![]() DWP spokesperson Ellen Cheng told me via email that the utility has identified the proposal as “an opportunity for collaboration with neighboring electric utilities in the region.” 3. Will Los Angeles take the unusual step of partnering with other power providers on the undersea cable, which could reduce costs to ratepayers and help bring the project to fruition? Possibly. The proposed multibillion-dollar power line would hug the California coast for 200 miles, with the ability to carry offshore wind energy to the Los Angeles Basin and potentially reduce the region’s reliance on a fleet of dirty - and at least recently, expensive - gas plants. Department of Water and Power - which runs its own independent electric grid - about an undersea cable called the Pacific Transmission Expansion. The report notes that the system operator has had discussions with the L.A. One transmission line not yet endorsed by the California Independent System Operator could change that equation. Even with lots of new solar and wind - and batteries - officials expect there will still be a need for gas turbines that can be fired up on the hottest summer days, when demand for air conditioning strains the power grid. But they wouldn’t eliminate the need for gas plants, many of which are in low-income communities of color burdened by high levels of air pollution. Those facilities could dramatically reduce the need to burn natural gas, which in 2021 supplied more than one-third of the state’s electricity. The transmission projects outlined in the report would enable 17 gigawatts of solar development, from the Central Valley to the Mojave Desert to neighboring regions of Nevada and Arizona eight gigawatts of offshore wind eight gigawatts of onshore wind, more than half of it coming from Idaho, New Mexico and Wyoming and at least a gigawatt of geothermal energy. So we’re talking about more than doubling the size of the power grid. The system operator and other agencies envision adding 70 gigawatts over the next decade - and an additional 50 gigawatts by 2045, the deadline for 100% clean energy. Right now, California has just over 80 gigawatts of electric generating capacity. Some of the numbers in the new report are hard to wrap your head around. We’re talking mind-boggling amounts of clean power And even if the board signs off on the billions of dollars in projects, the Public Utilities Commission still needs to give them the OK, too - a much bigger lift. The draft report still needs to be approved by the system operator’s board of governors. ![]() “We’re trying to take any barriers off the table,” he said. But Mainzer insists these are important steps. ![]() Right now, there are so many requests - many of them for plants unlikely to ever get built - that the agency is moving far too slowly to study and approve badly needed solar and wind farms.īetter processes don’t always lead to better outcomes. Second, the system operator is reworking its process for responding to “interconnection requests,” in which energy developers apply to hook up their power projects to the grid. It should lead to closer coordination among the agencies as they provide direction to companies proposing power plants and transmission lines, he said. When I asked Elliot Mainzer - chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, which oversees the electric grid - whether anything’s really going to change after his agency’s report, he offered several reasons for optimism.įirst, he said, the system operator reached a new agreement in December with the state’s Public Utilities Commission and Energy Commission, the other entities responsible for planning and approving power grid projects. It’s been clear for at least a decade that new and upgraded power lines would be needed to facilitate construction of more solar farms in California’s Central Valley, geothermal plants by the Salton Sea and floating wind farms off the coast.īut for the most part, those projects haven’t gotten built. So what kinds of tricks might California have up its sleeve? Here are four things to know. And getting permission to string wires over long distances - with some routes traversing multiple states and hundreds of landowners - can take a decade or more. Hardly anybody wants to pay for them, even if they’ll save money - and lives - in the long run. But getting the ball rolling on new power lines has been especially tough. Nobody said solving the climate crisis would be easy.
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