The road ahead looks clearer for clean energy bills that
stalled in Sacramento last year.
California has championed clean energy and climate change
mitigation, but legislators last year failed to pass SB 100, a 100 percent clean energy bill authored by Senate
leader Kevin De León and supported by Governor Jerry Brown. The bill would
increase the state's renewable energy goal to 60 percent by 2030, and require
entirely carbon-free electricity by 2045.
A different bill to regionalize the California grid faltered
last year, and one to create a long-term funding program for energy
storage disappeared
from the agenda before a vote last July.
All three have returned to the hearing agenda this June, and
evidence suggests old sources of opposition are receding.
In Democrat-controlled Sacramento, utilities, utility
workers, environmentalists and clean energy industry groups all vie for
influence to achieve their policy goals. In the past, utility workers' unions
sought to protect
distribution grid jobs with amendments that would impede the growth of
third-party owned distributed energy resources, which present an alternative to
traditional utility investments.
Such opposition helped scuttle De León’s bill last time. But
multiple sources in Sacramento told GTM that such amendments aren’t expected on
SB 100 this year. The bill is scheduled for a committee hearing July 3.
“I’m cautiously optimistic — I think we have a shot of
continuing California’s leadership on clean energy and working with all parties
to make it happen,” said Dan Jacobson, state director for Environment
California.
The grid regionalization bill, AB 813, passed out of committee Tuesday. It aims to create
a broader electricity system for trading renewable energy, with major
ramifications for the state’s electricity system.
A regional grid would be able to source renewable energy from
a wider geographical swath, smoothing out the intermittency of those sources
and potentially saving hundreds of millions of dollars. Critics assert that
doing so would surrender California’s control over the cleanliness of the
energy mix, allowing coal power to seep back into the California grid. It would
also mean California relies more on power plants built in other states,
shifting the location of energy jobs.
Debate is sure to continue as this bill moves forward.
Another bill, SB 700, which would create a long-term storage program
modeled on the California Solar Initiative, enjoyed a visible thaw with
potential critics. It cleared a committee vote Wednesday afternoon.
Scott Wetch, the lobbyist representing the California State
Association of Electrical Workers, wrote a letter Monday to Senator Scott
Wiener, the bill’s author, endorsing the legislation.
“This Self-Generation Incentive Program is critical to
facilitating the deployment of distributed energy systems into the electrical
grid,” reads the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Greentech Media. “This
will improve the efficiency and reliability of the distribution and
transmission system, reduce costs and reduce greenhouse gases.”
That marks a dramatic departure from earlier rhetoric that
framed distributed energy as a threat to well-paying union jobs and the
security and reliability of the grid.
This bill is not advancing in a vacuum; it's part of an
interconnected portfolio of energy bills moving through the legislature
simultaneously.
Assemblymember Chris Holden chairs the utility and energy
committee. He's the one who pulled SB 700 before the vote last year. He also
authored the grid regionalization bill, which passed out of the Senate energy
committee Tuesday. Wiener, the author of SB 700, voted yes for Holden's
regional grid bill.
All three energy bills need to clear additional votes before
they become law. Even if they succeed, it’s entirely possible that language
regarding distributed energy will resurface in some of the other bills on the
table, changing the landscape for negotiation.
“I don’t think it will be over until August 31, 12 midnight,
when they bang the gavel,” Jacobson said.
If the bills' reception has changed since last year, so has
the utility industry's bargaining position.
Questions loom over what will happen to the state's
investor-owned utilities if grid regionalization occurs. But they are already
experiencing homegrown defection in the form of community-choice
aggregation, in which local governments procure their own power for
delivery by the utility wires.
Most dramatically, Cal Fire investigators concluded that
PG&E equipment and pruning standards started
several of the wildfires that ripped through Northern California last
fall. California subscribes to a legal principle known as “inverse
condemnation," which makes utilities liable for damages even if they
violated no laws. That means utilities could face greater liability than they
would in other states.
A separate bill is moving through the legislature to address
how the state handles liability.
With more existential threats to worry about, utilities have
a different calculus for how to spend political capital compared to last time.
Another difference from last year: This will be the last
session for Governor Brown and De León, making it their last chance to cement
their legacies for climate action, noted RL Miller, founder of Climate Hawks
Vote and elected chair of the California Democratic Party’s environmental
caucus.
Brown also is hosting a Global Climate
Action Summit in San Francisco in September, when climate leaders from
around the world will arrive to coordinate progress toward climate commitments.
“I think he wants to present this as part of the proof that
California is moving into a clean energy-based economy,” Miller said of the
clean energy legislation.
Clearing committees is just one step. With stakes high all
around, the negotiations in the full Assembly and Senate will keep the suspense
going for the rest of the summer.
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