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Electric leadership in small California town
Feb. 14, 2021
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A view of some of the 749,088 solar panels at the California Valley Solar Farm near Santa Margarita (San Luis Obispo County) in 2015.Michael Macor / The Chronicle 2015
If California is lucky, our energy future could look like a small town in the rural Salinas Valley.
Longtime readers of this column will not be surprised to learn that the town in question is Gonzales, the California municipal version of the “Little Engine That Could.” Its small, working-class population of just 9,000, many of them farmworkers, has ingeniously solved tricky local government problems, from universal broadband to health care access, and from economic planning to child development.