This was a recent question on Quora, an online question and answer platform. 

Can California go all electric vehicle, given rolling blackouts due to electricity poverty?

Quora finally found a business model!

Well, sort of: Quora CEO, co-founder, and first Facebook Chief Technology Officer, Adam D’Angelo, is using 15 years of accumulated Quora content to train his abysmal pet AI question and answer generator, Poe.  Quora holds the distinction of being the longest-extant company to attend Y-Combinator’s annual Startup Camp.

Quora secured funding from venture capital with rounds A, B, C, D, and E.  I think Quora was a member of the Y-Combinator Class of 2014 shortly after closing round C from Tiger Global Management.  Most startups are lucky to have a few hundred thousand dollars in funding at that point. Much was made of Adam having contributed $20 million of his own money to Series B. Somehow, I failed to notice that Adam’s net worth–as of 2016–was $600 million according to Forbes, which makes his $20 million investment a lot less impressive from a risk point of view. 

Open AI and Adam, Larry, Mark, and Sam

To make this post more topical, note that Adam d’Angelo is on the board of directors of OpenAI. He was one of the group of directors who voted to fire Sam Altman in November 2023; he is the only one of them to remain following Sam’s return. 

I’m curious about the conversations Adam has with his fellow OpenAI director, Larry Summers. Yes, THAT Larry Summers: Former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin BBF, chief of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, Harvard University president and scolder of a young Mark Zuckerberg for feuding with the Winklevii Bros while the three  were undergraduates, and part-time D.E. Shaw employee.  Back in the days when the New York Times wasn’t failing, as our erstwhile POTUS 47 is fond of saying, the NYT Dealbook section published a most memorable article, After Harvard, a Rich Education for Larry Summers, about his year at the hedge fund. 

Larry Summers was Obama’s top pick for Federal Reserve governor of governors in 2013, when Bernanke resigned. After the Summers and Robert Rubin duo muddled U.S. economic policy for at least 15 years that spanned three consecutive presidential administrations, someone made the decision that Larry should decline the nomination. We got Yellen instead, who was no prize either.

I still can’t get over how these people know each other. Mark Zuckerberg and Adam attended Philips Exeter together; Mark knows Larry from his years as a Harvard student; Adam worked for Mark as the first Chief Technology Officer of Facebook; Sheryl Sandberg worked with Larry at the World Bank and was his Chief of Staff when he was the U.S. Treasury Secretary. Sheryl worked for Mark and Adam at Facebook; Quora were mentored by Y-Combinator while Sam was CEO there; And now, Larry, Sam, and Adam are 3 of the 5 members of the OpenAI board. I wonder how often and how avidly they discuss the yet-to-be disclosed OpenAI initial public offering. Larry is probably the only one to truly relish it. 

Regarding an all-electric California

There were a lot of answers that didn’t make much sense to me. That’s because they were the usual screeds by futurists divorced from reality. A few were decent. User Ed WD20’s answer was the best of the lot (Quora dispensed with their real names policy some years back):

How can California go completely to electric cars when we already experience brownouts and rolling blackouts due to not having enough electricity? California is decommissioning its nuclear plants. Wind and solar won’t be able to take up the slack so it will have to buy power from nuclear and coal plants in neighboring states.

I couldn’t resist assenting vehemently and elaborating in a comment. I will share here, because I certainly won’t be getting the word out about this on Quora!

California commandeers hydroelectric energy from the needy who generate it

This is no exaggeration. California has been using most of the electricity produced by Hoover Dam for decades. That seems reasonable, at first glance, as California has such a large population and correspondingly high need for electricity.

Consider the geography of the region though. The Colorado River, which Hoover Dam dams (that is not a typo!), runs along the border between the states of Arizona (where I live) and Nevada. Yet my state only gets 10% of the hydroelectric power generated by Hoover Dam. Nevada gets about the same. The state of Colorado receives 7% of the electrical bounty generated by its eponymous river. California takes 50%.

Worse yet is that states north and east of California have been pressured to decommission their nuclear and coal power plants, mostly by activists based out of California! Even the Navajo Nation’s coal-powered plant was forced to shut down in 2019.

Green New Dealer liberal Democrats didn’t care that the Navajo Generating Station (NGS) of Page, Arizona kept the reservation energy-independent, and provided a lot of conveniently located jobs, for decades. The NGS produced more energy than needed, so the extra was sold for profit through interties to the electric power grid. AND the coal was mined locally!

The Navajo Nation protested closure, to no avail. There is nothing to replace it. Too many Californians want electric vehicles and care about climate change virtue signaling more than human suffering. They tend to get their way.

I extracted some reviews of the NGS from Google Maps.

This guy HATED the Navajo Generating Station, as it detracted from his Lake Powell experience, OMG!

Germans and Dutch didn’t like it either. Spoiled their photography.

None of them cared about this important detail.

Too late, it is gone, sadly.

Recall how I said the coal was sourced locally? It was, and they did one better: the Navajo Nation owns that coal mine! The Kayenta coal mine is special. Its coal is bituminous not anthracite. Bituminous coal is naturally low-sulfur, with an average mercury content of 0.04 parts per million. That concentration is 90% less than most shale rock. Emissions were lower than 95% of other coal-fired electric plants in the United States. In the early 1990s, the EPA said to put sulfur dioxide wet scrubbers on it anyway, so they did. Then the Clean Air Act came along. Although there were no regulations requiring it, the Navajo Generating Plant voluntarily installed low NOx-SOFA burners for good measure. No, I don’t think that means they burned couches that emitted nitrous oxide but I’m uncertain of the genuine meaning so I’ll leave it at that.

The NGS was supplied with fuel by a 100% air-gapped electric railroad (air gapped from any other rail lines, that is) for transporting coal from their mine to the power plant. The Black Mesa and Lake Powell Railroad was one of the first to use an electrified line. Electricity was supplied by the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, of course. The Kayenta Mine employed another 400 Navajo Indians, in addition to the 700 at the generating station.

These positive reviews on Google Maps by visitors over the past 15 years really touched my heart. Oleksandr T. said,

Nice and modern facility!

Derek Wong said,

LOVE IT. Can’t stop staring at it, even from miles away. Wish they gave tours.

An Italian guy described it (with help from Google Translate) lyrically:

For many it is an eco-monster that ruins Monument Valley. Leaving aside the ethical discourses, on a photographic level it is a very interesting scenario: This modern and dark cathedral that emerges from the red desert just before Page presents itself in the futuristic style of Blade Runner.

Arizona Public Service (APS) tried their best to keep the NGS in operation. It wasn’t closed for good until the Sierra Club from California had their say in Phoenix, the state capital of Arizona.