BERKELEY (March 29, 2011) – In a bold move to bolster one of the few bright spots in California’s economy and set a precedent for strong renewable electricity standards nationwide, the California Legislature today approved a bill that would require utilities in the state to obtain at least 33 percent of their electricity from clean, renewable sources, such as the wind and sun, by 2020.  

Promoted by the governor and legislative leaders in both houses as part of a green jobs stimulus package, the bill would create the most aggressive renewable energy requirement in the country and position California as a national leader in clean energy investments.  

“Today’s vote is not just a victory for California’s economy and environment, but for the entire nation,” said Laura Wisland, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the leading national nonprofit organization providing economic, technical and policy analysis of renewable electricity standards.  “Transitioning toward more clean, renewable electricity sources means cleaner air, healthier communities, and a stronger green economy.”

Introduced by State Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), the bill (SBX1 2) garnered the backing of a broad range of electric utilities, ratepayer groups, environmental organizations and renewable energy businesses. UCS advised the  bill authors, and played a lead role to build support for the bill as it made its way through the Legislature.

UCS also has been involved in coalition efforts to enact clean energy standards in other states and at the federal level.

California’s current law, the Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS), required privately owned utilities in the state to obtain 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2010.  UCS estimates that with the 33 percent RPS law in place, California will be responsible for more than 25 percent of the renewable energy generated by state standards across the country in 2020.  The amount of heat-trapping global warming emissions that would be displaced as a result of the 33 percent RPS would be equivalent to removing nearly 3 million cars from the road.

UCS is expecting California Gov. Jerry Brown to sign the bill, given statements he made during his campaign last year.

Dan Kalb, UCS’s California policy manager, said the new standard would be a boon for the state economy.  “A strong 33 percent renewables standard in statute would give renewable energy developers the market the certainty they need to raise money to build their projects in California,” he said.  “With the governor’s signature, this bill will create new clean energy jobs, strengthen our economy, and reduce harmful heat-trapping emissions that cause global warming.”

Wisland said that the federal government should follow California’s lead.  “Once again, California has demonstrated national leadership in advancing clean energy,” she said. “Now it’s Congress’s turn to act.” Such a move by federal legislators has widespread public support, she added. A February Gallup poll found that 83 percent of Americans favor Congress passing a bill that would provide incentives for renewable energy.

For more information on the California RPS, see the UCS fact sheet, “California Renewable Electricity Standard.”

It’s a happy day in Spain today.  Sure, the whole World Cup was kind of a big deal.  But there’s something else:  Spain has now leapfrogged the United States as the biggest producer of solar power.

Spain has opened the world’s largest solar power station, meaning that it overtakes the US as the biggest solar generator in the world. The nation’s total solar power production is now equivalent to the output of a nuclear power station.

Spain is a world leader in renewable energies and has long been a producer of hydro-electricity (only China and the US have built more dams). It also has a highly developed wind power sector which, like solar power, has received generous government subsidies. (GuardianUK)

I’ll save you all the technical details that got me (as a huge nerd) interested in the story, but instead look at the economic and societal impacts.  In the end, rankings really don’t have much of a real meaning. I guess that it’s good for the Spanish national psyche, which after the 20% unemployment and the “socialist” government’s ill-advised austerity program could use a boost.  But, the greater issue is what is Spain doing better than us.  And here in California, we should be kicking Spain’s butt all on our own.

After all, we have all the inherent advantages (and many more) that Spain has.  The California economy is bigger than that of Spain.  The Spanish economy is roughly 1.46 trillion, ours is roughly 1.85 trillion. Spain has plenty of sun, we have plenty of sun.  Spain has a population that is concerned with the environment, as does California. (Though we’ll get some hard numbers with the Prop 23 question of AB32 repeal.)

So why is Spain now producing a nuclear power station’s worth while we’re still diterhing around the margins?  Well, there’s the obvious issue of our grid.  The upgrading of the grid was supposed to be one of the big projects emerging from the Recovery Act, and that’s happening as we speak. BUt, unfortunately, that’s still going to take a while.  The funding was cut down from the original bill, and we will still need plenty of time to really be able to manage the grid as well as we hope to in the future.  

We’ll also need to think about combining energy storage capacity with the new green energy.  You can start with flywheels and that sort of thing, but the big hope on that front is a grid that can tap into a whole network of batteries parked in the garage of every house. Like…say a fleet of electric cars that can be charged and discharged in times of high or low loads.

