The move was approved with a 5-0 vote by the California Energy Commission, in what supporters of solar energy are hailing as a monumental moment.

“This is an undeniably historic decision for the state and the U.S.,” Abigail Ross Hopper, the Solar Energy Industries Association’s CEO said in a statement. “California has long been our nation’s biggest solar champion … now, California is taking bold leadership again, recognizing that solar should be as commonplace as the front door that welcomes you home.”

The regulation will go into effect once it receives its expected approval by the Building Standards Commission later this month.

And while proponents of renewable energy may be pleased with the decision, there’s mounting concerns that the requirement will only aggravate the state’s home affordability crisis, as the mandate is expected to add at least $10,000 in additional construction costs.

However, supporters argue that utility savings will balance out that cost in the long term.

“Adoption of these standards represents a quantum leap in statewide building standards,” Robert Raymer, technical director for the California Building Industry Association, told the commission. “You can bet every other of the 49 states will be watching closely to see what happens.”

But Republican leaders are already coming out against the decision, framing it as just the latest example of government overreach in Sacramento.

“That’s just going to drive the cost up and make California, once again, not affordable to live,” Republican Assemblyman Brian Dahle reportedly said of the dangers of the rules.

The mandate will apply to all homes, condominiums and apartment buildings up to three stories high — with exceptions for structures that are covered by shade.

According to the commission’s own estimates, the panels will cost homeowners around $40 a month, but save them about $80 a month on heating, air conditioning and other costs.

“This is great for wealthier homeowners, but for everybody else it’s one more reason to not go to California or to leave ASAP,” American Enterprise Institute economist Jimmy Pethokoukis said on CNBC Wednesday.

More broadly, the move is part of California’s plan to have all residential buildings be “zero net energy,” which means that the the total amount of energy used by the building is the same as the amount of renewable energy it creates.

California’s massive computing industry faced the prospect of sweeping changes at the hands of Golden State regulators worried that idle devices are drawing too much power at too great a cost.

“All computers sold in California could be required to adopt stricter state energy standards by 2018, cutting computer energy consumption by as much as half, according to new regulations being proposed by the California Energy Commission,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “The standards would apply to power use settings on both desktops and laptops, monitors and signage displays sold in California,” requiring “software and hardware settings controlling the amount of power used by the machines, especially when not in use, in a power period called ‘idle load.'”

The regulations have already been pegged to make a decisive impact on the manufacture and production of electronic devices in the U.S. “Given California’s size, market share and influence, the rules adopted by the CEC expect to trigger changes across the industry by mandating changes even the federal government has thus far avoided tackling,” U-T San Diego noted. But the federal Department of Energy has been tipped as next in line to consider applying such rules, according to the Bee:

“The regulations would save 1,913 gigawatt-hours of power used by computers and 588 gigawatt-hours from monitors and displays yearly, said Andrew McAllister, commissioner for the California Energy Commission. That’s estimated to reduce utility bills by more than $400 million annually by 2024.”

Costs and savings

With little if any organized opposition to the rules, outside of industry negotiations, the California Energy Commission would become the first state body to codify an energy-reduction agenda — at an initial cost to consumers. “The agency estimates it will add about $18 to the price of a computer but promises it will save customers and businesses much more in energy savings,” reported U-T San Diego. “But the commission estimates consumers will save $75.53 over the computer’s 5-year lifespan, due to energy savings.”

“California businesses will pay up to $62 million more per year in incremental costs for installing more efficient computers, monitors and electronic signs, but the CEC said businesses will reduce their electricity costs by up to $290 million per year once their equipment has turned over.”

Hitting the wall

Environmentalist groups have spearheaded the push for the new regulations, insisting that the energy savings translate into air cleaner enough to justify big changes. “Roughly 300 million computers in the U.S. spend from 50 to 77 percent of their time ‘on but inactive’ and devour $10 billion a year worth of electricity, the equivalent of 30-large power plants spewing 65 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution that contributes to climate change,” the Natural Resources Defense Council claimed. 

But some industry analysts have cautioned that, regardless of environmental objectives, the need for energy efficiency standards could be driven by an even simpler problem: current limits on the global capacity to produce energy. “The anticipated and growing energy requirements for future computing needs will hit a wall in the next 24 years if the current trajectory is correct,” according to Semiconductor Engineering. “At that point, the world will not produce enough energy for all of the devices that are expected to be drawing power.”

