Flipping the Switch: What Will it Take for California to Meet Its 100% Green Energy Goal?

California is racing toward the ambitious goal of a 100% clean energy grid by 2045. But trading fossil fuels for zero-carbon power isn’t as simple as flipping a switch—it means overhauling the appliances, vehicles, and energy systems we’ve relied on for decades. We’ll talk with state and local leaders about where we’re making real progress and where we’re falling short. And we’ll hear from you: how is California’s green energy transition impacting your daily choices and utility bills?

Guests:

• Siva Gunda, vice chair, California Energy Commission
• Merrian Borgeson, California climate and energy policy director, Natural Resources Defense Council
• Lori Mitchell, director, San Jose Clean Energy

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Laura Klivans: This is Forum. I’m Laura Klivans, in for Alexis Madrigal.

I read a lot of Richard Scarry books with my kids these days. You know, Lowly Worm and pickle cars and families of pigs just kind of doing their thing. One of my favorite parts of these books are the pages that peel back the mystery of how things work, like a cutaway beneath a road where we see gas lines or a power plant pumping electricity to homes through poles and wires.

This is the kind of infrastructure many of us rarely think about. But right now, California is smack dab in the middle of overhauling these crucial systems. We’re phasing out one — oil, gas, and the machines they power — and expanding the other: clean energy, the system that delivers it and the end products it sustains, like heat pumps, ovens, and electric cars.

The challenge, of course, is to do this skillfully at a time when we’re feeling the consequences of a warming world and our electricity bills are climbing. So how do we actually pull off this massive transition fairly, reliably, and without breaking the bank?

Joining us today, we have a wonderful panel to talk about it. We have Siva Gunda, vice chair of the California Energy Commission. Welcome. Thank you. And Merrian Borgeson, California climate and energy policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Merrian Borgeson: Great to be here.

Laura Klivans: Yes, thanks for joining us.

Okay, so we are in this place some call “mid-transition.” Siva, give us a sense of where we actually are. We’re transitioning to a grid that’s 100% carbon-free — at least we’re trying to. That’s a state goal, right? Written into law. And it’s to have a grid that runs on renewables and zero-emission sources by 2045. How are we doing?

Siva Gunda: Yeah, thank you, Laura, so much for having me in this conversation. And wonderful to be here with Merrian, a colleague. We both work on these issues very closely.

I think it’s helpful for us to contextualize this conversation in decades and decades of work in California. Whether we are trying to address the smog in L.A., the health impacts and safety of communities that live alongside fossil fuel investments, or the extraordinary impacts of climate change, the North Star that the state has right now is pursuing carbon neutrality by 2045. That’s where we are going.

And as we go there toward carbon neutrality, one of the most important measures is to electrify as much of those end uses that you talked about. And the rest of it really is sourced through clean molecules. That’s the premise and the organizing principle of all state agencies, local governments, and others together.

So as we go through that, I think it’s really helpful for us to think about: How do these transitions happen? And is there some kind of framework that we could use to discuss the transition?

Some of the scholarly work — I want to give a shout-out to Dr. Emily Grubert out of the University of Notre Dame — really talks about four phases of transition. You’re talking about pre-transition, early transition, mid-transition, and late transition.

And each one of them comes with different policy goals and different investment strategies from the marketplace. When we talk about early transition, this is where a legacy system — or even a new system — is seeing positive growth in the marketplace.

Laura Klivans: Legacy system being oil and gas.

Siva Gunda: The legacy system being oil and gas, and they see a lot of opportunity to make money. So all the policy is really doing is protecting people during that time.

But as you begin to enter the pre-transition phase, this is where policy is setting goals and saying, “Hey, we want to get here.” And what that does is gives the oil and gas, or legacy system, kind of an idea of where they are going. The investments begin to stabilize instead of going full force. And then you go into the mid-transition.

Laura Klivans: And what you just described — that’s where we were in, like, 2018, when we set this law. Is that right? Okay, we were like, “We have this goal: 2045.” Yeah, okay. But now we are in mid-transition, right?

Siva Gunda: Mid-transition, right. And as we go into mid-transition, this is where the legacy system is still substantial.

We still use oil and gas — a significant amount of oil and gas. Just for context, California is either the third- or fourth-largest user of petroleum in the world, after the United States and China and, depending on the data, either Brazil or California. So that’s the context. We use one gallon per person per day.

So when we think about the transition, we know that the oil and gas system is still substantial, but it’s declining. This is where the industry does not see a lot of opportunity, so the investments come down to safety and reliability.

And the alternate system, which is EVs — we have 2.5 million electric vehicles sold in California — is coming up, but it is not at a scale where it can replace the legacy oil and gas system. So we need to have these two systems functional and safe at once.

Precisely.

And then you kind of go into the late transition.

I think one thing I wanted to close with is that it’s important for us to think about these as three transitions happening at the same time. You have the electric grid transitioning to 100% clean, as you mentioned. You have petroleum going down. And natural gas hasn’t even begun fully in terms of coming into a mid-transition. So you have the electric system in late mid-transition, petroleum just entering mid-transition, and natural gas hasn’t yet really come into mid-transition.

