From pioneering air-pollution control programs in Los Angeles County in

So when Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León introduced Senate Bill 100 in January, the expectations were high. The measure committed California to generating 50 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2026 – four years earlier than the present goal – and to 60 percent by 2030 and to 100 percent by 2045. No government remotely as large as California’s had made such a commitment.

In spring interviews with reporters at an energy conference in Orange County, the Los Angeles Democrat depicted his bill as a common-sense measure to goad investor-owned utilities into making long-term shifts in their infrastructure to prepare for an all-renewable future. He said progress had been so quick that he expected the state to meet the 50 percent renewable standard “in the early 2020s without breaking a sweat.” But he also depicted SB100 as setting up “the most ambitious program in the world.”

When it passed the California Senate on a mostly party-line vote in May, the world took notice. The New York Times set the tone: In a 2,100-word analysis headlined “Fighting Trump on Climate, California Becomes a Global Force,” it depicted the bill as a key part of California’s determination to take over the global lead in environmentalism from Washington.

But earlier this month, SB100 failed to even get a floor vote in the Assembly as lawmakers wrapped up business for the year. A Desert Sun report depicted the decision as “unexpected.”

That’s not how it looked to some insiders. Business groups spent months hammering home the argument that it was risky to commit to 100 percent renewable energy use when it was not clear that was either feasible or safe for a modern economy. In a June interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Gary Ackerman, executive director of the Western Power Trading Forum, depicted SB100 as “reckless” and with a huge downside. The arguments echoed those made by Pacific Gas & Electric, Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, the state’s three giant investor-owner utilities, which quietly have established strong ties with Democratic lawmakers in poor districts buffeted by high energy costs.

IBEW adopted, modified utilities’ argument

Meanwhile, de León didn’t enjoy unified support on the Democratic front. An argument the utilities had been making – that SB100 was potentially a hugely disruptive force – was adopted and modified by some labor leaders. They worried what a 100 percent commitment to renewable energy might mean for thousands of union members. According to an NBC News report, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 1245, began opposing the bill in late summer because the local union alleged de León had gone back on his promise to protect union jobs.

But a third factor may also have been at play. De León has never enjoyed the broad goodwill accorded his predecessor, Darrell Steinberg, now the mayor of Sacramento. Soon after taking over as Senate leader in late 2014, de León was the target of a scathing column by then-Sacramento Bee pundit Dan Walters for mistakes, power plays and a lack of humility. He faced similar criticism from the Sacramento Bee’s editorial board.

De León has since emerged as a legislative powerhouse, at least according to the conventional wisdom that holds that the 2017 session was one of the most productive in recent history. But his clout couldn’t overcome the late-emerging opposition to SB100.

The lobbying will begin all over again for the measure in January, the Greentech website reported.

“We’re going to be back next year,” said Peter Miller, Western energy project director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the website. “I don’t want to underestimate the challenges to moving to a fully zero-carbon grid, but we can get there, and we will.”

The California Legislature enters the final week of its 2017 session with ambitious measures on immigration, renewable energy and housing still up in the air.

Two of the measures have been championed by state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles.

One – SB54 – would put relatively strong limits on how much local and state law enforcement agencies could cooperate with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of Homeland Security and other federal immigration authorities.

Labelled the “sanctuary state” bill by critics and de Leon alike, it passed the state Senate in March. But law enforcement officials’ concerns have won a friendlier reception in the Assembly, where the bill appears stalled despite approvals from three committees. Some sheriffs have warned the bill would put California on a collision course with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the U.S. Justice Department, which has already acted to withhold funds from “sanctuary cities” on the grounds that the federal government alone sets immigration policy.

Sessions’ recent announcement that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would end in six months could give fresh fuel to the “sanctuary state” bill. Under the program, an estimated 200,000 California youths who were brought here as children have some legal rights. Protecting this group from deportation or other negative consequences has been a priority of state Democrats since Trump’s election last November.

Another high-profile de Leon bill also passed the Senate in May before facing a cooler reception in the Assembly. SB100 would set a goal for state utilities of having 60 percent of their electricity generated by renewable sources by 2030 – up from the present goal of 50 percent – and require utilities to plan to be 100 percent renewable by 2045.

