Sacramento, CA—Today, the California Energy Commission (CEC) announced progress in meeting the state’s 100% clean energy goals ahead of schedule. California Solar & Storage Association (CALSSA) executive director Bernadette Del Chiaro issued the following statement in response:
California should be proud of its clean energy leadership, and we have the California Energy Commission to thank for much of that progress. However, with less than 35% of our electricity coming from renewable resources today, it is premature to celebrate, and especially so as utilities continue their attack on California’s renewable energy bright spot: rooftop solar.
California policy makers should be sounding the alarm and calling for all-hands-on-deck action to double our renewable energy resources by 2025, and doubling them again by 2030, as called for by the Biden Administration last year.
It took California 20 years to generate 35% of its electricity from renewable resources like solar and wind power. State law dictates we at least double that, hitting 60% renewables in less than 10 years, by 2030. And, climate science dictates the goalposts of getting to 100% carbon-free energy should be moved way up from the current 2045 timeframe.
Complicating matters, demand for electricity is expected to increase significantly as more consumers switch to electric cars and appliances making those higher benchmarks even harder to hit. Further, the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant is scheduled to close in 2024 and the prolonged drought is severely limiting hydro power.
All of these dynamics mean California needs to pick up the pace on renewable energy development more than ever before.
Meanwhile, rooftop solar, which continues to grow especially among middle- and working-class communities and added more than a nuclear-power plant worth of renewable energy last year, is under attack. Investor-owned utilities, led by PG&E, view rooftop solar as a competitive threat to their monopoly business model. They have launched a well-funded attack campaign to blame rooftop solar users for rising energy costs when research shows building distributed generation like rooftop solar and batteries is key to both controlling costs and creating greater grid reliability.
A California study put out by the California Public Utilities Commission last year showed utility profit and uncontrolled utility spending is squarely to blame for rising costs. When California voters are asked what they believe is causing rate increases, rooftop solar is listed last, by just 11%, well behind utility companies seeking to maintain of boost their profits (51%), managing wildfire danger (41%), grid maintenance (33%), and the cost of building new electric transmission lines (15%).
Data presented in today’s announcement by the Commission shows utility-scale renewable energy has not grown significantly for several years. The document cites the data as “Renewable Portfolio Standard-eligible resources” which typically does not include rooftop solar, or distributed generation, built and maintained by consumers.
Rooftop solar, by contrast, is California’s renewable energy bright spot, adding over 1.5 GWs of energy in 2021 alone as the data from the state-run website “DG Stats” shows.
As the California Public Utilities Commission continues to deliberate the so-called “NEM-3” proceeding, CALSSA joins with 140,000 California voters, over 600 faith, community, environmental, and equity organizations, and countless elected officials in calling on Governor Gavin Newsom to protect the rights of consumers to invest in rooftop solar, rejecting the “solar tax”, and making sure rooftop solar remains affordable for working- and middle-class consumers in the years to come.