How can California become more energy efficient?

California looks for yet more clean energy

Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 8:39 AM on 17 Dec 2007

Read more about: California | energy | renewable energy | energy efficiency

The following essay is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

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The California Energy Commission (CEC) has released its biennial integrated energy policy report (PDF). The 301-page report looks at various issues confronting California and makes recommendations on how to address them. The issues include:

CA_energy_consumption

Rising population leading to greater demand for energy (natural gas, petroleum, and electric power).
Rising natural gas demand while production remains flat, leading to a tight market and higher prices.
Increasing population away from the coast, increasing peak electric demand from air conditioning.
Increasing vehicle travel from population and sprawl.
Expected petroleum supply constraints (e.g. port facilities for increase imports) making it difficult to fuel future vehicle travel conventionally.
California's AB32 cap on greenhouse-gas emissions, requiring 1990 levels by 2020 (despite the population increase -- a 30 percent decrease in absolute emissions).

Even though California is already one of the most efficient users of energy, the CEC is looking for further efficiency improvements, and although a 2006 legislative act mandates 20 percent renewable electricity by 2010, the report looks to 33 percent by 2020 to support California's population growth. A few of the numerous specific recommendations from the report include:

Increase the efficiency levels of the building standards and combine them with on-site generation so that newly constructed buildings are net zero energy by 2020 for residences and 2030 for commercial buildings.
Enact appliance standards to improve the efficiency of appliances sold in California, specifically targeting standards to increase the efficacy of general service lighting.
Implement feed-in tariffs to encourage additional renewable energy connections to the grid.
Upgrade grid capacity to support greater renewable energy (e.g., add transmission lines).
Implement smart grid capabilities to support load management, greater distributed generation, and combined heat and power.
Adopt smart growth policies to address sprawl and reduce vehicle travel, energy, and greenhouse-gas emissions.
For vehicles, target vehicle efficiency, reduce the greenhouse gas content of fuels, and try to reduce vehicle miles traveled.

resource_mix

Many of the suggested actions are for other state agencies to act upon, so the report analyzes various scenarios to provide guidance. The efficiency-only scenarios are all projected to have large negative net costs, i.e., they save more than they cost (report page 60, PDF page 72), which is remarkable because California is already one of the most efficient first-world economies, but apparently there is more to wring from this stone. Renewable energy scenarios have large positive net costs, and the combination of greater efficiency and renewables has small positive net costs. Somewhere in the middle is the probable direction California will go.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

For story: How can California become more energy efficient?
4 Comments | Post a Comment

UK has the answer

They have a target of 2020 to go to offshore wind for baseload power. Penty of offshore wind along the California coast, not to mention wave and tidal current power.

Catch the energy you need from floating platforms anchored offshore Cali. they can double as desalinization stations. Water shortage is your other huge environmental problem.

go to plugin hybrid vehicles, you can set standards to impell a whole new market, as you did when the EV-1 was created.

And go to geo heat exchange for building cooling/heating. that peak air conditioning load will dissapear with cool ground and ocean water temps doing the cooling job.

Help make farms distributed renewable energy producers, wind, solar, and biogas. Shift to organic farming with the organic fertilizer from waste stream biogas digestors. manure and human waste that typically runs off into the ground and surface water is recycled to produce biogas and fertilizer. The biogas can be added to natural gas supplies or used on the farm to produce electricity via a super efficient solid oxide fuel cell/turbine power plant.

There's an energy plan.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 9:07 AM on 17 Dec 2007

Did CA Republicans think this stuff up at the CEC?

Negative costs via air conditioning using the sun without making electricity. Not in California.

Negative costs displacing natural gas using the sun. Not in California.

Positive costs using roof pv.

Swarming for electricity is not warming with the sun.

by sunflower at 10:30 AM on 17 Dec 2007

all remote generation is not equal

please make sure you ALWAYS, ALWAYS qualify any "renewables" advocacy with the absolute maxim that NO WILDERNESS can be damaged or destroyed by generation or transmission lines in any pursuit of "renewables." there is some intentional misinformation campaign out there (thanks for greenwashing it, Sierra Club and NRDC) that somehow as long as there are no greenhouse gases, you can obliterate entire ecosystems and it's all groovy.

NO WAY. there are about 100 times the rooftops already existing in CA to power the entire United States 24/7. we can only use habitat areas we have already destroyed by development for power generation and/or transmission.

please make this distinction and do not allow any exceptions. if we kill one more ecosystem, global warming will be the least of our problems.

the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.

by stopgreenpath at 3:04 PM on 17 Dec 2007

Distributed grid

One characteristic of distributed generation grids is that they require less transmission capacity than centralized power grids.

The power lines already installed are more than enough with a renewable distributed grid that gets power from every suitable roof top and waste stream biogas source and wind power site. All these can be built on already developed sites like farms, landfills, factories, homes, malls, schools.

Larger wind farms can float offshore or have minimal impact located on the great plains, combined with existing farms, or even better located on conservation land set aside to restore marginal farm land to wilderness. I have proposed a new national park on the great plains for this purpose.

Energy policy can be designed to restore wilderness rather than destroy it.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 9:03 PM on 17 Dec 2007

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