State looking into 100 percent RPS
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Just after 16 months after Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 350, Senate leader Kevin De Leon introduced a new bill in SB 384 to mandate utilities to generate all of its power from renewable energy sources by 2045
The bill will also move the 50 percent renewables deadline from 2030 to 2025 which is expected to be a tough challenge for utilities to meet. According to a report by the California Energy Commission, the state currently produces 27 percent of its power from renewable sources meaning that to meet the 50 percent deadline by 2025 will essentially force the utilities in the state to double their RPS in an eightyear span.
One of the concerns for the energy sector is that making all power have to come from renewable sources it could mean other clean energy sources would be omitted such as large hydro, nuclear and rooftop solar which currently do not count toward a utility’s RPS.
“This is potentially a game-changing development. I have no doubt it will be met with some opposition but my sense tells me that in a state like California it will have some traction in the legislature,” said Imperial Irrigation District General Manager Kevin Kelley during last week’s IID Board of Directors meeting. “It bears our continued vigilance to track and where appropriate, help advance it.”
If approved California will have the same set goal as Hawaii to reach 100 percent renewable energy.
Since early in his campaign Donald Trump pledged to revive the coal industry which had been adversely affected by some of the regulations put in place during former president Barack Obama’s administration to push for the development of cleaner sources of energy and the reduction in emissions of greenhouse gasses.
The current administration’s efforts to roll back those environmental policies have been harshly criticized by the general public, environmentalists and the scientific community who have warned legislators about the serious consequences of not acting to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Now a new and unlikely ally has emerged, the coal industry itself.
The New York Times published on Sunday an article about top executives in the three largest coal producers in the United States Cloud Peak Energy, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal joining forces with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Clean Air Task Force to worked with officials to pass legislation to reduce the impact of coal burning has in the environment.
With the new partnership, the coal industry is lobbying for a bill that would expand federal subsidies to incentivize the development of new technology such as carbon capture and sequestration that can be used to mitigate the impact of carbon dioxide.
The technology usually involves capturing most of the carbon dioxide produced and contain it underground.
“We can’t turn back time,” Richard Reavey, vice president for government and public affairs at Cloud Peak Energy told the New York Times. “We have to accept that there are reasonable concerns about carbon dioxide and climate, and something has to be done about it. It’s a political reality, it’s a social reality, and it has to be dealt with.”
Since the fossil fuel industry is projected to remain dominant in the energy mix of the country for the next couple of decades, these companies argue that in order to have a meaningful impact on the environment investing in technology for capturing carbon from coal-fired and gas-fired power plants is a must.
For 2015, the coal industry hit its lowest level since 1978 and despite the White House plans to roll back regulations on the coal industry it seems unlikely it will be enough for the industry to thrive due to the lower cost of renewables and natural gas.
Even though the latest sentiment from the coal industry could be seen as a way to keep their industry alive, environmental groups are still willing to work with them.
“To the extent that they are saying things that seem much more rational than in the past,” David Hawkins, director of the climate program at the NRDC told the New York Times. “They are trying to persuade skeptical investors that coal has a future.”