“A report issued by the Semiconductor Industry Association and Semiconductor Research Corp., bases its conclusions on system-level energy per bit operation, which are a combination of many components such as logic circuits, memory arrays, interfaces and I/Os. Each of those contributes to the total energy budget. For the benchmark energy per bit, as shown in the chart below, computing will not be sustainable by 2040. This is when the energy required for computing is estimated to exceed the estimated world’s energy production.”

This “solvency” issue gives state commissioners broad authority. In the dozen or so states where insurance commissioners are elected, these officials often have their eyes on higher office. For instance, insurance officials and some Sacramento observers argue California’s ambitious commissioner – Dave Jones, a former Democratic assemblyman who is mulling a race for attorney general – is imposing a politically motivated diktat on companies and dressing it up as a campaign for solvency.

The issue: Jones is calling for insurance companies to divest “voluntarily” from their investments in thermal-coal companies and in utility companies that make heavy use of coal. He has vowed to publicize – some say “shame” – insurance companies that don’t comply with the request. Given that 1988’s Proposition 103 grants the California commissioner vast powers to prescribe which factors companies use to adjust rates and to approve or deny proposed rate increases, insurance officials wonder about the voluntary nature of the policy.

The “Climate Risk Carbon Initiative” divestment request applies to direct investments in companies that gain more than 30 percent of their revenues from thermal coal. In practice, these are some of the most conservative investments around, including monopoly utilities whose returns are set by regulation. It also requires insurance companies that do business in the state to answer a variety of questions about such investments, even if they are headquartered outside California. The goal is to pressure companies to divest from these holdings.

“The commissioner decided to request voluntary divestment from thermal coal enterprises this year following consideration of recent studies that show coal investments represent significantly higher financial risk than other investments over time,” the California Department of Insurance explains. “Moreover, since 2011, coal prices, cash flows, and company valuations have fallen sharply, thus adversely affecting and bankrupting numerous coal companies.”

“Politics,” the department says, “has nothing to do with the decision to ask insurers to divest from thermal coal.”

That sounds reasonable, but insurers typically make conservative investment decisions. Jones and other advocates for divestment make it seem as if these companies are heavily invested in high-risk stocks. They suggest these companies will be stuck with enormous “stranded assets” as the nation moves away from coal-based energy and toward alternative-energy sources. But insurance companies hold few coal-related stocks and bonds as a percentage of their overall investments. Even if the “stranded asset” argument were correct, it would barely cause a blip in their portfolios.

In a letter to the insurance commissioner last year, leaders of major insurance-company trade associations reminded him: “For regulated utilities, the risk of loss due to stranded assets is remote. Utility companies operate on a cost-plus system. Precedent is in place that supports the recovery of all costs deemed to have been prudently incurred.”

By contrast, some of the investments the insurance commissioner prefers – in “green” energy, for instance – are risky. As my R Street Institute colleague R.J. Lehmann noted in an article last year, “Greentech Media publishes an annual list of solar company failures and has noted that ‘(k)eeping track of failing solar companies in 2011 and 2012 bordered on full-time work.’”

Why hasn’t the insurance commissioner called for divestment from these companies?

The answer seems obvious. California’s government has embraced climate change in a big way. Gov. Jerry Brown has addressed the United Nations and a conference at the Vatican, where he has depicted the issue in stark terms. In his view, the future of human existence is at stake. California has passed a first-in-the-nation cap-and-trade system to roll back industrial emissions to 1990 levels, along with other legislation designed to decrease public use of petroleum products dramatically. It’s a popular cause here, and isn’t lost on any up-and-coming politician.

Whatever one’s view of man-made climate change, it remains an iffy proposition to suggest it is threatening the long-term solvency of major insurance companies. These investments already reflect the risks involved in the energy sector. Every knowledgeable investor knows about the changing regulatory climate. Private investors are better able than government planners to evaluate such matters and make decisions accordingly.