So how do you harmonize the timing of those three systems? That’s the complexity we face.

Laura Klivans: Ah, I see. I see. Okay. Yeah, wow. Okay.

Laura Klivans: And so one thing that you say — and that I get as a reporter on these issues a lot — is, you know, you’re talking about how we’re trying to electrify everything. That’s a state goal.

Merrian, if you can answer this one, I think a misunderstanding people have is that a lot of people will say, “Well, that’s just putting oil and gas in from a different source. It’s just from a power plant.”

Why is it that the goal is to electrify everything in California?

Merrian Borgeson: Yeah. So electricity is going to be the place where we’re able to get all of our renewable resources — wind, solar, et cetera — from clean sources.

And we’re actually replacing huge amounts of the fossil fuels, which cause both health issues but also leave us vulnerable to geopolitical risks and price spikes and all these things that we are seeing right now.

So the more end uses that you can electrify, the more things we can power with clean electricity, both from a health perspective and from a vulnerability and economic development perspective.

I would say, too, like you, I love those Richard Scarry under-the-scenes details. I don’t think that most people like to think about their gas pipelines on a daily basis.

So part of this is: How do we make this easy for people?

I think California has been really good at setting big, exciting goals. We have them, so great. We don’t need more goals right now. We need to actually have people have all the choices they need to make the right decisions that work for themselves and for their families economically.

So it’s possible to make this transition without them honestly having to worry too much about their pipelines or exactly how refineries are going to close down in the state. It’s really the role of leaders like the folks in this room to make those choices more and more available to people.

We’re starting to do that in California, and that’s where we’re going to get the real impacts: making sure everyone can be part of this transition, no one is left behind, and it’s actually affordable for people.

Laura Klivans: Yes, yes, that makes quite a bit of sense. And we’re going to get into that as we continue to talk.

I want you both — maybe, Siva, you want to answer this — where really are we now? When people say, “Oh, it’s just more oil and gas,” like Merrian, you said, the place to transition is the electricity grid. But where are we right now? What percentage of our power from the grid is zero-emission?

Siva Gunda: Yeah, great question.

And to Merrian’s point, if you go back even to 2000 or 2001, we were getting two-thirds of our electricity from fossil sources like natural gas.

Laura Klivans: Just five years ago?

Siva Gunda: Like 25 years ago.

Laura Klivans: Oh, 25. 2001. Yes. Great.

Siva Gunda: And when you look at where we were then, we were even using coal in California.

So what we’ve done over these last 25 years is get rid of coal completely. And that one-third clean energy we had in 2001 is now two-thirds in California.

Laura Klivans: Yeah.

Siva Gunda: So that’s meaningful progress because of the deployment of solar, the deployment of lithium-ion batteries — both on the bulk grid side and behind the meter with rooftop solar and home battery storage.

As you look at that transition, we are on track to get to 90% by 2035. Right? So that is the transition we are in.

And the important part here is, as Merrian mentioned, we have great goals. The work that we need to do gets tougher and tougher as we get closer to that 100%.

I think that’s where we are in terms of the integrated nature of oil and gas with electricity. You cannot silo them anymore. You have to figure out how to combine progress on one side with careful and responsible management of the other.

Merrian Borgeson: And I just want to add, on gasoline sales, we’re actually 60% below our peak usage. So gasoline sales have declined.

Laura Klivans: Wow.

Merrian Borgeson: So we’re making measurable progress.

Natural gas sales have also declined. We’re about 12% down from five years ago in terms of natural gas use.

And there’s a lot of reasons for that. On the transportation side, we’re buying EVs, we have more efficient cars, and people are making different choices about driving.

On the gas side, we are switching to things like heat pumps. We also have a warming climate. We actually need heating less, which is disturbing but true.

So there’s lots of reasons that we’re already reducing the use of these fossil fuels, and we have to plan for that transition, which is really what the mid-transition framework is about.

Laura Klivans: And then the mid-transition — it’s not a period of five years, right? It is a decades-long process.

Siva Gunda: Yes.

Laura Klivans: Okay, interesting.

And then in terms of where California is as compared to other states, are we leading the pack here, or are we behind? Where are we?

Siva Gunda: I would say, humbly, California always tries to be at the front of some of these transitions.

Looking at California and its economic might — we’re the fourth-largest economy in the world — the examples that we set here in terms of transitioning the fourth-largest economy will really become examples for the rest of the world.

Laura Klivans: Okay, all right. Thank you.

And if we fail, people will say, “Don’t do that.”

Yeah, we never want to be a cautionary tale.

Okay, I am Laura Klivans, in today for Alexis Madrigal. We will be back after a short break.

We are talking about California’s ambitious attempt to have a 100% clean energy grid by 2045. We’re joined by Siva Gunda, vice chair of the California Energy Commission, and Merrian Borgeson, California climate and energy policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

And we want to hear from you. How are you participating in the switch to clean energy? Give us a call now at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. Or email your comments and questions to [email protected]. You can find us on all the social media platforms — Bluesky, Instagram, or @KQEDForum.

More after the break.