While the measure has passed three Assembly committees, most recently the appropriations panel on Sept. 1, its future may depend on whether Gov. Jerry Brown provides a last-minute boost. Utility lobbyists say the state is already making perhaps the biggest gains of any large state in shifting to renewable energy and that they don’t need a further push by Sacramento.

Housing bond, real-estate fee may be packaged

Two measures to address the state’s housing crisis – including one measure long seen as a slam dunk – also await final approval.

The first – SB3 by Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose – won some Republican support when it passed the Senate. It would ask California voters to approve $4 billion in general obligation bonds next year to pay for construction of affordable rental housing and “smart growth” projects near transit hubs and to revitalize the state’s veteran home loan program, which is expected to use up all of its present funding at some point in 2018.

SB3 was initially expected to be approved late last month. Reports over the weekend suggested that delays may be because of the desire to package SB3 as part of a comprehensive deal that could rescue the second high-profile housing bill – SB2 by Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego. To generate an estimated $250 million a year in reliable, permanent funding for affordable housing projects, it would increase fees by $75 on some real-estate transactions.

Because it is a fee hike, it needs two-thirds support from both houses to advance to Brown’s desk. In July, it passed the Senate with the bare minimum of 27 votes. But insiders have been skeptical for weeks that the measure can get the 54 votes necessary to pass the Assembly. No Republican Assembly members back the bill, meaning all 54 Assembly Democrats would have to be yes voters for it to advance.

A Los Angeles Times report last month suggested that was unlikely because some Assembly Democrats in swing districts didn’t want to vote for a measure that could be depicted as a tax hike after having already voted to raise fuel taxes earlier this year.

This account is from the Riverside Press-Enterprise:

The operators of a Mojave Desert solar power plant at the center of the Obama administration’s push to reduce carbon emissions faced an unusual task [earlier this month]. They had to prove to state air quality officials that they were complying with California’s cap-and-trade program to get carbon polluters to reduce their emissions.

 

The Ivanpah solar plant off Interstate 15 in northeast San Bernardino County makes electricity by focusing heat from thousands of mirrors onto water boilers mounted on top of three towers. Steam from the water then turns turbines that generate power.

 

But the plant also needs to burn significant amounts of carbon-emitting natural gas to operate and thus is required to be in the state’s cap-and-trade program.

 

The plant burns natural gas to heat water after sundown so that steam can be generated more quickly when the plant starts up in the morning, its operators have said. It also uses natural gas to keep electricity production up during cloudy days.

Controversial ‘offsets’ used to avoid CARB hit

The air board says the Ivanpah plant emitted 50,145 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2013. The P-E says that is about twice the threshold for forced participation in cap and trade. But because Ivanpah managed to cut net emissions by 10 percent in 2014 — to approximately 46,000 tons — plant operator NRG Energy is telling reporters that it is in compliance. The net emissions is key, because NRG confirmed that Ivanpah complied not just by reducing emissions but by buying greenhouse gas “offsets” from companies which do projects in various states and countries that reduce greenhouse emissions.

The markets for such offsets are huge and growing. But they are controversial given that they don’t necessarily provide pollution relief to affected communities.

The California air board policy adopted in 2013 allows offsets to be purchased in any state in the nation but with emission credits applying to how much companies are polluting in the Golden State. That drew sharp fire from some environmentalists.

The revelation that the mammoth Ivanpah uses so much fossil fuel perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, given its size and complexity — it relies on 346,000 computer-synced mirrors spread over 5.6 square miles — and because solar power can be irregular.

But advocates of renewable energy say the conundrum of clean-energy plants relying on fossil fuels for their operational needs won’t last forever. They predict advances in battery technology will allow solar plants to store energy for use at night and on cloudy days.

The Santa Clarita-based BioSolar start-up firm is working with UC Santa Barbara researchers on such advanced batteries. In June, it issued a press release claiming it had made a huge breakthrough, prompting its stock price to surge. But since then its stock price has plunged, suggesting analysts have grown skeptical of the company’s claims.