Indeed, as I pointed out in my recent R Street study, one of the nation’s most widely respected investors, Warren Buffett, recently rejected calls by an activist group and investor in his Berkshire Hathaway Corp. to report on climate-change risks. For instance, many activists argue that insurance companies aren’t properly pricing these risks and aren’t being aggressive enough in tackling the potential long-term problems. Buffett believes in climate change but doesn’t see a risk in his company’s insurance holdings.

“As a citizen, you may understandably find climate change keeping you up nights,” Buffett said in his company report. “As a homeowner in a low-lying area, you may wish to consider moving. But when you are thinking only as a shareholder of a major insurer, climate change should not be on your list of worries.” Buffett suggested even an uptick in the frequency or severity of climate-related catastrophes wasn’t much of a problem for the insurance industry, given that rates are set annually. Moreover, as a major provider of reinsurance – that is, insurance for insurance companies – Berkshire might actually benefit from more demand driven by climate change, given that reinsurance prices have been falling for years.

These companies’ futures depend on their ability to evaluate risks and benefits. They all have teams of actuaries and risk-management professionals who have a vested interest in making the most sophisticated guesses about future events. Elected officials, by contrast, are more apt to be swayed by political winds. A previous Republican insurance commissioner and gubernatorial candidate, Steve Poizner, in 2010 tried to force insurers to divest from investments in multinational companies that did business in Iran. This type of thing is nothing new.

“Divestment comes at the expense of meaningful action,” wrote Frank A. Wolak, director of the Stanford University Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. “It will do nothing to reduce global greenhouse emissions. It will not prevent these companies from raising capital.” And indeed, the state government’s push for divestment in non-insurance areas – i.e., forcing the California Public Employees’ Retirement System to take a similar approach – has been met with a similar backlash.

One can never know the motives of insurance commissioners, past or present. But it’s a safe bet that private investors making their own decisions with their own money are almost certainly more trustworthy than politicians making investment decisions based on the latest political winds. By all means, commissioners should work to assure that insurers can fulfill whatever claims are made in the future – but they shouldn’t bootstrap that legitimate authority into a politically motivated crusade.

Steven Greenhut is the founding editor of CalWatchdog. He is Western region director of the R Street Institute and a Sacramento-based columnist. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

Brown has long pursued environmental policies — like an executive order last year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or entering a global pact to curb the rate at which the globe is warming — but by working with other states, Brown said California can benefit from a regional energy grid, can make bulk purchases of energy-efficient state vehicles, and can lobby for federal research and development funding that could fund the grid, fuel and storage.

Four of the 17 states have Republican governors, which Brown attributed to the accord’s narrow focus on energy efficiency, avoiding more contentious topics like climate change.

“It takes not too much research to notice there’s a very sharp cleavage in the United States on this issue of climate change, and it has a lot of partisan coloration,” Brown said. “So we want to move forward. We want to get done important stuff without getting bogged down in the larger controversy.”

The Republican governors are: Terry Branstad of Iowa, Rick Snyder of Michigan, Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts.

The Democratic governors joining Brown are: Jack Markell of Delaware, Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, Peter Shumlin of Vermont, Jay Inslee of Washington, Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, David Y. Ige of Hawaii, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Kate Brown of Oregon, Gina M. Raimondo of Rhode Island and Terry McAuliffe of Virginia.

“The whole genius of this accord is that we’re bringing together parties, governors of different philosophies,” said Brown. “We are talking about clean energy, renewable energy, the grid efficiency, all very powerful, very important.”

The accord can be found here.

As CBS Los Angeles reported, Brown tied his support for the legislation to his broader climate agenda, which has seen him praise Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on environmental matters and earn a trip to Vatican City to push for global change.

“‘We’ve got a serious problem here,’ he told KCAL9 Political Reporter Dave Bryan via satellite. ‘Burning oil and gas and coal and diesel is a big part of the problem. We’ve got to find new bio-fuels. We have to be more efficient. We’ve got a lot to do. And by the way, if we do nothing, the cost is unimaginable.'”

Brown has done his best to use his final term in office to amplify that message whenever possible. His trip to the Vatican, Sci-Tech Today noted, will be just “the latest of several international trips the governor has taken to urge others to do more to curb global warming. He’s also been rallying states and provinces to sign an agreement to match California’s target for reducing emissions by 2050.”

