California has some of the world’s most ambitious clean energy policies, but mounting climate change impacts underscore the need to ensure electricity reliability, even as the state accelerates its fossil-free transition. Modeling from GridLab and Telos Energy finds California can achieve 85 percent clean energy by 2030 without compromising reliability, even under stressful conditions. A companion report from Energy Innovation shows how state policy can leverage resource diversity, demand-side resources, and greater regional coordination to reduce reliability risks while improving environmental justice by retiring natural gas power plants.
This companion policy report “Achieving An Equitable And Reliable 85 Percent Clean Electricity System In California” provides California policymakers with no-regrets actions to implement reliability insights from the technical analysis. The recommendations show how the state can mitigate risks from deploying resources too slowly, and reduce air pollution impacts of legacy natural gas power plants, while expanding resource diversity and regional coordination to improve reliability.
Download the report here