But on niche websites devoted to energy production and energy markets, the picture of how California is responding to its mandates is more muddled. A recent free report from SNL, the McGraw-Hill financial publication that typically charges for the proprietary information it provides to shareholders and potential investors, puts California’s progress in a different light:

Carbon laws are choking demand for coal-fired power in California, but the state still imports a large amount of coal-based power and is one of the nation’s top industrial users of coal, providing a needed market for Western producers facing dimming prospects elsewhere.

 

California’s carbon law AB32, which requires the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to return to 1990 levels by 2020, sets in-state plant performance standards that are too stringent for conventional coal units. But California is still importing coal-based power from neighboring states until current power purchase and plant ownership contracts expire.

 

In 2014, less than 5 percent of California’s total energy demand was served by coal and petroleum coke-fired plants, nearly all of it from plants outside the state, according to an Oct. 12 report from the California Energy Commission. By 2026, California will end virtually all its reliance on coal.

 

But at times, as much as 50 percent of Southern California’s electricity still comes from coal-fired plants, Steve Homer, director of project management for the Southern California Public Power Authority, or SCPPA, told SNL Energy.

 

The three main out-of-state coal plants serving California — the Intermountain Power Project in Utah, the San Juan plant in New Mexico and the Navajo plant in Arizona — together received 10.1 million tons of coal in the first seven months of 2015, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. …

 

California is also one of the country’s biggest industrial users of coal, although consumption for that sector is relatively small. In 2013, the latest year for state-level EIA data on industrial coal consumption, California was the eighth-biggest industrial coal user, burning 1.4 million tons.

How states game energy reports

The report is another interesting example of how states play games with energy exports and imports to make themselves look greener than they are. In 2010, Orange County lawmaker turned Austin policy wonk Chuck DeVore laid out how California and British Columbia benefit from this maneuvering:

California has become America’s largest electricity importer. With 37 million people producing about 13 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, California imports about 23 percent of its electricity.  …

Complicating matters are a trio of California energy policy laws passed in 2006: AB32, SB1368 and SB107. AB32 mandates a 30 percent reduction in California’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 … . SB1368 outlaws the renewal of coal-fired electricity contracts — imported coal energy powered about 16 percent of California’s grid in 2008. While SB107 accelerated the requirement that California derive 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources [in 2010], renewable being defined as small hydro, geothermal, wind, solar and biomass (we missed the target, meaning utilities, read ratepayers, get dinged).

Enter government-owned BC Hydro and its Powerex subsidiary. With abundant hydro power potential, British Columbia is seeking to become the Saudi Arabia of “green” energy.  … [But] in fact, BC Hydro has imported more energy than it has exported in 10 out of 11 years.

What’s going on here? British Columbia sells its clean hydropower to neighboring governments which need to meet renewable energy mandates. But then it doesn’t have enough power for its growing economy, so it imports power from coal and gas-fired power plants in Washington state and Alberta.

A California compromise — or a loophole?

A 2014 Los Angeles Times story raised similar questions about the gaming of the intention of the state’s landmark climate change laws. Its key conclusion:

California regulators say they have taken steps to prevent utility company executives from outwitting them and insist state rules will lead to real reductions in carbon dioxide, the main gas scientists blame for global warming. But officials concede their efforts have run up against the limits of California’s ability to control what takes place outside its borders, a point the utilities also emphasize. …

Originally, California’s climate-change policies included a provision that would have demanded utility executives swear under penalty of perjury that the actions they took to reduce emissions would not result in a spike in greenhouse gases someplace else.

 

But federal officials warned Gov. Jerry Brown that too aggressive an effort to control emissions across state lines would risk disrupting the complex interstate electricity system.

 

In the end, the California Air Resources Board — which oversees the state’s 2006 climate-change law — allowed utilities a dozen “safe harbor” conditions under which electricity companies would be permitted to shift emissions to nearby states.

 

Critics called the conditions loopholes. …

 

The exemptions are so broad, the board’s own advisory committee cautioned, that all the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions made by electricity companies could end up existing only on paper.

