What California isn’t doing is building offshore wind turbines that keep spinning after sundown. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. And the Public Utilities Commission is slated to vote today on a proposal that critics say would offer an additional lifeline to gas plants. But in the meantime, Newsom’s administration is scrambling to keep the lights on this summer, in part by extending the shutdown deadline for four fossil-fueled power plants in Southern California. That should help avert blackouts, at least to an extent. State officials are finally compelling utilities to invest in lithium-ion batteries that can store solar power for use after dark. Half a decade later, that mostly hasn’t happened. I wrote about it back in 2015, explaining that in the view of some experts, a bill to increase the state’s renewable energy mandate “doesn’t do enough to promote clean energy sources that can generate electricity around the clock.” Still, even critics were confident California would “eventually diversify its clean energy sources.”
Sooner or later, we’ll need clean energy sources that can fill in the gaps - and after two evenings of rolling blackouts last summer, it’s looking more like sooner than later. But as you may be aware, the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow 24 hours a day. Much of the state’s climate progress thus far has been enabled by increasingly low-cost solar and wind power.
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