Stricter standards

While Brown has pushed the message, Democrat allies in Sacramento have crafted the content of regulations to match. De Leon’s bill, SB350, “imposes three significant clean-energy goals by 2030,” U-T San Diego’s Steven Greenhut observed: “Reducing the use of petroleum products in automobiles by 50 percent; increasing to 50 percent (from a current 33-percent goal) the amount of energy that uses renewable sources such as solar and wind power; and doubling energy-efficiency in current buildings.”

In fact, the legislation was crafted around achieving the outsized goals Brown set for ratcheting down California’s statewide emissions levels. As an interim step, the governor has proposed that the state “cut emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. It’s an ambitious target that members of his administration insist is achievable,” according to Sci-Tech Today.

De Leon himself has not shied away from using aggressive language to characterize the bill’s sweep and ostensible urgency, as Greenhut noted. “We need to break the stranglehold the profit-driven oil companies have on our economy and give consumers better options to power their homes and cars in cleaner, healthier and more sustainable ways,” de Leon said in remarks posted to his website.

Brown, for his part, has openly acknowledged the level of industry outrage the bill guarantees. “Well, of course, the people who are gonna sell 50 percent less petroleum are not only gonna have questions, they’re gonna have a fierce, unrelenting opposition,” he told KCAL-9.

But the coming regulatory shakeup has made for some strange industry bedfellows. “One of the issues both utilities and solar installers have raised,” according to GreenTech Solar, “is that distributed solar should not be treated any differently than utility-scale solar as the state crafts the rules around meeting the new 50 percent target.

A legislative scramble

Part of the urgency behind SB350 has been driven by environmental regulations voted into law years ago. AB32, the big climate bill passed in 2006, “established a goal of cutting the state’s greenhouse gas emission to 1990 levels by 2020. To meet that goal, emissions need to fall by six percent between 2013 (the latest year for which figures are available) and 2020,” CalMatters reported. “Brown and other political leaders expect that to happen,” according to SCPR, although, to date, “emissions have fallen only slightly since 2009, when the recession ended.”

The minor dip has been attributed to the difficulty involved in pushing California’s energy usage much lower than it is already. “Greenhouse gas emissions in California dropped by 7 percent from their peak in 2004 to 2013, compared to 9 percent nationwide over the same period,” according to CalMatters. “Reducing emissions is harder here because the state’s economy is already relatively energy-frugal.”

A play for leadership

Gov. Brown was intent on taking the opportunity to speak more to a national and even local audience than to the planet at large. “With mayors from San Francisco, San Jose and eight other U.S. cities in the audience, Brown gave a glowing review of his own achievements in cutting emissions in California, offering it as a template for mayors around the world to follow,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

But the governor did make plain his ambition that others around the world might look to the Golden State for a blueprint, or at least an inspiration. Well-known as a former Jesuit seminarian, Brown leveraged his reputation to connect up California’s climate policy to the possible policy agenda of Catholics around the world.

“I believe what people at the Vatican are looking for is some hopeful news and reports that yes, climate change can be dealt with,” Gov. Brown told Bloomberg. “My message: that even though this is a very profound and difficult problem, California is showing a way whereby the countries of the world can actually do something very positive.”

He singled out Pope Francis for moving the Catholic church in what many observers have described as a markedly more assertive direction on economic matters. “”I’m very impressed with Pope Francis and where he’s taking the church — I see the hand of Jesuit training and inspiration in what he’s doing,” Brown told reporters with the Contra Costa Times. “The pope is engaging in moral authority and calling people to reflect on the basis of those considerations. This is desperately needed to counteract the iron logic of the marketplace, which is only dealing with profit.”

Gov. Brown emphasized that his Vatican visit was a prelude to the larger United Nations conference on climate change soon to be put on in Paris. “To achieve anything in Paris, we’ll need grass-roots efforts by religious leaders and states and provinces,” he said, “to intensify the pressure on these national leaders to get more done than is currently on their respective agendas.”

Politicking religion

Senate Democrats ensured Brown had a token of appreciation to take with him. SR37, passed with what the Los Angeles Times called near-unanimity, called upon the state to “consider the implications of the papal encyclical and climate change in their policy and fiscal actions to prevent further environmental degradation.”

