DWP’s Budget, LA City, and LA100 Details
LA100, the initiative to have 100% renewable energy by 2045.
As usual for Mayor Garcetti’s 20-year plans, by the time we know how well it will play out, no current LA City Councilmember will be around to be accountable.
To show how complicated projections of renewable energy are, we should remember this started with a 2016 City Council Motion “requesting the DWP” to conduct an analysis as to “what investments should be made to achieve a 100 percent energy portfolio for the DWP.”
The LA 100 Study Itself
The results are now in, with a truly groundbreaking, massive study by NREL. For a quick overview of what this was all about, my 2019 column gives a summary.
CALmatters Commenary: Utility ratepayers need an advocate, too
By Timothy Alan Simon, Special to CALmatters
Despite the demonstrated environmental and cost benefits or natural gas, the California Public Utility Commission’s independent Public Advocates Office has allied itself with the Sierra Club to eliminate the use of natural gas.
The Sierra Club and other environmental organizations have focused their advocacy activities on local governments throughout the state to end the use of natural gas in commercial and residential properties.
As I stated in my Dec. 3 letter to CPUC President Marybel Batjer, I understood the role of the independent ratepayer advocate to be a narrow and defined function of advocating on behalf of just and reasonable rates.
There is a great deal of confusion regarding how long carbon dioxide (CO
2) persists in the atmosphere. There are at least two reasons for this. The first reason is that there are multiple physical and biological processes that combine to remove CO
2 from the air and they behave differently and at different speeds. The second reason is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has changed how it describes the lifetime of CO
2 in the Summary for Policymakers twice over the course of four assessment reports. And since most politicians and media don’t dive deeper into the assessment reports than the summaries, some confusion is reasonable, if unfortunate.