But the honeymoon could be over for millions of Southern California residents served by municipal utilities. Moody’s Investors Service warns they will be hard-hit by the state’s latest edict on increased use of renewable energy to supply electricity:

On Oct.. 7, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill requiring all California utilities to generate 50 percent of the electricity they sell to retail customers from renewable energy by 2030. The legislation will be credit negative for municipal utilities if ratepayers balk at higher prices that come with the transition to renewable energy from coal-fired generation.

 

Municipal electric utilities in Southern California would be particularly affected given their reliance on coal-fired generation. Coal-fired generation has historically supplied cities like Los Angeles and Anaheim with more than 40 percent of their electricity. In contrast, Northern California cities such as San Francisco and Sacramento derive all of their electricity from sources other than coal such as solar, hydroelectricity and natural gas.

 

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and other Southern California municipal utilities have thus far managed the shift to other sources from coal without major ratepayer protest, allowing them to increase rates and maintain a sound financial performance. But Los Angeles ratepayers are facing a likely 3.4 percent annual water and power rate increase over the next five years to help support the further transition to cleaner energy.

 

For utilities, the Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015 increases the percentage of electricity coming from renewable energy to 50 percent by 2030 up from the current 33 percent by 2020. We expect the utilities will meet the 33 percent requirement. However, ratepayer affordability and technical challenges will become increasingly difficult as utilities reach towards the more significant 50 percent renewable standard.

Infrastructure costs also likely to buffet ratepayers

Moody’s says another factor could also yield future rate shocks:

[Municipal] utilities will face another major challenge in whether the transmission grid can adequately handle the intermittent renewable resources that will begin to dominate California’s power supply mix. LADWP benefits from owning and operating its transmission system and has variable resources such as a pumped storage facility and gas-fired units to balance the system. The city of Anaheim recently added the Canyon natural gas fired unit and Southern California Public Power Authority financed the Magnolia unit in Burbank to help compensate for shortfalls in solar or wind energy. In the long term, the need to successfully integrate more renewables into the grid will likely require similar additional capital investment.

But while customers of the region’s two giant investor-owned utilities — Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric — won’t be as hard hit by the latest state edict, they will also pay unique bills in coming years not borne by customers of municipal utilities. Unless a California Public Utilities Commission decision is overturned, customers of the two utilities will pick up 70 percent of the $4.7 billion cost of shuttering the broken San Onofre nuclear power plant. SCE owns 80 percent of the plant, SDG&E 20 percent.

The Los Angeles Times also reported on how solar subsidies often amounted to a transfer of funds from the state government to very wealthy Californians.

As the understanding grows that green energy policies create political winners and losers, a new U.S. Energy Information Administration report shows how rapidly California is advancing with solar power:

Solar generation from utility-scale facilities (capacity of 1 megawatt [MW] or greater) hit a monthly record high of 2,765 gigawatt hours (GWh) in June 2015. The June 2015 solar generation level represents a year-over-year increase of 35.8 percent relative to June 2014. …

Most of the growth in U.S. utility scale solar generation is in California. In June 2015, well over half (56.5 percent) of total solar generation came from plants in California. Arizona (13.4 percent), North Carolina (6.7 percent), Nevada (6.4 percent), and New Jersey (3.3 percent), respectively, followed California as the largest solar contributors to the grid.

But it’s not the utilities building “utility scale” solar facilities. It’s usually multinational corporations setting up solar facilities in the expectation that Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric will buy their electricity to meet the state’s ever more ambitious goals for renewable-energy generation.

The utilities still have enough influence that they managed to persuade the California Public Utilities Commission to adopt a new pricing structure in July that made individual homeowners and businesses that have installed solar panels pay more toward maintenance of the state’s electricity grid.

Utilities: Part of ‘green industrial complex’ or not?

This would seem to presage a future in which power utilities are part of a “green industrial complex” that conservative publications have long warned of — companies and institutions which seek to profit from government environmental mandates that appear popular in red states and blue states alike.

