“It defies all stereotypes that people tend to think about solar. She said the decision to hold Thursday’s event at a Central Valley high school showed how mainstream solar had become. They say distributed energy resources reduce the need for polluting power plants and costly grid investments.Ĭalifornia’s millionth solar system was a long time coming for Bernadette Del Chiaro, who lobbied the Legislature to approve Schwarzenegger’s Million Solar Roofs initiative in 2006. “From a societal perspective, that’s a tremendous waste of resources,” he said. If state officials continue requiring utilities to offer net metering, those power grid costs will increasingly be shouldered by homes and businesses that don’t have solar panels - especially if solar customers also add batteries, Bushnell said.įor Bushnell, public support for rooftop solar and home batteries makes little sense when large-scale solar farms and storage systems are cheaper. James Bushnell, an energy economist at UC Davis, said solar-friendly electricity rate structures had allowed rooftop solar customers to avoid paying their fair share of the costs of maintaining the bulk power grid. Some experts say the costs of net metering and other policies that promote rooftop solar and storage may outweigh the benefits. Officials postponed a decision that critics said would cripple the state’s home solar mandate. “A rebate program would create the incentive that we need to drive down prices and increase the numbers,” Jacobson said.Ĭlimate & Environment California will still require rooftop solar panels on new homes - at least for now Jacobson said state policies could help spur the nascent battery storage market in much the same way they did for rooftop solar power. Those systems could store solar power for use in the evening - and help homes keep the lights on when utility companies intentionally shut off power to reduce the risk of wildfire ignitions. Now that California has reached 1 million solar roofs, some activists are looking at battery storage as the next frontier for lawmakers.ĭan Jacobson, director of Environment California, thinks the state should aim to install 1 million batteries by 2025. “And if we don’t do something, things will get a lot worse.” “We’re in big trouble,” Brown said at the event. He listed rising seas, the spread of disease-carrying insects and an increase in cross-border migration as a few of the many climate change effects relevant to the Golden State. Jerry Brown, warned that rising global temperatures posed a serious threat to California. Even as they celebrated, clean energy advocates were talking about what would come next - and warning that climate change demands faster action.
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