Dispatch from the near future
Welcome back to The Planet You Save, a weekly newsletter on local climate action. I'm Taylor Kate Brown and be thankful I skipped all the graphs I wanted to put in this newsletter.
It will be in the spring, likely April. The day will be cool and sunny and quite possibly Saturday. It might be this year.
On that day, you will see a headline that says something like this: "California's grid is powered for the first time entirely by renewable energy"
Or maybe it will be "California's electricity grid reaches net-zero for the first time."
There's plenty of caveats here, and it won't last long, maybe 10-20 minutes tops. But this moment is close. The all-time record for electricity demand across California's main grid served by renewables is 94.5%, on April 24 of last year. The year before was 81.8%
Granted, I'm not a professional electricity analyst, but an unrepentant nerd who has the California grid's real-time data app on her phone. Maybe that last 5% is the hardest, maybe California's new battery installations will soak up enough solar that it won't be worth hitting that magic 100%. Maybe it will be a technical 100%, where energy imported out of California will cancel out the emissions from gas plants.
The point being is that one of the largest states in the U.S. is close to doing something with energy that it hasn't done before, something that is super complicated and involves a lot of things going right. But also something that didn't just happen without a lot of effort.
It won't be the end of greenhouse gas emissions from California's or any other grid. In fact, in 2021, emissions from electricity in the state actually increased from the year prior. None of this is happening fast enough, but that moment will be the first of a lot of firsts.
Reporter request
I'm close to finishing up a very large story, and am finally getting to a newsletter idea I had at the beginning of the year: What are you focusing on in 2022 when it comes to climate? If we're talking about climate action happening locally, I'm curious what's top of mind in your back yard. Let me know by replying to this email.
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