But that’s not how the nation’s investor-owned utilities think the end game of current green politics are likely to play out. As The Washington Post reported earlier this year, it had obtained secret documents from the Edison Electric Institute, a utilities trade group that believes that the growth of renewable energy is an existential threat — not something that can be gamed by rent-seeking with regulators and state legislatures:

If demand for residential solar continue to soar, traditional utilities could soon face serious problems, from “declining retail sales” and a “loss of customers” to “potential obsolescence,” according to a presentation prepared for the group. “Industry must prepare an action plan to address the challenges,” it said.

That action plan so far has focused on getting state utility regulators to make solar-panel owners pay more toward maintenance of the electric grid — an effort that worked in California but that the Post notes hasn’t worked well in most states.

So whom might the utilities find common ground with in their fight against a solar power future? As complaints from urban Democrats in the Legislature suggest, an obvious candidate is lawmakers who understand that cleaner power is usually costlier power.

So far in California politics, the factions that make up the Democratic coalition have managed to stay on the same page on the biggest issues of the day. But if utilities begin to use their clout to warn that poor people are hurt by AB32-style policies — a potentially potent argument in the state with the highest effective poverty rate — that could roil and possibly recast the politics of the Golden State.

Roughly 1,000 miles away in Wyoming, the developers of what would be the nation’s largest on-shore wind farm quickly caught word of the proposal.

 

California has long represented the holy grail for the Power Company of Wyoming, the Anschutz Corp. subsidiary that has proposed building the 3,000 megawatt Chokecherry Sierra Madre wind farm in Carbon County.

 

California [already had] a mandate that requires 33 percent of its power come from renewable sources by 2020. And with almost 39 million residents in need of electricity, that represents a potentially hefty sum of green electrons.

 

The problem for wind developers in Wyoming, is Brown and other California policymakers have insisted the Golden State meet its 33 percent mark with power generated from inside the state. California is projected to reach its 2020 benchmark on time.

 

But Brown’s inaugural address left many wondering if the four-term governor was coming around to the idea of out-of-state renewables.

 

“They’ve always said if they raised their renewable portfolio, Wyoming would have a place in that new demand,” said Loyd Drain, the executive director of the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority.

 

Drain has spent the last five years lobbying California policymakers on the virtues of Wyoming wind.

 

“They’re going to look to us, I do believe,” he said.

Wind patterns in two states are opposite

Wyoming’s interest in supplying California is backed up by a pioneering study that looks at wind patterns, an important factor, given the great concern about renewable energy being erratic and unreliable as a 24/7/365 source of power.

A new University of Wyoming study further demonstrates that combining the strengths of Wyoming wind with California wind and solar will reduce the intermittency of renewable energy and smooth the power supply — leading to benefits for utilities and energy consumers alike.

 

It turns out that Wyoming’s and California’s wind patterns are rather opposite, and that means that they’re complimentary. When one is active, the other isn’t. Based on a yearly average, California wind is strongest at night, while Wyoming wind is strongest during the day and peaks in the afternoon — coincident with the time when the sun is beginning to set while the electric load is still increasing into the evening hours.

 

“Although the benefits of geographic diversity to renewable energy have been suggested for some time, only recently have there been attempts to quantify these benefits,” says the study’s author, Jonathan Naughton, a UW professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Wind Energy Research Center. “The renewable energy quality metrics proposed in this study are a start at being able to characterize different combinations of renewable energy sources. The result of applying these metrics to energy produced from Wyoming wind and California renewables provides a quite compelling case for geographic diversity.”

But whether this intriguing study and Wyoming’s strong interest will translate into the state becoming a California energy supplier is very much up in the air. Solar power is expanding so quickly in California that utilities are making what appear to be barely disguised attempts to make it a less attractive option for homeowners and businesses considering installing solar panels, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday. If solar panels keep coming down in price, Wyoming officials’ assumption that their wind power supplies would be attractive to California on cost grounds appears shaky.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory goes even further. As Vox reported last month, it no longer believes there is any technical barrier to “a grid running on 100 percent wind and solar.”

This view counters the conventional wisdom. A comprehensive study by Cornell electrical engineer Eilyan Bitar released earlier this year is highly skeptical that a grid system could be reliable without traditional “bulk power generation.”

