SACRAMENTO – After recent successes including absentee voting, absentee schooling, absentee policing, and in San Francisco, absentee plumbing, the Golden State is gearing up for a similar shift in its power grid. “This initiative represents a bold, new step into the future”, said energy expert Joanna Gambolputty before a brownout cut off her Zoom feed. Meanwhile, grad students at Caltech have been working towards turning the state’s resentment for Trump into a new source of renewable energy. “We’ve tried green energy and now we’re switching to orange energy”, said Associate Professor of Social Physics Morningstar Godiva Dingleberry-Kaufman. The plan is to build large sonic collectors in the San Gabriel hills surrounding Los Angeles. Instead of losing hundreds of megawatts every year as frustrated commuters honk and others scream helplessly into the sky, this noise will collected and put to use. Experts say it could provide enough power to run the proposed California High-Speed Rail line with enough left over for Bill Maher’s bidet. “We’ve run the numbers, and we’re confident we have enough a big enough margin. We even simulated Bill Maher eating gas station burritos everyday for a month and there were no outages,” added Dingleberry-Kaufman. Elsewhere, critics have pointed out to lackluster results from the state’s absentee forestry policy. “Yeah, like, I’m pretty sure wood burns, man”, said Skylar TreePhrog, a former Venice Beach surfer and current director of natural resources. “Yeah, turns out I got the job because I was like the only applicant who could speak English. I was just, like, wow, how can be you be so prejudiced? But I took the job, so whatever.” Director Treefrog wasted no time in identifying the number one problem in California’s forests. “So at the first meeting, I was like, OK guys so what’s deal? And they started talking about fires and stuff, and I was like, whoa dude, timeout – the forests are on fire?! Like, somebody call 911.” TreePhrog has formed a blue ribbon commission which is studying the feasibility of installing a sprinkler system for the state’s 33 million acres of forest. California Governor Gavin Newsom has tentatively approved the plan provided the system does not contain any materials known to the state to cause cancer.