In the wake of a power shutdown that affected nearly 800,000 customers, the California government and utilities are facing a struggle to balance aggressive climate change goals with the responsibility to keep the lights on.
The blackout, a preventative measure imposed by Pacific Gas & Electric, is raising new questions about whether the Golden State is going too far too fast on climate change, without diversifying what energy technologies for which it relies upon to keep the state running.
PG&E, the Golden State’s largest investor-owned utility, began shutting off power for customers in northern and central California on Oct. 9 amid severe wind conditions the company said could risk sparking wildfires. In total, homes and businesses in 35 California counties went dark over four days. Power was restored fully Oct. 12, according to the utility.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom painted a bleak picture in a press conference Oct. 10: Schools were closed. The blackout affected people’s ability to work, get around, and access medical care. Daily life was disrupted.
For PG&E, the power shutdown, which it called a “public safety power shutdown,” was necessary. The company found at least 50 instances of weather-related damages to its equipment — downed power lines or trees on power lines — that could have created fire conditions, Jeff Smith, a PG&E spokesman, told the Washington Examiner.
The utility is already under intense criticism for the role its equipment has had in sparking previous fires, including the deadly Camp Fire last year. Feeling the weight of those wildfire liabilities, PG&E filed in January for bankruptcy protections, a move many observers dubbed the first “climate change bankruptcy.”
The recent power shutdown didn’t go smoothly for PG&E, and Newsom and other lawmakers in the state have pounced.
“This is not, from my perspective, a climate change story as much as a story about greed and mismanagement over the course of decades,” Newsom said. “Neglect. A desire to advance not public safety but profits.”
However, beyond the scrutiny of PG&E, the blackout is also fueling debate in the state about which technologies it should prop up as it forges ahead on climate policy — and whether California policymakers and in some cases, third parties like the utilities or environmental groups, are cutting out certain solutions.
Advocates for distributed energy, such as rooftop solar paired with battery storage or fuel cells paired with hydrogen or natural gas, say their technologies could ultimately help California reduce emissions and lessen the risks of future blackouts. But they argue that they haven’t been entirely let in the door because the government has been preoccupied with boosting utility-scale renewables, large-scale battery storage, transmission upgrades, and electric vehicles.
That push, for example, “tends to suggest that there’s not a role for natural gas in particular, and in fact, there’s a lot of efforts going on to decarbonize the natural gas system and to introduce renewable energy,” said Jeff Serfass, executive director of the California Hydrogen Business Council.
Serfass added the natural gas system could be utilized in a zero-carbon, renewable future. For example, he said natural gas pipeline infrastructure can be used to transport and store hydrogen, which can, in turn, be used to provide power for clean vehicles.
Serfass is hopeful California regulators are “fairly listening” to all voices and won’t single out a clean energy solution.
Environmentalists in California and around the country, though, have increasingly called into question how much utilities and state policymakers should be focusing on natural gas.
A September report from the Rocky Mountain Institute, for example, suggested that the declining costs of solar, wind, and battery storage could soon start to make investments in new natural gas infrastructure uneconomic.
“The most risky, least economic investment in gas plants is for coal plant replacements,” said Mark Dyson, electricity principal at the Rocky Mountain Institute. He noted several utilities have been making that swap from coal to natural gas but said it’s not sustainable.
“What does make sense is buying a lot of renewable energy and then figuring out some way to provide backup power when these renewables are not necessarily available,” Dyson said.
Investments in renewable energy could offset utility spending on things such as new gas plants or substation upgrades, Dyson added. He also pointed to the opportunity for behind-the-meter solar power and storage to minimize the impact of blackouts such as the shutdown PG&E imposed.
But even clean, distributed power, such as rooftop solar with storage, has a hard time finding a level playing field.
“The biggest barrier we have are the utilities unfortunately,” said Anne Hoskins, chief policy officer for SunRun. “We really want to work with them,” but major utilities often view distributed energy as a competitor, she added.
That’s in large part because utilities risk losing profits as more customers disconnect partially or entirely from the grid.
“We don’t have a lot of experience in how do you build a business model where one-third of the power is coming from the customer and two-thirds from the utility,” John Farrell, director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Energy Democracy Initiative, said.
“In the long run, we have to figure out what is the appropriate way for customers and utilities to interact in terms of providing energy,” he added.
Hoskins said SunRun has about 2,000 customers in California who have rooftop solar paired with battery storage, which would allow them to a certain extent to keep the lights on and appliances running during shutdowns such as the PG&E event. Pooling together distributed resources in a community could also help keep critical buildings such as hospitals and schools online during blackouts, Hoskins added.
All of that takes the pressure off the grid, reducing the overall risk of having to shut the power down to prevent fires.
“It’s the idea of let’s really think about how do we generate where we consume,” Hoskins said. She is urging utilities and policymakers to rethink where investments should be made and to analyze the cost of supporting distributed resources versus investments in updating transmission or conducting long-term maintenance such as tree trimming.
Ultimately, the debate over how California treats various energy technologies will put pressure on the state’s policymakers as they make increasingly consequential climate and energy decisions in the state.
The state could already be well behind in meeting its medium- and long-term climate targets. The California Green Innovation Index, released earlier this month by the research firm Next 10, found the state at its current carbon-cutting pace could be more than 100 years late in meeting its midcentury goal to cut greenhouse gases 80% below 1990 levels.
As a result, California may seek to speed its emissions cuts by doubling down on electrifying other sectors such as transportation and buildings — a push that’s sure to exacerbate tensions in the state, particularly if more wildfire risk-induced power shutdowns occur.
Policymakers aren’t thinking about the ramifications of their aggressive climate push, particularly the cost it imposes on customers, Brad Jensen, director of public policy for the San Gabriel Valley Economic Partnership, told the Washington Examiner.
“If California is this big, progressive, forward-thinking, innovative, better-than-every-other-state state, then why are we handling this by simply turning off the power?” Jensen said. “The truth is that there are a lot of issues in the state that go unaddressed or go by the wayside.”
