THE NET-ZERO BLOG
Climate policy analysis and updates from Sacramento
California’s transmission permitting: Slowest in the West?
Blog announcement: Clean Air Task Force’s Nelson Falkenburg and CSG’s Sam Uden explore one of the main drivers behind California’s decade-long lead times to transmission development, which is a key permitting application at the California Public Utilities Commission known as the Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity. Nelson and Sam compare these requirements to other Western States, highlighting California’s highly challenging permitting regime.
The challenges of carbon capture and storage in California: Regulatory issues
The 2022 Scoping Plan identified the need for 100 million tons of carbon capture and storage (CCS) to achieve net-zero emissions by 2045. This is a significant share – equal to about 25% of the total solution. However, there are currently no operating CCS projects in the state. Can California reliably deploy this technology and infrastructure in the timeframe required by the Scoping Plan, and if so, how can we get from here to there? In this technical blog post – the first of a two-part series – we analyze the first main barrier: lack of a regulatory framework.
Study finds public financing of transmission could save ratepayers billions
A rapid and significant expansion in transmission infrastructure this decade is key for California to meet its ambitious climate goals. However, this build-out will be expensive – with the potential to overburden ratepayers and undermine the state’s clean energy transition. In this blog post, we highlight an analysis by the Public Advocates Office which explores strategies to minimize the cost of transmission.
Governor’s proposed Clean Energy Central Procurement mechanism could be the most consequential climate policy this decade
The pace of clean energy deployment in California is currently too slow to achieve the state’s ambitious climate targets. The Governor’s proposed Clean Energy Central Procurement mechanism in the 2023-24 energy trailer bill is a powerful policy concept that has the potential to correct this trajectory. In this blog post, we highlight how strategic public procurement of clean energy assets can address critical obstacles to a rapid energy transition in California.
State and federal agencies release first-of-its-kind biomass utilization strategy
Biomass management has been a neglected climate problem in California. That is, until recently – when the 2022 Scoping Plan identified both the significant scale of the biomass challenge and importance of mobilizing organic waste to provide clean fuels and carbon dioxide removal in a net-zero economy. In this blog post we briefly recap California’s biomass challenge before summarizing the top-five recommendations from the state’s newest draft wood utilization strategy from the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force.
California needs to expand its clean energy. And it starts by expanding its grid
California’s 2022 Scoping Plan identified the unprecedented amount of new clean energy needed to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045, including developing a 20 GW offshore wind industry from scratch and more than tripling the state’s utility-scale solar capacity. How can the state deliver on these major ambitions? In this blog post we highlight the essential role of transmission to enable California’s clean energy deployment goals.