The bill’s language foreshadowed what top Sacramento Democrats hoped would become a big new raft of state energy regulations. Senate leader Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, has advanced a sweeping piece of legislation drawing some fire, but not enough to blunt its progress. “Oil companies have ramped up opposition,” reported the Times, “and utilities are angling for changes in the bill that would make it easier for them to fulfill requirements to produce renewable energy. But so far, no one has been able to stop the legislation, which has passed the state Senate and is advancing in the Assembly.” De León told the Times “the world is watching what happens in Sacramento very closely.”

The remarkably — but selectively — church-friendly resolution did draw some skepticism. As the Times reported, Sen. Joel Anderson, R-San Diego, “criticized a ‘cafeteria attitude’ to the encyclical, where statements on climate change are endorsed and opposition to abortion is ignored.” As Francis has attracted increasing appreciation from those further to the political left than usually praise the Church, Catholic conservatives have often insisted that his economic views cannot be endorsed in isolation, while other  conservatives nationwide have questioned his economic credentials.

Environmentalists who advocated for cleaning up air quality by shutting down old, obsolescent power plants are going to find that renewable power did not, in the long-run, bring about conservation-inducing tiered power rates. Moreover, this consolidation of pricing tiers will bring about the demise of rooftop solar power, which was economic only because the top two tiers for electricity were higher priced than the solar power.

Current pricing model

On April 21, the California Public Utilities Commission announced it was rolling out a new plan that would overhaul electric utility rates.

As shown in the adjacent chart, today, electric utilities charge for power based on four increasing rates.  The lowest rates is 15 cents per kilowatt-hour; and the highest more than double at 31 cents. The CPUC would reduce the price tiers to two and flatten the price difference between the tiers from 106 percent today to 20 percent by 2019.

The result would be that those with higher rates today will have their monthly electricity bill reduced and those at the bottom two price tiers will see their electricity bills increase.

AB327 phases out Top tiers of power rates by 2020

This is the result of California Assembly Bill 327 sponsored by Assemblyman Henry Perea, D-Fresno, which was signed into law by Gov. Brown on Oct. 7, 2013.  However, AB327 still provides for discounts for low-income electricity customers whose electricity bills do not exceed 30 to 35 percent of their income under the California Alternate Rates for Electricity program.

AB327 specifically states that the original reason for the four to five price tiers was to pay off the $42 billion bill accumulated due to the California Energy Crisis of 2001. That bill was loaded into Department of Water Resources power purchases to pump water through the State Water Project (see page 4 here). Conservation was never the primary purpose of the higher price tiers, which were expanded after 2001 so that wealthier customers would mainly pay off the huge debt incurred in 2001 to mothball older, dirtier power plants.

Progressive Pricing Coming to End

Evan Gillespie of the Sierra Club says of the new rate structure:  “It jacks up bills for low-income customers, lets energy hogs off the hook and will slow the transition to clean energy.”

Bottom line for customers in PG&E, Edison, and SDG&E service areas:

• Use very little electricity? Pay more than you did last year.
• Use a lot more electricity? Pay less than you did last year.
• Use an average amount? Pay about the same as last year.

But the era of Progressive pricing of electricity, where coastal ratepayers used 50 percent more power but paid 100 percent higher rates, will be coming to an end in 2020.

Current Electricity Price Structure for Regulated Public Utilities:

The probe complicated an already politically charged environment surrounding California gasoline. Cap-and-trade rules were applied this year that extended taxation to gas. Meanwhile, criticism has mounted over the cost and availability of the special blend of gas required by law in California.

Exploring collusion

Although the push toward alternative fuels could have contributed to the spike, Senate Democrats have focused the legislative probe on a much different idea: industry price-fixing. “Sen. Ben Hueso, D-San Diego, chaired the hearing and returned several times to one suspicion: that the tiny pool of refiners responsible for producing California’s unique fuel blends may be colluding to keep prices artificially high,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Do we have monopolies on fuel in California?” he asked. “We want to know if we don’t have a competitive-enough market to keep prices low.”

The line of inquiry could hit an unusual political sweet spot. Though Republicans have long sought to shield the energy industry from environmentalists’ sweeping regulatory objectives, California conservatives and libertarians have also maintained a strong pro-car and pro-consumer stance. The state gas industry would be left with few allies amid any price-fixing scandal that took advantage of California’s limited supply of special-blend gas.

