Keeping state’s lights on will require a major electricity market, partnerships across West

The reason that PG&E prices are going up, up, up is the fact that PG&E makes money on the transportation part. Hence PG&E and it's "sponsored" politicians push for energy being produced far, far away. But what San Mateo really needs is more local production and at least one energy source that covers 20% of the baseline. That could be one form of smaller nuclear power, that is frowned upon for various reasons. That could be geothermal, which California with all our fault lines is a great location for.

My guess is that Senator Becker is looking for more out-of-state projects to "greenwash" local carbon emissions. Currently Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE) pretends to own hydropower from Shasta, wind power from Kern County and from solar farms in the desert. All of these power sources existed long before PCE existed, none of these power sources would stop producing without PCE, all San Mateo is doing is buying "green bragging rights". But since more and more counties are doing the same to look green, San Mateo now has to venture way out to source "virtual" wind power from New Mexico.

This is all a scam of course. How do we know?

If San Mateo politicians like Kevin Mullin, Josh Becker, Diane and Gina Papan, David Canepa, Rico E. Medina, Jeff Gee, and the long list of C/CAG and PCE members were really "green" we would see three things as a start:

- protected bike lanes everywhere

- much better public transportation including bus lanes

- a few wind turbines along our coast and the Bay

These are the easiest and cheapest projects to show a little climate action by local politicians.

But there is more that PCE and its huge workforce and board could be exploring. San Mateo always likes to be compared to Silicon Valley, but we don't see interesting projects like Flywheel Energy Storage (FES), local geothermal, local wind, how about some gravity-based energy storage systems. Instead they are buying into the short-lived and dangerous lithium-ion battery storage from companies in Texas (of all places) and watch it burn down.

There are 3 things a community needs to be successful - in this order - Cheap Energy - Affordable Housing - the right to grow and cultivate our own food locally. California has none of these.

A conversion to green energy is a laudable goal but can’t happen until we have enough “aways on” green energy. Batteries are impossibly expensive and dangerous as a recent storage battery fire at a California power plant showed.

But there is a promising green project called the “Advanced Clean Energy Storage” project in Delta Utah that stores hydrogen made from solar on sunny days in pre-existing underground salt caverns for use when there's no sun or wind. This could be a game changer depending on costs.

"Clean. Reliable. Affordable." The Europeans, who are much further ahead in this endeavor, will tell you that these terms are mutually exclusive, specifically the last one. The proposed bill is a worthwhile effort and is overdue but the assumption is that the neighboring states will have carbon free energy available to us. Wouldn't you think that they would use it for their own requirements first? California was at one time interconnected with neighboring states and never had outage problems. Of course, once the Energy Commission started monkeying around with elusive and unreliable green energy, we are now trying to catch up with thoroughly unreliable, expensive, and distributed sources of electricity. The author even mentioned that massive battery storage needs to be installed next to generation plants. What type of plants is he referring to? Fossil fuel fired, of course, so those are still not out of the picture. Let's not kid ourselves, green energy is great for those who insist on paying a premium but the industrial and commercial base, i.e. data centers, will vanish from the areas served by this proposed grid due to economics. Again, look at what is happening in Germany and the Netherlands where automobile manufacturing and chemical industries are closing down, throwing tens of thousands of workers out on the streets. It is so convenient for an academic to preach from his pulpit and not have to worry about the dire consequences.

Thanks for your guest perspective, Mr. Wara, but I don’t believe your optimistic goal will ever succeed unless California builds numerous nuclear power plants – the cleanest form of electricity generation. A few years ago, Edward Ring penned an article providing his take on Mark Jacobson’s simulation report (https://californiaglobe.com/articles/examining-californias-renewable-energy-plan/). In that article, he concluded that although we may be able to cover 1000 square miles with solar panels on existing roofs, I’m not sure Californians want 10,000 square miles of land covered with windmills and 15,000 square miles of ocean covered with windmills. What happens if the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine? And let’s not get started with what happens to the hazardous waste when solar panels end their useful life.

I wish you good luck in your endeavor but there will be inevitable electricity rate increases due to this misguided attempt at providing only “clean” energy. BTW, there’s still the issue of forest and fire management. The carbon emitted from forest fires easily surpasses any supposed carbon “savings” from clean energy.

Thank you! I look forward to hearing about what we can do to help support SB 540 and get this legislation passed.

Unfortunately, there was a good bipartisan, national energy permitting reform bill ready for a vote last fall. Trump told the Republicans to not support it so that he could take credit for it after he was in office. Now there is so much chaos coming out of DC, who knows if this will ever happen? It is so important for California to move forward with rational and much needed legislation like this. We cannot continue burning dirty energy and expect to have a world with a predictable climate, giving us ample food, reasonable insurance costs, and the natural world as we know it.