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Image credit: Getty Images California is set to hit its green-energy goals a decade early
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alifornia is both the nation's leading renewable-
energy proponent and one of the few states to
actually put its power where its mouth is. In
November, the California Energy Commission
released its annual Renewable Portfolio Standard
(RPS) report which found that the state's three
investor-owned utilities -- Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California
Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric -- are on track to collectively
offer 50 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by
2020. That's a full decade faster than anyone had anticipated.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and CA Governor Jerry Brown at the One Planet Summit, Dec
'17
"We've got to realize that we are here today because of oil -- oil and
gas, to a lesser extent, coal," California Gov. Jerry Brown told the
press at a 2015 signing ceremony, where he increased the state's
renewable goal to 50 percent. There, he pointed out that California is
still the third-most-oil-producing state in the union, behind Texas
and North Dakota. "What has been the source of our prosperity has
become the source of our ultimate destruction, if we don't get off of
it," he added.
Jerry Brown speaks at the launch event at the US climate action center
Granted, both of those states are home to far fewer people than
California and therefore require far less energy, so the Golden State
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is uniquely situated to lead the renewable energy revolution.
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"California in a lot of ways is a blessed state," said Dr. Austin Brown,
executive director of the UC Davis Policy Institute for Energy,
Environment and Economy. "We have a wealth of both wind and
solar, a lot of historically built hydro that we can use."
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California's aggressive policies toward renewables also deserve
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credit. "People want to cast it as a choice between policy or
technology as a solution but those should exist hand-in-hand,"
Brown said. "We would have never gotten renewable energy prices
where they are today without really ambitious public policy."
"When you get it right, it's this virtuous cycle where policy improves
technology and that allows us to go for greater ambition without
increasing prices and continuing to reduce unintended
consequences," Brown said.
Of course, setting goals and actually achieving them are two very
different things. Indeed, the path to 80 percent renewables will pose
its own unique challenges. The effects of diminishing returns will
soon come into play, Brown explained. "Once we get to about 50
percent, we're going to start to run into new challenges -- the second
50 percent will be trickier than the first 50 percent." Should we
continually produce renewable energy at times when there is
already excess generation, the value of that energy will decrease,
Brown notes.
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"When you look at it, storage works, but it's probably the last thing
in the stack that we want to go to," Brown concluded.
The effects of global warming will pose their own unique set of
challenges. With California's temperate climate, residents don't
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typically need to run their A/C or heaters for months on end as they
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do in other parts of the country, though that could change as the
planet continues to warm.
By Andrew Tarantola
@terrortola
Andrew has lived in San Francisco since 1982 and has been writing clever things
about technology since 2011. When not arguing the finer points of portable
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vaporizers and military defense systems with strangers on the internet, he enjoys
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