The cleaner-burning fuel, mandated during an environmentalist push in the 1990s, has never been available outside California itself, creating serious supply problems in the event of an interruption or crisis. “We are one of 17 states using reformulated gas,” the San Jose Mercury News explained, “and about 30 percent of gas sold in the U.S. is reformulated. The problem is that there isn’t a single blend required, or otherwise California could use other states’ fuel when it’s running low, and vice versa.”

An environmental agenda

Tom Steyer

But Democrats have a bigger political interest in hitting up energy companies for money than they do keeping gas prices low. Party heavyweight and environmentalist donor Tom Steyer recently threw his support behind the probe. But as the Sacramento Bee reported, it has remained “unclear whether Steyer and his allies will get the answers they want. Political pressure from Sacramento over the years has resulted in few changes, and Democrats will not say whether they plan follow-up hearings or legislation in response to the latest price increases.”

Drawing cap-and-trade revenue from the gas industry has been seen as essential to distributing costs away from consumers alone. Although they’ll still pay at the pump, their driving habits have proven more responsive to policy nudges than their home energy use, where regulations and incentives have been seen as more invasive and unwelcome.

Republican countermeasures

In hopes of seizing the moment to revisit a key issue, Republican lawmakers have chosen to reintroduce their effort to roll back the cap-and-trade extension to gasoline, backing a proposal introduced by Assemblyman Jim Patterson, R-Fresno. Democrats were divided last year over the extension.

“With oil companies and the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office warning of a spike in gas prices, a group of Democrats last year sent a letter to the California Air Resources Board urging a delay,” the Bee noted. “While a bill doing so never got a hearing, the industry bankrolled advertisements during the election slamming candidates who support cap-and-trade.”

But the new Republican measure would go beyond what moderate Democrats had supported last year, leaving its fate, for now, still very much in question.

On Tuesday, Gov. Jerry Brown promoted Commissioner Michael Picker, a longtime Democratic political consultant and Brown’s former energy adviser, to serve as president of the scandal-plagued agency. Picker fills the vacancy created with the departure of President Michael Peevey, whose 12th year at the state’s energy regulator ended in controversy over his close relationship with and political favors for the energy companies under his jurisdiction.

“I’m honored by the Governor’s trust and confidence, and take his charge to heart – reduce greenhouse gas emissions, strengthen safety programs and modernize the agency,” Picker said in a press release. “I look forward to continuing this important work with my fellow commissioners.”

Picker, who has served on the commission since January, will be replaced by Liane Randolph, a deputy secretary and general counsel of the California Natural Resources Agency. Randolph also is a Democrat.

“Michael Picker’s deep experience and sound judgment make him uniquely qualified to take on this role,” Brown said in a statement. “Liane Randolph has handled very difficult issues with insight and balance and will be a real asset to the commission.”

Peevey’s term ends in controversy

With its new leadership, the PUC hopes to turn over a new leaf in 2015, after facing serious questions about its ethics under Peevey. As far back as 2005, Peevey, a former president of Southern California Edison, has been questioned about his close ties to energy companies. In 2011, he “jetted off on an all-expenses-paid study trip to Sweden” that was partially funded by energy companies, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Peevey-led PUC faced renewed scrutiny this year, when emails revealed the agency’s assistance to energy giant PG&E. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

“In one case, highlighted in an email PG&E was forced to disclose by a judge’s order, a commission official offered to write a favorable opinion on a $1.3 billion gas-rate case if the utility ‘did not like’ one from another commissioner.

“Additional emails showed Carol Brown, then chief of staff to Peevey, had promised to help PG&E executives who were trying to get a specific judge of their liking in a key gas-rate case arising from the San Bruno explosion, which killed eight people and injured nearly 60. In another internal email between the executives, Peevey appeared to broker a deal to swap favorable treatment in a regulatory case for PG&E’s help fighting a ballot measure that would undo California’s law capping greenhouse emissions.”

PUC’s new power to promote renewable energy

Brown said “both appointees share a commitment to seeing California achieve its ambitious renewable energy goals.”

An expert on renewable energy, Picker has played a crucial role in shaping California’s energy policy. He served as a senior adviser to both Brown and his predecessor, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the state shifts towards more and newer renewable energy requirements.

