Guest Blogger Ken Alex: Potholes on the Renewable Road

Starting this week, Legal Planet is very happy to be hosting occasional guest bloggers. Our first is Ken Alex, the Senior Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Environment Section of the California Department of Justice.  The views expressed in this blog are his own.  For more info on Ken, click here.

Thanks to the Emmett Center at UCLA and the Center for Law, Energy, and Environment at UC Berkeley for the guest blog spot.  I want to focus, in a series of short blogs, on some of the practical and legal issues in moving from a carbon based economy in California to a renewable based economy.  Under California law (AB 32) and the Governor’s Executive Order, California must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and then by another 80 percent by 2050.  No small feat.

The roadmap for achieving those reductions is reasonably clear; the reality, however, is filled with roadblocks, detours, and falling debris.  In California, something like 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector, and over 30 percent are attributable to the electricity sector.  Close to three quarters of all greenhouse gas emissions come from those two sources.  So, a direct route  to the 2020 and 2050 emissions reductions is to remake the electrical system from one powered by carbon (mostly natural gas in California) to one driven by renewables, and, at the same time, to electrify the transportation system. 

Right now, only about 13 percent of power for California’s electricity grid comes from renewables.  Under state law, the State’s three utilities (PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E) must get to 20 percent by December 31, 2010.  That seems unlikely to happen.  Governor Schwarzenegger has raised the percentage of renewables requirement and extended the time frame by Executive Order to 33 percent by 2020.

How does California get to 33 percent renewables by 2020 (and a lot higher percentage after that)?  What are the barriers and the solutions?  For me, these are the essential issues for meeting the AB 32 requirements and beyond, and for changing to a carbon-free economy, not just in California, but nationally and internationally as well.

Sorry for all of the statistics, but here’s another important one:  California’s peak power demand is something like 65,000 MW.  In order to reach 33 percent of demand, we can either increase the megawatts of renewables in the system or reduce the peak demand, or, of course, do both.  On the supply side, we must add concentrating solar, wind, solar photovoltaic, small hydro, geothermal, and biomass, and possibly some other technologies.  On the demand side, we need to increase energy efficiency, practice energy conservation, and increase power storage.  Storage, which comes in many forms – from batteries to pumping water up a hill to converting energy to ice – can dramatically shave peaks and reduce overall energy capacity requirements.  It should not be underestimated.

Saying what must be done is the easy part; applying solutions to the issues raised – and every single approach raises significant issues – is the hard part.  Large scale solar and wind, for example, require large sites, and massive new transmission; distributed solar photovoltaic remains costly (although that is changing); and battery storage faces technological hurdles.  I want to explore some of these issues through the next few blog entries, and engage in a dialogue.  I also want to talk about why it matters that California take on this challenge, even with the change from Bush to Obama.

In the meantime, if you are interested in how we might approach the issue of massive increase in renewables on a national level, the Gigaton Throwdown, here, is a good place to start.

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