A nine-year-old in 2035
I’m back after a few weeks on parental leave with my first child. Time passes strangely. It feels like I was away for both a much shorter time and a much longer time than that, and now the days and nights blend together in a semi-caffeinated stew. I’m learning that this phenomenon of newborn time distortion isn’t unique to me or my wife, so maybe you know what I mean.
While it's a little harder to focus on the nitty-gritty of clean energy, I do have a new perspective on the timelines involved in this work.
Take 2035, when California’s goals call for 90% of retail electricity to come from renewable sources. That’s 74 more gigawatts of solar, storage, wind and geothermal the state’s got to add, and some of it needs to be transported on new transmission lines that take 7, 10, sometimes 20 years to permit, design and build. Still, even knowing that, 2035 has seemed so far off. But with a son who will be just 9 then, it seems much sooner. Same for 2045 and, alarmingly, 2100.
To meet California’s goals and keep air conditioners running, it’s imperative to get that transmission built. To load up dried-out farmland with solar panels and grid-scale batteries. To refocus CEQA on the environment and bring the California Endangered Species Act into alignment with the realities of climate change. To get wildfire costs out of electric bills. These are big jobs, and there’s not that much time.
Here’s what’s got our attention lately.
Interconnecting
Assembly Bill 2493, the proposal co-sponsored by ACP-CA and the Union of Concerned Scientists to reduce delays connecting new clean energy projects to the grid, passed out of the Assembly Tuesday on a 57-17 vote.
Authored by Utilities and Energy Committee Chair Cottie Petrie-Norris, the bill holds investor-owned utilities accountable for widespread delays to transmission system upgrades that are slowing down the interconnection of new clean energy projects and driving up costs.
The bill requires the IOUs to initiate permitting faster for grid upgrades approved by CAISO, requires the IOUs to take remedial actions to address root causes of the delays overseen by an independent auditor, and creates a financial incentive to drive improvements by making the IOUs’ progress in speeding things up a factor in CPUC return-on-equity authorizations.
Do it faster
A slow-motion experiment in competitive transmission development yielded more positive results this week. According to an analysis from Washington, D.C.-based R Street Institute, competitively bid projects cost about 30 percent less and were usually finished faster than projects built by utilities with exclusive rights to build the lines in their territories.
Transmission projects, historically the sole province of utilities that are regulated as monopolies, were opened to competitive bidding after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved competition for a subset of projects in 2011.
Because transmission development happens so slowly (and, according to the study, because utilities often make it hard to obtain necessary data), it’s taken a long time to tell how the order has worked. But R Street’s results align with those from a Brattle Group study we wrote about here that identified savings of 29 percent for competitively bid projects in the California Independent System Operator’s footprint from 2013 to 2019.
The competitive process incorporates accountability that is often missing when utilities are automatically assigned the projects. To win a bid, competitive contracts often need to include cost-containment provisions and penalties for missing deadlines that save ratepayers money.
In California, private bidding is only permitted for the biggest transmission projects (over 200 kV) that aren’t considered upgrades to utilities’ existing infrastructure. CAISO’s recently approved transmission plan approved 38 new transmission projects totaling $6.7 billion, but just one was open to competitive bids.
As evidence mounts on the benefits of competitive transmission, we should look for ways to build on that success. In the absence of competition, we need measures like AB 2493 to bring more accountability to the IOUs’ generator interconnection upgrades.
A good plan for transmission
Speaking of CAISO’s transmission plan, it was approved May 19. As we discussed last month, it dedicated a lot of attention to congestion, which is the industry term for overcrowding on transmission lines.
CAISO’s plan, which ACP-CA supported in public comments, approves new investments in major transmission corridors and previews more to come for the Central Valley in next year’s plan.
The one line that’s open to competitive bids, mentioned above, traverses 180 miles of Southern California to enable delivery of roughly 7 gigawatts of clean power. It’s expected to cost from $1.3 to $1.8 billion.
Offshore wind lives
California officials were steadfast in their support for offshore wind despite federal antipathy at this year’s Pacific Offshore Wind Summit, which was attended by some 400 people on May 19 in Long Beach.
California Energy Commission Chair David Hochschild, Assemblymember Rick Zbur, and CPUC Commissioner Matt Baker all expressed confidence in pressing forward, with Hochschild coaching the crowd, “it’s hard because it’s important.”
The general mood, as observed by ACP-CA Senior Policy Director Molly Croll, was clear-eyed but sanguine. Panelists celebrated recent offshore wind achievements in the state, including the Coastal Commission’s adoption of the Statewide Fishing Strategy, the CEC’s progress on port readiness assessments and grant administration, and grassroots organizing in support of community-enriching project development, while other panels focused on recent legal victories in federal courts.
