The company behind the highly criticized “California Forever” project, a plan backed by Silicon Valley billionaires to build a green city for up to 400,000 people on California farmland, withdrew the ballot measure for the election in November, according to a letter released Monday.

The decision followed a discussion between Mitch Mashburn, chair of the board of supervisors in Solano county, and Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader and chief executive of California Forever.

The company will instead seek approval through the county’s standard processes and proceed through the usual county process for negotiating and executing a development agreement.

“I think it signals Jan Sramek’s understanding that while the need for more affordable housing and good paying jobs has merit, the timing has been unrealistic,” said Mashburn.

Solano county supervisors were scheduled to vote on whether to approve California Forever’s plan to rezone 17,500 acres of farmland near Fairfield for the city or let voters decide in November.

The move to withdraw the measure comes a week after a report by Solano county stated that the proposed city would likely cost the county billions of dollars, create substantial financial deficits, reduce agricultural production, harm climate resilience and potentially threaten local water supplies.

Sramek said California Forever would work with the county on the environmental report and development agreement over the next two years, aiming for approval from county supervisors in 2026.

“We take our time to make informed decisions that are best for the current generation and future generations,” said Mashburn. “We want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to be heard and get all the information they need before voting on a General Plan change of this size.”

California Forever, which spent more than $800m buying in excess of 60,000 acres of mostly agricultural land, had released its own study claiming the new city would generate billions in economic activity and tens of thousands of jobs. Their marketing materials depicted a Mediterranean-style community with walkable neighborhoods and a mix of businesses.

The proposal, funded by billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder, and businesswoman Laurene Powell Jobs, has faced controversy since Flannery Associates, its real estate arm, sued holdout landowners for $510m, accusing them of conspiring to inflate prices.

Controversy over the secretive approach also had residents skeptical from the beginning. Silicon Valley elites had been quietly buying northern California farmland to develop a 27-square-mile plot between Travis Air Force Base and Rio Vista, currently zoned for agriculture.

“We believe that Solano county has the opportunity to forge a new path towards the California Dream for this generation and generations to come,” said Sramek. “We also believe that we must move forward with urgency – because delays are not just a statistic.”

The county’s report estimated that infrastructure such as roads, schools and parks for the project would cost taxpayers $6.4bn for the first phase and nearly $50bn to complete the new city.

On Monday, Mashburn said that a vote without this type of environmental report “politicized the project and forced the community to take sides.”

A poll conducted by Impact Research in July said 65% of Solano county voters “support bringing more good paying jobs, affordable homes, and clean energy to East Solano”.

Sramek emphasized the importance of regaining California’s historic promise of optimism and opportunity, which he says has waned in recent decades due to stagnation in development. More than half of respondents also agreed that the development project was moving too fast and preferred an environmental report.

We got this, America.

California is sending you the best possible person to weather whatever the next three-plus months hold.

Let’s be honest about Kamala Harris. We’re not giving you our most charismatic public speaker. Her sentences can be as awkward as Joe Biden’s.

We’re not giving you our most disciplined politician. She’ll crack an ill-considered joke, or make a mistake in a meeting that requires clean-up.

What we are giving you is someone who can emerge improbably triumphant from losing situations. Someone who will take more crap than anyone possibly could.

The best explanation of Kamala Harris came from a San Francisco political consultant, who compared her to Andy Dufresne, the main character of the 1994 film “The Shawshank Redemption.”

Dufresne was a falsely convicted banker who escapes Shawshank Prison through a 500-yard-long sewage pipe. “Andy Dufresne,” the consultant said, quoting a movie line, “who crawled through a river of s–t and came out clean on the other side.”

Because Americans don’t know Harris this way, they are underestimating her. Just like they underestimate California.

Contrary to the stereotypes, 21^st century California is not soft or easy. It’s a crowded, competitive place where everything — even finding an affordable place to live — is a struggle.

The real California made Harris tough. It helps that she spent her early years in the late 60s-early 70s in Berkeley and Oakland, which might be California’s toughest city. As a mixed-race kid, Harris had to learn how to fit in, at a newly integrated elementary school, and at both Hindu Temple and the 23^rd Avenue Church of God. After the divorce of her immigrant parents, she and her sister were raised almost entirely by their mother, who moved them to Montreal.

Harris attended law school not in the leafy Ivy League but at UC Hastings, in the middle of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. She worked as a prosecutor in Alameda County and then San Francisco, on the sorts of cases — sex crimes and child abuse — that harden people.

She launched her political career in the hyper-competitive political culture of San Francisco. Her first election, for San Francisco district attorney, posed the trickiest challenge in politics — beating an incumbent (who was also her boss). She won an upset victory in a three-person race.

Then Harris, still little known, ran statewide, for California attorney general — against a popular Los Angeles Republican, Steve Cooley, who had the state’s law enforcement community behind him. On election night, she appeared to have lost. But when all the votes were counted, she had squeaked through.

When a U.S. Senate seat opened in 2016, Harris was hardly the most popular Democrat in the state. But she jumped into the race early, scared off other contenders and won the seat.

Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was a disaster. She didn’t make it to the Iowa caucuses. But even after that embarrassment, she crawled through to the vice presidency.

Reviews have been dicey — staff turnover, difficulties with immigration policy. Her polling was lower than the president’s. Until it wasn’t. Now Biden has bowed out and endorsed her.

