Bad Energy v Healthy Energy

RENEWABLES are bad energy. They are gluttons for land AND require massive subsidies, yet their juice is super expensive. They also can become deadly. To wit: The Moss Landing BESS Bomb incinerated 10 million pounds of lithium and heavy metals on January 16, 2025. 

NatGas & nukes are healthy energy. They are slender, taking almost no land and no sea. They actually make money, even as their juice costs less than from RENEWABLES. Their profitability makes them strong income generators, as many fixed-income retirees can attest. Yes, they are risky, all energy carries risk, yet they are also proven and largely tamed. 

California needs juice, lots of juice. Hell, we needed lots more juice before charge-hungry EVs came on the scene, and well before AI data centers created ravenous new demand. 

We need even more now, not least to get the price down. Thousand-dollar electric bills are not unknown in California. High utility bills hit the middle class hardest. To wit, Christmas lights were sparse in Carmel Valley this year because folks couldn’t afford their PG&E bill. 

Footprints Vary

The land required for energy generation varies widely due to the varying energy density of different fuels. For instance, nuclear energy generates vast amounts of electricity on slivers of land due to its exceptional energy density. At the other end of the scale, wind energy requires fully 300-times more land than nuclear to generate the same amount of juice.

Given that we highly value our California landscape and seascape, it's worth considering how much footprint each form of generation would require to fully power the Golden State.

Fuel Alternatives

California employs six main forms of "fuel" for electricity generation: nuclear, natural gas, solar, onshore wind, hydroelectric and geothermal. The first four are the main expansion candidates, along with offshore wind. Here they are side-by-side, showing the footprint each would need to fully electrify California: teeny for natgas up to morbidly obese for wind.

Form	Square Miles	Relative to Natural Gas	Relative to Nuclear
Natural Gas	2		10%
Nuclear	22	10X
Solar	2,755	1,312X	125X
Onshore Wind	6,929	3,300X	315X
Offshore Wind	6,552	3,120X	298X

BAD ENERGY

Solar

Solar is very inefficient in land use, requiring 1,312 times more land than natural gas and 125 times more land than nuclear power. It is also intermittent, so this estimate includes land for the required battery storage BESS plants to match California’s continuous demand.

Rooftop solar mitigates this profligate land use, fine. OTOH, solar farms gotta go. They're land-use villains, egregious blotches on the California landscape. Hell, they've already consumed vast swaths of wilderness, including thousands of Joshua Trees in Kern County.

Onshore Wind

Onshore wind is a land hog, requiring a whopping 3,300 times more land than natgas and fully 315 times more than nukes. Big Wind Farms pollute our landscapes, from the Salinas Valley to the San Gorgonio Pass. What's gonna happen when they inevitably go bankrupt? Will their ginormous towers of solid waste be left for future civilizations to discover?

Offshore Wind

Offshore wind in California's Pacific waters was funded by the Green New Deal and thus was perilously close to reality under Biden-Harris. Save the Whales, Kill Offshore Wind, my 2024 post, covered that horrifying risk. Offshore wind is also extremely surface-area inefficient, requiring 3,120 times more area than natural gas and almost 300 times more than nuclear, albeit that area would be in the precious Pacific Ocean, not on the California landmass.

 HEALTHY ENERGY

Natural Gas

Natural gas is far and away the most land-efficient electricity source. Grok's calculation that it would only take 2 square miles of natgas power plants to electrify all of California was so shocking, I asked Grok to double-check it. The result came back the same. Here's the link.

Natgas is also clean burning and cost efficient, the latter because of America's bountiful gas from the the Shale Revolution. In short, natural gas is extremely healthy power, and cheap.

Nuclear

Nuclear power is the other extremely land-efficient power source. While land-use is the topic of this post, it's also worth noting that 20th century concerns about nuclear have been substantially overcome by current designs and standards. And, it's still 100% emission free! In short, nuclear power is now healthy power. Its next-gen era beckons — small & modular.

Healthy Energy = Golden Ticket

Land use is only one characteristic when considering how to grow California's electricity generation. Cost, safety, reliability and cleanliness are others. (CO2 isn't worth considering.)

However, it is clear that natgas and nukes are far and away the most parsimonious in their consumption of California's golden landscape, and our seascape for offshore wind. They're also the most affordable and the most reliable. Therefore, they are healthy energy forms.

Speaking of reliability, "Renewables" (solar and wind) require Battery Electric Storage Systems to cover for their intermittent nature, and/or natural gas or nuclear to provide so-called base-load power. Those BESS plants are exceptionally dangerous, as demonstrated by the recent Moss Landing Disaster. (Three Mile Island was less toxic than Moss Landing!)

In short, California needs much more energy generation. That new energy could be and should be substantially cheaper than the expensive and wasteful RENEWABLES promulgated in recent years. California's new energy must also be safer and absolutely reliable. Two healthy forms of electricity generation meet those criteria: nuclear and natural gas. They are the golden ticket for powering the Golden State into the Golden Age.

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Data Source

Grok provided the data for this post based on the following prompt:

• C = California electricity consumption

• A = Area: California square miles

• N = Nuclear: Square miles for sufficient nuclear power plants to produce C, ignoring transmission.

• G = Gas: Square miles for sufficient natural gas power plants to produce C, ignoring transmission. Also ignore extraction land requirements. The natgas is mostly if not exclusively imported into California. Stupid is as stupid does.

• S = Solar: Square miles for sufficient solar farms to produce C, ignoring transmission but including required BESS plants.

• W = Wind, Onshore: Project Site Area in square miles for sufficient onshore wind power plants to produce C, ignoring transmission but including required BESS plants.

• W2 = Wind, Offshore: Project Site Area in square miles for sufficient offshore wind power plants to produce C, ignoring transmission but including required BESS plants.

• Calculate each of these variables and also N/A, G/A, S/A, W/A, W2/A.