California

“I still think it's far from guaranteed. For all the hype, and for all the planning that have gone into it so far, I think there's still a chance that it could fall apart. I think the politics of the region are indicative of how these sorts of grand promises fo…”

“The Salton Sea is the biggest inland body of water in California.”

“One-fifth of Imperial Valley residents live below the poverty line. 85% are Latino, and many live and work on both sides of the Mexico border. This region has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state.”

“Famously, when his California factory was locked down, he called the officials who imposed that fascists and really publicly bristled against it. But there's been a similar lockdown going on in Shanghai at his factory, and he hasn't Pushed back against it at a…”

“The next town over had a massive oil field, the Santa Maria oil field and the Guadalupe oil fields, and there was a refinery near my middle school, and the largest oil spill in the state of California happened in the dunes just outside my town.”

“In several studies, researchers have found people of color, so Black and Latinx people, are more likely to live near oil and gas wells and other infrastructure like flaring. We've seen this in Texas. We're seeing this in California. And we also know that from …”

“Actually, 14% of all of the public schools in Los Angeles are within 2500 feet of a well, and seven million Californians live within a mile of a well.”

“There's no rule in California that says oil wells has to be a certain distance from a home or a school or a hospital. It's one of the only oil producing states where that's actually the case.”

“Even since 2020, there have been two bills that would have done exactly this, shut down oil drilling near residential areas, but both of them failed.”

“Yes, and that exists all over the state, and particularly in Los Angeles, you get these oil pump jacks just sitting right next to people's homes.”

“By the end of twenty-twenty, there were more than 50 gas bans in California alone.”

“California is mandated to basically put in about 5,000,005 million electric vehicles by 2030. And SMUD's contribution of that is about 300,000 vehicles.”

“California's gonna be banning this stuff in seven years, so start the transition now when there's a lot of money and incentives going.”

“They estimate that renewable diesel made from used cooking oil, which is very similar to sustainable aviation fuel, has a life cycle emissions factor of 15 to 20 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent, or essentially one-fifth the CO₂ footprint of Petroleum-based …”

“They've got 300,000 grid interactive homes worldwide. That they're managing, and in California, which is their main base of operations they've got 250,000 appliances and devices under their control.”

“So in Illinois, we found 80% of households with children cook with gas. In California, it was 74%.”

“California itself, I think, gosh, it was a, I want to say a year ago, April they turn off 80,000 megawatt hours of solar because there's nowhere for the energy to go.”

“The combustion of any kind of fuel that was gonna be unacceptable if we were gonna be reaching the kind of goals of, you know, that the science was telling us we needed to reach to you know, to keep the planet from warming by more than 1.5 degrees centigrade”

“Transportation is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in California, but on August 25th of this year, CARB, which stands for the California Air Resources Board, which is this organization that deals with regulating air quality in California, well, C…”

“The main thing that really has helped us in terms of the climate regulatory field is the fact that we had the ability to set our own emission standards for motor vehicles. It was built into the 1970 original Clean Air Act”

“New York is also banning gas-powered car sales by twenty-thirty-five, and soon, as many as 17 other states, like Washington and Massachusetts, which currently have vehicle emissions standards tied to California's, may follow suit.”

“We spent a billion dollars on dirty legacy, you know, once through cooling, heavily polluting plants, just because we might need them for, like, 15 hours a year.”

“We've got a advanced clean trucks rule that's going to require all 1.8 million commercial trucks in the state to go emissions free over the next two decades.”

“The largest battery in the world is in California hanging on garage walls. It's a gigawatt worth of energy storage capacity in a distributed fashion.”

“California just announced, you know, just put in place major changes to the number one driver to that market, which was net metering, and we just got data today that shows that sales are down 80% across the state.”

“We anticipate our electricity load is going to at least double just from our electrification initiatives in the next couple of years, and that's not counting any kind of impact climate change has on electricity consumption.”

“A lot of the freight depots out there are reporting that it's taken one, two, or more years to get the grid interconnection service they need to actually do all the charging that they're gonna need for all those trucks.”

“Battery attachment rate last year was maybe 12%, so 12% of consumers going solar added a battery.”

“We're reducing emissions about one percent a year. And even to hit our own 20, 30 goals, we've got to be reducing emissions four to five percent a year.”

“California needs a 180 gigawatts more of renewable energy in the next 10 to 15 years. That's additional. We've only built 50.”

“The problem is we stuff lots of things into rates, right? We stuff in all the wildfire costs into rates. The care program, which is a five billion dollar program, we put that into rates. So we put everything into rates.”

“Nearly 1.8 million rooftop solar installations, a 10 X increase in batteries to more than five gigawatts, and one in four cars sold in the state are now electric.”

“So I think it's a big mistake to disincentivize rooftop solar at this time and believe that we can both do that and do things like central procurement, make sure we actually build offshore wind, which is, as you know, is going to take seven to 10 years anyway…”

“To put that in context, when California had blackouts a couple summer, a couple Augusts ago, the delta in our needs was around 250 megawatts.”

“If anybody is geeks out, look at Cal ISO's energy supply and demand on a daily basis any summer day, and you will see we are heavily dependent on natural gas still in the middle of the day at 12 o'clock in the afternoon when the sun is shining brightest.”

“You can look at what renewables are doing in Texas, which is arguably the most free electricity market in the country and they're adding so much solar that they're about to or perhaps even have passed California in terms of utility scale solar deployment with …”

“Even in the places where we're really far ahead, like California and even Australia and other places, you know, penetration of DRs, whether it's EVs, solar, batteries, you know, heat pumps, you name it, it's still fairly low. I mean, it might make 20% at best …”

“When you don't have that, so what California is facing right now, and they're saying, all right, we're going to get 2000 megawatts of clean, firm baseload, really the only two resources that will fit that are geothermal and biomass, because hydropower in Calif…”

“From 20 20, when we had some issues with the grid, we had 503 megawatts Online. In 2023, as of last count, this is September, we had 5000 megawatts of energy storage online in California. I mean, in just three years, we've had a tenfold, nearly tenfold increas…”

“In California, the smart meter data that the three big investor on utilities have actually should be shared with a variety of different players. So for example, the distributed energy companies like Sunrun or Sunpower They can really benefit from having smart …”

“California basically said, nope, that's not what we're going to do. We're only going to have it work for utilities to run these projects. And what that means is like, they're not going to be cost effective. They're not going to deliver costs to the customers, …”

“You know, what amounts to, I think, 15% rate increases every year for the last four years for PG&E because of uncontrolled distribution grade investments, and it's not wildfire related. Let's just be crystal clear. People call it wildfire. Three to four percen…”

“Southern California Edison, we worked with they measured on one peak day, The price signal to time of use customers, this is one of the heat storms in California in August, September, I think, of twenty-twenty-two, but they measured 75 megawatts of load reduct…”

“We have our next site that will come online in the summertime that will be in the Inland Empire, which is after a vehicle goes to the port, it generally goes to the Inland Empire which is the, you know, giant warehouse district for the port here in California.…”

“For the first time in human history, you achieved net energy gain with a plant out in California, so we'll talk maybe more about that. So it's been proven, like, this can work, and this can work on Earth.”

“So we applied to a pretty ambitious sales tax exemption, and it's almost a million dollars worth of value because sales tax is so high in California. We won one of four of those in the state for recycling programs”

“The California standard plot size for almonds, for example, is 75 acres. It's like this rectangle that's 75 acres, and sometimes you can get 25 acre blocks, but really, like, that's what you need, and 75 acres needs a lot of product, and so the minimum pilot s…”