Reducing natural gas will help clean energy flourish

Ed Kahl (Natural gas ban worsens unreliable energy supply, Dec. 8) writes that California’s energy supply is unreliable and will be made more so with a natural gas ban. This is a misleading oversimplification. Solar power, for example, is obviously intermittent but solar plants are very reliable and suffer only half the downtime of natural gas plants.

California energy is complex, and climate change is dire. Reducing use of natural gas which is a potent greenhouse gas will help clean energy solutions flourish, for example by using the battery capacity of your electric car to power your home during a grid outage. Let’s look forward to our clean energy future using facts rather than backward to fossil fuels with misleading characterizations.

Doug McKenzie

Berkeley