California's power grid stressed to the limit and maxed out

Gov. Newsom's extreme agenda to move California from fossil fuels to electricity supplied by renewable energy sources is on a collision course with reality, experts warned this week. California’s already maxed-out electric grid is nowhere near ready to support the government’s push for electric vehicles and other environmental mandates.

"The California power grid is stressed pretty much to the limit," California Policy Center co-founder and senior fellow Edward Ring said on a Fox Business this week. "Our ability to import energy as well as our ability to generate energy from renewables just isn't there, the storage isn't there or the transmission lines as well."

Ring explained that California would have to build a massive number of wind and solar farms to be able to replace fossil fuels and meet consumer demand. The scale of what is required would devastate California’s landscape.

"They're going to have to build an outrageous amount of wind and solar in a very short time if they want to accomplish their objectives of electrifying our whole transportation sector and all the heating and cooling required by our residential sector," Ring told Fox News in a separate interview earlier this week.

"You need to build seven or eight times as much solar power so that the capacity is sufficient to give you an output that you're going to actually need," Ring said. "And California's power grid consumes, on average, 50 gigawatts of power. If you were going to generate that kind of power with solar energy or with wind, you would be covering literally…tens of thousands of square miles."