All of which makes recent developments with California’s wind- and solar-power industries of acute interest. According to a global-energy blog run by McGraw-Hill’s financial information branch …

In the first quarter of this year, with unseasonably warm dry weather tamping down wind flows in California, the amount of power generated by the state’s 44 wind farms fell off by around 35% compared to the first quarter of 2014, according to data filed with the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Energy Information Administration … .

 

While that was a first, clear signal that wind power had its distinct draw-backs, but two more recent dates — June 8 and 9 — seemed something like days of reckoning for renewables in California.

 

As demand for power rose and generation surged to meet it, rain, widespread cloud cover and poor wind pushed down the amount of wind and solar generation available to help meet the demand. Because of the shortage of renewables, prices surged.

‘Microgrids’ meshing with the ‘Internet of things’

This relative unreliability is why Bitar thinks the answer going forward is “microgrids.” This is from a physics blog run by Cornell:

In an intelligent grid, this variability in supply would be balanced through the coordination of flexible distributed energy resources at the periphery of the system. Power would be produced locally and consumed locally, giving rise to self-sufficient communities or cities, called microgrids. Such an approach would decrease the need to transmit bulk power hundreds of miles to counterbalance fluctuations in renewable sources.

 

The architecture of such a system, which requires sensors and actuators in appliances, electric vehicles and the like, isn’t the hard part, Bitar said. The hard part is the design of algorithms to efficiently manage the deluge of information produced by those sensors in order to coordinate the simultaneous control of millions of distributed energy resources on fast time scales.

This in turn suggests the “Internet of things” that Americans have been told is just around the corner — in which an online network constantly monitors and links humans, appliances and machines — would also be an extension of the electricity grid.

Privacy advocates would then have a new area to worry about — individual energy use being subject to 24-7-365 monitoring.

An essay in the Guardian earlier this year raised such concerns.

Previously, a CalWatchdog.com story covered Carson Bruno’s research showing that the state of California has far surpassed its 2020 goal of having 33 percent of electricity coming from renewable sources. So why isn’t this big news? Because according to state laws establishing the 33 percent goal, some renewable energy doesn’t count as renewable energy.

Bruno also makes a provocative point about Gov. Jerry Brown’s goals on another energy front:

California may be the greenest state in the nation. The Golden State’s renewable portfolio standard is among the nation’s most aggressive, the state’s cap-and-trade program is likely the most developed, and each legislative session lawmakers grapple over dozens of new environmental-based bills. … So it didn’t come as any surprise that during his 4th (and final) State of the State address, Jerry Brown focused heavily on taking California’s already aggressive climate change action to the next level. …

Brown [said the state would] double the energy efficiency of California’s buildings. …

This proposal is the most straightforward, but also may be the most difficult to achieve. Here’s why: California is already the national leader – coincidentally, since Jerry Brown was first governor – in energy conservation.

Conserving more would be akin to squeezing out more lemon juice from an already squeezed lemon: you’ll get a little, but not that much. Californians use approximately the same amount of energy they did 40 years ago as the rest of the nation has increased its use by roughly half. This is despite California’s population and economic output steadily increasing. California’s Mediterranean-like climate helps reduce energy use, but that can’t explain the full difference.

Here’s where the paradox comes in, however. We know how to get to the next step: technology. Smart metering enables consumers and providers to better understand their behavior to encourage conservation; new lighting technology and new advances in heating and cooling systems better reduce waste. But even with new technology, doubling efficiency while California continues to grow and after California has already squeezed a lot out of consumers won’t be easy.

‘Build it and they will come’ regulatory approach

There’s always been an element of “build it and they will come” to California environmental regulators’ habit of establishing goals that seem unrealistic but that the private sector manages to meet. More than a few engineers were skeptical that cars averaging 35 MPG was a realistic goal, but that’s now the federal mandate for coming years, as the Obama administration follows the California example of demanding change that seems daunting. As Car & Driver wrote, “as goes California, so goes the country.”

