittency. Wind turbines produce energy around 40% of the time, and solar panels do much worse than that in many parts of the country. So how does a utility ensure that the lights will go on, even at night when the wind isn't blowing?

The liberals' favorite answer is "batteries." Produce electricity when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and store the energy in batteries for use when electricity is not being generated. Batteries exist, of course; we use them all the time. But where is the battery that can store the entire output of a power plant or a wind farm? That battery does not exist. Further, battery storage is ruinously expensive. The cost of storing the entire electricity needs of the U.S. for even a day would be prohibitive.

But that isn't the worst of it. Wind and solar are low-intensity energy sources. It takes many acres of wind turbines to produce, on a best-case scenario, what a single power plant can produce. And solar panels are even worse. A single 3 mw wind turbine uses 335 tons of steel, 4.7 tons of copper, 3 tons of aluminum, 2 tons of rare earth elements, and 1,200 tons (2.4 million pounds!) of concrete. If we take seriously the idea of getting all of our electricity from wind and solar, where will all of those materials come from?

It's a huge must-read.  He concludes:

 "Green" energy is driven by two closely related things: 1) politics, and 2) enormous quantities of money being made by politically-connected wind and solar entrepreneurs. 

That Newsom is admitting this is a strong signal of just how bad it's gotten in the Golden State, which might be better known now as the blackout state.  Funny how those blackouts always turn up whenever socialism is in the saddle.

Image credit: Pikist public domain photo.