But the biggest failure on our part is that we just haven’t aimed high enough. We’ve been content to play around the edges, and our power companies haven’t vigorously pursued green power.  This is one of the reasons that the defeat of Prop 16 was so critical. Had PG&E won that measure, they would have been able to shut down competition and controlled all of the purchasing of power.  Instead, we can work through our elected representatives to bring more green power.

In the end, you don’t get to be the world’s leader by spouting platitudes. It’s nice to hear the Governor talk about green power, and for Meg Whitman to tut-tut the concept. But California needs a leader that will affirmatively drag our economy into the new green economy.  Years ago, they used to call Jerry Brown Governor Moonbeam.

Well, today, we need Governor Sun Ray or Wind Gust.  How’s about it Jerry?

A mini-report:

• CA-04: I love this video from the Charlie Brown campaign.  They traveled 412 miles down to Thousand Oaks to talk to constituents of California’s Alan Keyes, State Senator and professional office-chaser Tom McClintock.  It’s really funny and drives the point home that McClintock is a do-nothing at best and a dangerous radical at worst:

And get this, McClintock is now running on the state budget, the Republican version of which has a 19% approval rating.  That’s like putting Nixon, Bush and Cheney in your campaign ad.

• CA-26, CA-45: Not one but two!  Both Russ Warner AND Julie Bornstein have been added to the DCCC “Races To Watch” list.  This is a prelude to being listed as Red To Blue candidates.  If the D-Trip comes through with some money, maybe threatened incumbents like Dreier will have to stop mouthing off about other GOP races and start paying attention to their own. UPDATE: Mike Lumpkin (CA-52) is on that list now too, which is a pleasant surprise.

• CA-46: When John Fund tries to target a Dem challenger, you know something’s going wrong.  Fund is sounding the alarm on Debbie Cook, as Dana Rohrabacher tries to greenwash himself with a scheme to build solar-power plants on federal land without environmental impact studies.  Fund says that Cook called this “an extreme position,” but he chopped the quote:

Democratic challenger and Mayor of Huntington Beach Debbie Cook agrees that the process of approving solar power plants is sluggish and needs to be sped up, but not at the expense of the environment.

“This is just another extreme position by Dana Rohrabacher. What we need to do is come up with a balanced approach that streamlines these projects, because they’re critically important to our energy future, but at the same time recognizes the impacts to the environment,” Cook said.

Rohrabacher’s doing the equivalent of saying he’ll grow jobs by hiring 10,000 federally funded serial killers, and then wondering why everyone’s worried about the mass death (“You wanted jobs, didn’t you?”).  There’s a sensible way to free up the bottlenecks and a rash one.  Rohrabacher chose door #2.

• CA-42: The internal poll results released by Ed Chau are intriguing (showing him up 44-38 after a mix of positive and negative information released on the candidates), but I don’t think candidates who have minimal bank accounts should do polls stating the numbers after a mix of information if they don’t have the money to get that information out.  But if Gary Miller truly has a 28% re-elect number as the poll states, he could be in trouble.

Blogged yesterday on DesertBlog about the Sunrise Powerlink hearings in San Diego, and the viral videos about Sunrise Powerlink that are spreading across the Internet. SDG&E and its Chamber of Commerce minions are spamming the Internet to keep their astroturf support group’s website high in Google rankings.

Fortunately, there are three videos out there that tell the truth about the Sunrise Powerlink, and you can help spread their message. You can help boost one of the video’s search results simply by viewing it and you can also boost its ranking, along with several other anti-Powerlink sites, by voting for them on hugg.com, the green social bookmarking site of Treehugger.com.

Let’s get viral, people!

Our state has the best solar “resources” (see map on page 7)[warning:PDF] in the country, but for quite some time the promise of using the sun to produce steam to make electricity has been in front of us with seemingly nothing ever coming of it. 

Things have certainly changed.  Solar thermal power plants are beyond the pilot/demonstration stage – they’re here for real now.  The technology and price point is proven enough that the big players are knocking at the doors of solar energy producers to buy their clean electricity.

(more)

Check it out: Silicon Valley venture capitalists are funding construction of solar-powered steam generating power plants, utilities(1) (2) are signing multi-year contracts to buy their power, and the regulatory environment will sooner or later (hopefully sooner) make fossil-fuel based forms of electricity generation more expensive.

The real “game changers” it seems to me are that this technology doesn’t require costly semiconductor material to produce electricity and it can actually store the heat generated until when it’s needed to produce power.  So if you want to supply energy even though the sun’s already gone down or it’s cloudy, you can still do that. 

If enough power lines can be built to get the power where it needs to go – much of it toward southern California, then solar thermal energy is going to be a big player in the energy mix in coming years.