But there are two recent examples of California regulators going too far and retreating in embarrassment. In 2010, they backed down from a proposal to criminalize having under-inflated tires after I wrote about it on my U-T San Diego blog and John & Ken took up the cause on KFI AM 640. This was the informal analysis of the proposal from the California New Car Dealers Association:

(The) regs. CARB’s pushing through (released this week and subject to a 15 day comment period) … provides that the only times that consumers may decline a check and inflate service — they can never decline the service if it’s offered for free — is when they are charged for services AND if they can PROVE (with DOCUMENTATION!) that they’ve had their tires checked and inflated in the last 30 days, or if they WILL do so within the next week. It is unclear, but possible, that CARB could take enforcement action against the consumer if they don’t follow through with their promise?!

In 2009, California regulators also backed down from a tentative proposal to ban black paint on cars after facing incredulity from U.S. and Japanese automakers. Snopes treats this as a “mostly false” story. But I spoke with an executive for an auto paint company in 2009, and she said California air board staffers were absolutely serious about the idea in meetings early that year. That’s how it was treated by an auto-industry website.

This link — http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/cool-paints/cool-paints.htm — used to show the air board’s proposal, but now it only shows an error message.

This cloud over the PUC comes at a particularly delicate point. California’s embrace of renewable energy is forcing the regulator to rethink how the state’s electricity grid can be maintained and kept healthy going forward. As the San Jose Mercury News reported last month, it wasn’t built with the idea that it would receive energy from so many different sources.

Nearly 23 percent of California’s energy now comes from renewable sources such as wind and solar, and the state is on track to reach its goal of generating one-third of its energy from renewables by 2020. But feeding all that green energy into the Golden State’s grid — without overloading it — has become a major challenge.

That’s because the state’s aging natural gas plants aren’t nimble enough to turn off when the sun starts shining and then quickly switch back on when it gets dark. And while the technology to generate clean energy is growing by leaps and bounds, efforts to store the power haven’t kept up. …

Roughly 140 companies sell to the market, resulting in about 27,000 transactions per day. The [California Independent System Operator, or ISO] makes sure the purchased electricity makes it to the utilities’ substations. …

Solar generation hit record in early March

In the morning, electricity demand rises as people wake up and turn on appliances, lights and electric toothbrushes. And as the day wears on, the state is increasingly dependent on solar plants, especially in the afternoon.

A recent record was set on March 6, when solar peaked at 5,812 megawatts, five times what it was three years ago. All this solar power is allowing California to cut back on natural gas — which now provides about 60 percent of the state’s energy needs — and other traditional sources of electricity.

But this can be a problem because the sun sets at the same time that people are returning home. That causes electricity use to surge, and the power plants that were turned down or even off need to start producing — fast.

The majority of California’s power plants, however, aren’t up for the abrupt on-and-off challenge.

Officials with ISO, the nonprofit that manages the state’s electricity grid, see a need to build new natural-gas plants and retrofit old ones to deal with the headaches the system now faces. Peevey was much less hostile to natural-gas plants than members of the state’s green movement.

But if the PUC, with new president Michael Picker, continues this approach, he is sure to be depicted as being under the thumb of giant utilities.

Another headache: How to deal with solar homeowners and grid?

The PUC faces a related headache with homeowners and companies with solar panels which want to continue favorable rates they get for sending their excess power to the grid. San Diego Gas & Electric says the current approach doesn’t pencil out, as the U-T San Diego reported:

Under current regulations, solar owners get to sell their power into the grid at the full retail price, offsetting their costs at night when they pull electricity into their homes.

Everywhere else in the utility economy, power producers must sell at lower, wholesale prices. In most cases, they even pay for their use of the grid to reach customers.

So the PUC faces explosive questions here as well. Thousands of homeowners and companies with solar technology only made the costly investment because of a long-term expectation of a great deal from utilities. But if this great deal plays havoc with utilities’ bottom lines, they’ll need to transfer costs to their customers who don’t have solar panels.

And every rate change SDG&E, PG&E and Edison seek will be considered with the backdrop of recent scandals in which Peevey appeared to have an extraordinarily chummy relationship with the three utilities.

It appears to be a recipe for distrust and controversy going forward as the PUC reckons with a new era in California power generation.