I drove south to see the flowers in the Carrizo Plain a couple of weeks ago. It was a little late and there were almost no flowers but I did get to drive on a couple of new, for me, roads in and along the coast range. Surprisingly, it looked like a crummy flower year anyway. I had driven part of the way and then back home, following close to the fault line, a couple of days before that, so I picked up driving as close as I could to the San Andreas Fault by driving down the Bitterwater Road from Highway 41 to Highway 58. It was as rural as any place in the state.

When I got to Highway 58, it was like jumping ahead a hundred years.

Solar panels covered the valley floor. with , thousands of them. California requires that utility companies get something like 33% of their power from renewable resources by something like 2020. I am very leery of changes that take years to change, like the new California minimum wage of fifteen dollars an hour, when it seems pretty easy to make the change faster. Usually, faster is better, like taking off a band-aid. But, in the case of our power mix, making a big change like that will be tough. Right now, the utilities are getting about 44% of their energy from natural gas, we only get 4.2% from solar which is lower than we get from coal. Coal, there is no coal in California! I think we would be better off renting the roof of every possible house and put the solar there, but this is much better than anything carbon based and while not pretty, it doesn’t desecrate the land too much, so I’m not going to complain.

Down highway, 58, there are almost no flowers as I get to the Carrizo Plain, unlike six years ago when I went with Howard Dunaier.

Rather than retrace my steps, on a road that is becoming very familiar, I decide to drive drive over the Coast Range into the Central Valley and then go north on another road I’ve never been on, Highway 33. (to be continued)