California Moves To Require 100% Clean Electricity by 2045 (bloomberg.com)

California's assembly has voted to move the state's electricity completely off fossil fuels. The state assembly this week passed S.B. 100, a proposal to transition California to 100 percent emissions-free electricity sources by 2045. A report adds: The Assembly voted 43-32 in favor of the legislation Tuesday. It would eliminate the reliance on fossil fuels to power homes, businesses and factories in the world's fifth-largest economy, accelerating a shift already under way. The state currently gets about 44 percent of its power from renewables and hydropower. California has positioned itself to lead the battle against climate change by cutting emissions even as the Trump administration has worked to roll back the state's stringent auto pollution standards and prop up ailing coal-fired power plants. Earlier this year, California became the first U.S. state to mandate solar rooftop panels on almost all new homes. It would be the second state to require 100 percent carbon-free power after Hawaii.

Comments

What if the feds say no?

[treymichaelcook]

What if the Federal government says no to that? I mean, the feds could pass a bill requiring that people purchase a certain percentage of their electricity from coal or natural gas if they wanted too. We now have legal precedent that the feds can force you to engage in commerce against your will.

Re:What if the feds say no?

[TFlan91]

We now have legal precedent that the feds can force you to engage in commerce against your will.

The ACA mandate is (was) just that.

Same argument as the ACA mandate, for the betterment of society, you old "get off my lawn" timers can, how did you say it, "move".

Re:What if the feds say no?

[imgod2u]

Hence why we vote in Federal elections. And if the majority of State representatives agree to such a provision, I guess we'll all just have to accept it.

It's almost like we live in a governed Federation instead of a do-anything-you-want clusterfuck of rogue nation-states.

Re:What if the feds say no?

[IcyWolfy]

The Hospital ER cannot turn you away for not having health insurance, and having no means to pay.
A non-trivial amount of operational costs for a hospital is covering ER visits for people with colds, flus, and non-insured; who all default on payment, with no means of covering their visit.
Many of the complications could have been dealt with for pennies on the dollar should the individual have had insurance, and simply seen the doctor before the illness progressed.

One cannot opt out of the health system.
One should not be able to opt out of paying for it.

Re:Behold the power of...

[myth24601]

Words written on paper by politicians who will be out of office by the time the words are to have any meaning.

States = Incubators for testing stuff

[Scroatzilla]

In terms of states' rights and energy independence and the environment, this is a good thing. Whether or not this works out, we will learn a lot about the feasibility of eliminating our reliance on fossil fuels from California's effort; other states could then model their own clean energy programs based on the positives and negatives of California's experiment.

(I'm not sure what the anti-Trump rhetoric adds to the article summary other than virtual signaling... ??)

Re:States = Incubators for testing stuff

[Baloroth]

California has little snow, relatively few clouds (or inclement weather of any kind, for that matter), massive amounts of hydropower, and very little manufacturing or other heavy industry (which is power intensive). It's basically an ideal environment for 100% renewable energy usage, which is not true for 90% or so of the US. In the Midwest, for example, there's little hydro, and solar barely works at all in the winter when you need power or you'll freeze to death. The Southwest has at least good solar potential, but AC usage tends to be very high, and solar is pretty terrible at baseline power (in fact, aside from hydro there isn't really a solid renewable baseline power source. Nuclear *would* work, but it's not technically renewable, and environmentalists usually hate it because they don't understand how radioactivity works).

Re:States = Incubators for testing stuff

[MachineShedFred]

In your cost of fossil fuels, please consider the externalized cost of waste product disposal into the lungs of those downwind, and the cost of deleting entire mountains in the Appalachians so we can load them into furnaces, and the costs of doing all that (slurry ponds, destroyed ecosystems, etc.)

The grid operators may see what goes up the stack as zero cost, but there is definitely a cost to society in elevated asthma rates, lung disease, increased chances of low and very-low birth weights, cancers, cardiovascular disease, and death. It's estimated that coal contributes in up to 50,000 deaths every year in the US alone - more than all the deaths from car wrecks in the US in a year.

Let's factor that into the fossil fuel energy costs, completely disregarding sea level rise and how much that's going to cost in lost real estate and property, as well as increased severity and frequency of storms from climate change because some people still argue about if those are real things.

I think we can all agree that breathing coal-fired particulate and sulfur dioxide is bad for you, and anyone 30+ miles downwind from each and every coal plant is doing exactly that.

What does that fossil fuel energy cost now?

Re:When their alternate energy has blackouts

[Anonymous Coward]

They can always do what Germany does in Europe: grandstand about renewables and use imports from other countries to keep the grid stable.