She doesn’t have the nomination yet. She may face a contested convention. And if she earns the nod, she’ll face a former president who is ready to attack.

Democrats are worried. Because Donald Trump is a constant font of lies and accusations. His strategy, as the now imprisoned Trump advisor Steve Bannon famously said, “is to flood the zone with s–t.”

But this time, his opponent is Kamala Harris. She survived all the b.s. of California. She’s heard every disgusting sexist insult. She sloughed off slurs against two different races.

She’s about to be submerged in it all again. Because American politics is a river of you-know-what.

Which is why this is her moment.

Who better to navigate us through all the crap than Kamala Devi Harris?

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

Originally Published: July 22, 2024 at 1:51 p.m.

A persistent heat wave that scorched most of California earlier this month essentially amounted to a real-time stress test that the state’s electric grid managed to withstand. But the head of the organization responsible for keeping the lights on says energy officials are still on alert as the summer wears on.

“We are generally well prepared” to avoid potential power outages, said Elliot Mainzer, president of the California Independent System Operator. “We’ve taken important steps to bring new clean energy and capacity onto the system, but we must stay diligent.”

As the Independence Day weekend approached, hot weather descended on the Golden State, with residents in Northern California suffering the brunt. Sacramento hit a high of 113 degrees on July 6, setting a city record for that date.

Though not as severe, parts of Southern California sweltered as well. In the deserts of San Diego County, temperatures hovered around 120 degrees in Borrego Springs and Ocotillo Wells on July 8.

Heat waves strain the electric grid because homes and businesses crank up their air conditioners, putting pressure on system operators to meet the surge in demand.

To make matters worse, the hot weather lasted 14 days and bled into neighboring states.

On July 10, the Western Interconnection that helps coordinate electricity between 14 states in the West (including all of California) plus northern Baja California, British Columbia and Alberta hit an all-time record of 167,988 megawatts for peak load.

But the California Independent System Operator, known as the CAISO for short, did not resort to issuing any Flex Alerts — requests of customers across the state to voluntarily reduce their energy use.

On July 8, for example, CAISO operators had about 55,000 megawatts of supply on hand to meet an estimated demand of just over 43,000 megawatts — a fairly comfortable cushion of  around 12,000 megawatts.

The elbow room was due in large part to capacity that’s been added to California’s grid in recent years.

The state has added nearly 11,600 megawatts of new grid resources since 2022. Of that amount, energy storage from batteries accounts for 5,800 megawatts.

Storage facilities take solar power generated during the day and discharge the electricity when California’s power system is under the most stress.

The batteries “did exactly what we expected them to do” during this month’s heat wave, Mainzer told the Union-Tribune. “They charged during the day when solar is abundant and put energy back onto the grid in the afternoon when solar production is rolling off the system … They were clearly a difference maker.”

It should be noted that the costs of building storage systems — and other grid enhancements — are passed on to utility customers in their monthly bills.

During this month’s heat wave, multiple wildfires broke out in Northern California but they did not affect major power lines or distribution and transmission infrastructure that feed into the grid.

System operators were not so lucky three years ago.

The Bootleg Fire in Oregon in July 2021 tripped a major transmission line called the California-Oregon Intertie that carries imported electricity from the Pacific Northwest into California. The fire knocked about 3,500 megawatts off the system at the same time stifling weather blanketed the area.

“Every event and every set of facts is different,” Mainzer said.

The threat of statewide power outages has taken on a higher level of urgency in recent years.

In August 2020, rotating outages in California occurred for the first time in 20 years after oppressive heat nearly overloaded the system for two straight days. The blackouts caused some areas to go without electricity for up to 2 1/2 hours.

The Golden State barely avoided a repeat the following summer. In September 2022, it nearly happened again when relentlessly high temperatures nearly buckled the grid. The CAISO issued a record 10 straight days of Flex Alerts and thanked utility customers afterward for helping save the day by cutting back on energy use from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Those are critical hours for California’s power grid because solar production quickly disappears from the grid when the sun sets and system operators must seamlessly replace those megawatts of solar with other energy sources in real time to make sure the power system doesn’t collapse.

September can get tricky for the CAISO because the weather is still hot so customers keep running their air conditioners. But since autumn is approaching, the sun sets earlier in the day and that means there are fewer hours of solar generation the power system can draw on.

Other complicating factors?

If wildfires break out, the smoke from the blazes can obscure the skies and that leads to a reduction in solar output.

And if a heat wave extends to neighboring states, that can lead to reductions of imports and exports in power trading markets. States under stress tend to hold onto the megawatts they already have so they can keep electricity flowing to their own utility customers and not export them elsewhere.

The system is interconnected and complicated but Mainzer is cautiously optimistic.

“The four-hour lithium-ion battery fleet that we’ve got in California is now the largest of anywhere in the world, outside of China,” he said.

Last year, the CAISO issued zero Flex Alerts. Can that be repeated this summer?

“If we have another set of unprecedented circumstances that take the system to its absolute outer edge — both here in California and other parts of the West — then it’s possible to call Flex Alerts,” Mainzer said. “I couldn’t put a probability on it, but it’s certainly a possibility. We always try to minimize those but it is a tool in the toolbox.”

The CAISO manages the flow of electricity across the high-voltage power lines for about 80 percent of the state, plus a small part of Nevada.

Originally Published: July 22, 2024 at 7:38 a.m.