![]() The system operator and other agencies envision adding 70 gigawatts over the next decade - and an additional 50 gigawatts by 2045, the deadline for 100% clean energy. Right now, California has just over 80 gigawatts of electric generating capacity. Some of the numbers in the new report are hard to wrap your head around. We’re talking mind-boggling amounts of clean power And even if the board signs off on the billions of dollars in projects, the Public Utilities Commission still needs to give them the OK, too - a much bigger lift. The draft report still needs to be approved by the system operator’s board of governors. “We’re trying to take any barriers off the table,” he said. But Mainzer insists these are important steps. Right now, there are so many requests - many of them for plants unlikely to ever get built - that the agency is moving far too slowly to study and approve badly needed solar and wind farms.īetter processes don’t always lead to better outcomes. Second, the system operator is reworking its process for responding to “interconnection requests,” in which energy developers apply to hook up their power projects to the grid. It should lead to closer coordination among the agencies as they provide direction to companies proposing power plants and transmission lines, he said. When I asked Elliot Mainzer - chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, which oversees the electric grid - whether anything’s really going to change after his agency’s report, he offered several reasons for optimism.įirst, he said, the system operator reached a new agreement in December with the state’s Public Utilities Commission and Energy Commission, the other entities responsible for planning and approving power grid projects. It’s been clear for at least a decade that new and upgraded power lines would be needed to facilitate construction of more solar farms in California’s Central Valley, geothermal plants by the Salton Sea and floating wind farms off the coast.īut for the most part, those projects haven’t gotten built. So what kinds of tricks might California have up its sleeve? Here are four things to know. And getting permission to string wires over long distances - with some routes traversing multiple states and hundreds of landowners - can take a decade or more. Hardly anybody wants to pay for them, even if they’ll save money - and lives - in the long run. But getting the ball rolling on new power lines has been especially tough. Nobody said solving the climate crisis would be easy. The billions of dollars in expenditures would add to utility bills at a time when electricity costs are already rising rapidly, straining cash-strapped families and making it less likely that Californians will want to replace their fossil-fueled cars, furnaces and stoves with electric alternatives. Those new and upgraded power lines would be paid for largely by customers of the state’s major monopoly utility companies: Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.
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