San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
COUNTY REACHES OUT TO PUBLIC ON PLAN TO CUT CARBON EMISSIONS IN REGION
San Diego County should expand rooftop solar and small solar arrays as it works to cut carbon emissions, speakers said last week at a workshop on the San Diego Regional Decarbonization Framework.
The framework is an ambitious effort to coordinate climate action among cities, school districts and other agencies within the county. Its goal is to reach net carbon zero by or before 2045. Net carbon zero is defined as a balance in the carbon cycle, where human carbon emissions equal the amount we capture.
The plan lays out choices the region faces as it transitions from fossil fuels, and includes recommendations for energy, transportation, land use, building electrification and workforce development. In November, the board approved a technical report on those options and this month it received a report on building a green energy workforce.
Last week, county officials and other experts held the first in a series of community meetings to present the framework and seek public input.
Besides calling for more rooftop and small-scale solar, speakers urged the county to invest in methane capture at landfills, develop well-paid jobs in the new sectors and collaborate with farmers on agricultural methods that improve soil and sequester carbon.
One of the key tradeoffs that San Diego must consider is how to vastly expand solar capacity without disrupting undeveloped or cultivated land.
Building large-scale solar and wind farms in East County would be cost-effective and meet nearly all the region’s energy demand, but could damage valuable habitat and farmlands and disturb neighboring communities, officials acknowledged. Expanding solar on homes or in local “urban infill” facilities would be more expensive and produce only 35 percent of the county’s power, the report concluded.
Speakers said the county should push to add as much infill and rooftop solar as possible before turning to solar farms. Sonja Robinson, lead organizer for the Protect our Communities Foundation, critiqued what she called a “bias toward remote solar” and said estimates for large-scale solar facilities don’t include the cost of transmission to urban areas.
“The focus on remote utility scale would require transmission upgrades,” she said. “Those upgrades are costly and would be charged to ratepayers.”
By contrast, another speaker said, adding more rooftop solar would provide financial benefit to homeowners and limit disruption of wildlands.
“This is a much wiser strategy to do infill solar, and to allow those homeowners to enjoy the investment of the labor they have,” he said. “This is wiser to do infill and avoid development of open spaces.”
Sean-keoni Ellis, an organizer with the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters and HVAC Local 230, said workers need assistance in the transition to renewable energy jobs.
“We’re the builders of the natural gas plants and a lot of these fossil fuel jobs that will be going away in the next decade,” Ellis said. “We’re looking forward to working with our environmental brothers and sisters and elected officials to find solutions to this very hard problem of our climate crisis.”
Other speakers said the county should install methane capture systems at landfills, noting that reducing methane, a short-term but potent climate pollutant, can have immediate benefits in slowing climate change.
Some also said efforts to sequester carbon in natural systems should go beyond tree-planting to focus on restoring soil and supporting farming techniques that capture carbon.
“Our agricultural acreage is decreasing due to many issues,” said speaker Greg Kamin. “Helping farmers stay in business seems like an easy way to maintain the carbon sinks that are a positive in the overall plan .... Possibly farmers could be convinced to plant crops that are even more carbon positive if it benefits their livelihood as well.”
Murtaza Baxamusa, the county’s program manager for regional sustainability, said the county hopes to enlist farmers in programs that advance climate action.
“Our board recognized that there needs to be done on agriculture community with carbon farming.”
The virtual event last week was the first of a series of five community meetings to introduce San Diegans to the decarbonization framework. It will also host workshops in April and May focusing on the sectors of energy, land and agriculture, transportation, buildings and jobs. In the summer, it will hold talks by experts in different sectors. The Board of Supervisors expects to approve the final framework in August.