“During the last four years Michael has been involved in the authorization of 150 clean energy projects, totaling nearly $25 billion in in-state investment and 16,000 megawatts of electricity and creating almost 25,000 highly skilled construction jobs,” Picker wrote in his 2012 biography as a candidate for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. “He coordinates the statewide effort to help reduce California’s reliance on polluting coal and fossil fuels and bring us closer to our goal of providing at least 33 percent of electricity from renewable generation sources.”

In 2011, while Picker was advising the governor’s office on renewable energy, Brown signed into law SBX1 2, which adopted a new requirement that a third of the state’s energy must come from renewable sources by 2020. Known as RPS or Renewable Portfolio Standard, the legislation was criticized for legislating by popular slogan rather than by sound public policy.

State Senate confirmation expected

Although both Picker and Randolph take over on Jan. 1, they must be confirmed by the state Senate. However, it doesn’t appear either will face an uphill confirmation battle.

One state lawmaker critical of the PUC in recent months offered praise for Brown’s appointees.

“We will see some good things from President Picker,” state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, told the San Jose Mercury News. “He encourages open dialogue, and he has emphasized public safety as a culture.”

“Liane Randolph sounds like an excellent choice at first blush,” he said. “She looks like she would be an excellent independent commissioner. She has no ties to the utilities industry.”

Assembly Bill 2013, by Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, expanded the sticker program that authorizes drivers of low-emissions vehicles to use High Occupancy Vehicle lanes regardless of whether they carry any passengers. The bill raised the total number of stickers authorized for DMV issuance from 55,000 to 75,000.

Aware of the symbolic political value of statistics, Gov. Brown has sought to use memorable numbers to capture the environmental imagination of elites and the public alike. That approach was evident in an additional bill signed by Brown, Senate Bill 1275, by state Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles; on Oct. 15 he will become the Senate’s president pro tempore.

It officially set a goal of one million zero- or near-zero emissions vehicles on California roads by 2023. In addition to ordering the California Air Resources Board to create a plan to meet the objective, SB1275 required the board to create new incentives for lower-income residents, who are less likely to purchase or lease alternative energy cars or trucks.

To do that, CARB was tasked to expand California’s electric and hybrid car rebate program. First used in 2010, over 75,000 rebates have gone out to Golden State motorists. As the Los Angeles Times reported, CARB will beef up that program by offering extra credit to qualifying “low-income drivers” who choose an electric vehicle.

Moreover, CARB will oversee the installation of new charging stations in selected low-income residential buildings and bolster car-sharing programs in targeted neighborhoods. “Low-income residents who agree to scrap older, more polluting cars will also get clean-vehicle rebates on top of existing payments for junking smog-producing vehicles,” according to the Times.

Beyond cars

Finally, Brown signed off on legislation using CARB to push alternate fuel use for heavier vehicles. That bill, SB1204, was introduced by state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens. Its aim is to subsidize the development, purchase and leasing of zero- and near-zero emission buses and trucks, dramatizing Brown’s vision of an overhauled transportation infrastructure for California.

To do that, however, SB1204 authorized $200 million in cap-and-trade fee revenue to be allocated to various incentives for alternate-fuel buses and trucks. In the recent past, Brown came under fire, even from environmentalists, for diverting cap-and-trade funds to his prized but costly high-speed rail project. Although critics have not rallied against the new allocation of funds, Brown’s rival in this year’s gubernatorial race did not hesitate to jump on the move.

“If he was serious about climate change,” Neel Kashkari told the Sacramento Bee, “he would be taking the cap-and-trade revenue and funding basic research at Stanford, at Berkeley, at Caltech, so we develop cleaner technologies that are also cheaper, and we export them around the world.”

A final mission

With Brown’s tenure in Sacramento coming to an end either this year or in four years, his idiosyncratic but dogged approach to environmental issues has taken on the air of a capstone personal project. At this week’s United Nations summit on climate issues, Brown told world leaders that within six months he planned to set new, lower carbon emissions goals for 2030.

AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, mandated reducing carbon emissions by 25 percent by 2020, just six years away.

Realizing his ambitions, Brown said, will take more ambition and more technology, “and will also require heightened political will.”