This week, actresses Amy Smart, Eva Amurri Martino, Emmanuelle Chriqui and Dawn Olivieri joined the Sierra Club in an online video asking California Governor Jerry Brown to make a "clean break" with fossil fuels, and commit to replacing the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station with 100 percent clean energy. Check out the great video.
The California Public Utilities Commission is expected to begin its decision-making process within the next few days as to how much of the shuttered nuclear plant will be replaced by clean or dirty energy.
Take action and learn more here.
The Sierra Club's My Generation Campaign is a statewide effort to ensure that every Californian is able to enjoy the access and benefits that come from the use of affordable, local clean renewable sources of energy, thereby reducing our overall reliance on dangerous fossil fuels.
All posts tagged "My Generation"
Video Highlights Realities of Pollution If New Gas Plants Are Built in Southern California
Activists across California continue to pressure Governor Jerry Brown and the state Public Utilities Commission to replace the retiring San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant with clean energy.
On the heels of an announcement that the plant may be replaced with new natural gas facilities, today the My Generation campaign released a new video and online petition urging the Public Utilities Commission and Governor Brown to reject a plan that would add new air pollution to Southern California and move California backwards on its climate goals.
"The retirement of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is a key opportunity to demonstrate how California can meet its future energy needs without new fossil fuels plants," said Evan Gillespie, Director of the Sierra Club's My Generation campaign. "Unfortunately, Governor Brown and state regulators are rushing through a flawed plan and using San Onofre as an excuse to build new polluting gas plants in Southern California."
On November 24, clean energy supporters protested outside the dirtiest power plant in all of California - the Mountainview natural gas plant in Redlands - to keep up the pressure as well.
The proposed new gas plants would be built in Southern California as part of a plan being supported by Governor Brown. Southern California already suffers from some of the dirtiest air in the nation. In the American Lung Association's 2013 State of the Air Report, Los Angeles County, Orange County, and San Diego County each received "F" grades for particulate matter and ozone, the two primary byproducts from gas peaker plants.
New gas plants would lock in more carbon pollution for decades to come and would undermine California’s climate targets. According to the California Air Resources Board, greenhouse gas emissions rose for the first time since 2008 because of increased reliance on gas plants after San Onofre closed. The state is already feeling the impacts of climate change with record droughts and increased frequency and reach of wild fires.
"We cannot claim to other states and the world that California is leading the charge against climate change while permitting huge new fossil fuel plants in our backyard. That's not leadership," said Gillespie. "California can either continue to lead on climate protection, or move backwards with new natural gas pollution."
California Does it Again: Groundbreaking Energy Storage Initiative
Today, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) finalized a decision requiring investor-owned utilities to build 1,325 megawatts of energy storage by 2020.
Much like the California Solar Initiative created a market for rooftop solar and is now driving rapid declines in the cost of rooftop solar across the nation, this mandate will create a market for storage that is expected to, in the words of CPUC President Michael Peevey "tear down barriers that prevent cost-effective energy storage resources from competing and providing benefits to California customers, ratepayers of California utilities."
Why is this ground-breaking? The sun doesn't always shine. Maybe you knew that already. This is a point routinely mentioned at the top of the list of challenges for wider deployment of clean energy (and too often blown way out of proportion by fossil fuel interests). But what's a state like California to do when it has clear goals to reduce carbon pollution from fossil fuels and scale up clean energy resources like wind and solar?
The challenge utilities confront with these clean resources is that, while highly predictable, they are nonetheless variable. In other words, we trust that every morning the sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and in California, provides dependable sunlight for the time in between. But, it is nonetheless variable in that the sun doesn't shine 24 hours a day. Grid operators balance lots of different energy generators simultaneously and throughout the day, of course, because we don't depend on one single location for energy generation. Nevertheless, a persistent question for power operators has been how to plug those gaps when the sun isn't shining.
Continue reading "California Does it Again: Groundbreaking Energy Storage Initiative" »
What Solar Panels on the White House Signals About the Future of Rooftop Solar
The growth of solar energy in America is simply stunning. Today, hundreds of thousands of Americans have already gone solar. The costs of solar panels have dropped 80 percent from 2007 to 2012. The solar industry supports 125,000 jobs nationwide, and 43,000 in California alone with solar panel initiatives being one of the main drivers behind that vibrant job growth.
A recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, puts an even finer point on this trend. Based on 2012 data, the number of residential energy customers that participate in solar rollover credit programs (commonly referred as “net energy metering”) has grown almost 60-fold since 2003. Like rollover minutes on a cell phone, net-energy metering allows customers to offset their electricity bills with clean energy — such as solar or wind power, for example — and to receive bill credits for extra energy sent back to the utility.
As the chart below shows, this hockey-stick graph would make any investor proud.
Continue reading "What Solar Panels on the White House Signals About the Future of Rooftop Solar" »
Solar Crowdfunding's Lessons Learned
We have two broken systems - energy and finance - which conspire to support a coal fired centralized grid that never reaches the poor while driving dangerous climate change. That means 1.3 billion people around the world won't escape the dark, and we'll fry the climate, unless we disrupt these systems and deploy distributed clean energy. Three months ago the Sierra Club worked on a pilot project with SunFunder to promote such a potentially disruptive solution: solar crowdfunding for the world's poor. We have a few preliminary lessons we'd like to share about taking it to 'scale.'
Let's start with the good news - in three short months the clean energy access project we shared with you is already fully funded! The project raised $15,000 to fund ReadySet Solar Kits from Fenix International to for 375 energy entrepreneurs in Uganda who will in turn power mobile phone charging and lighting for up to 19,000 households - as a microutility device, each ReadySet can power up to 50 phones in a community - while avoiding 12.3 tons of carbon dioxide. It's just the latest SunFunder success story as the company has raised $120,000 for eight projects that benefit 28,377 people directly. Not bad for a year's work.
Let's compare that to the World Bank. A 2011 Oil Change study that found that of all fossil fuel projects the World Bank supported, none provided energy access for the poor. That's right - zero. The only energy project that actually delivered energy for the poor was a $1.25 million investment in biomass gasifiers that benefited 2,500 people in India (thanks to Husk Power). For those keeping score, that's 28,000 people helped by SunFunder versus 2,500 by the World Bank.
Not bad on SunFunder's end, but clearly not the scale we're looking for right? I mean this is just a small slice of the energy needs of 1.3 billion people. That's true, but after engaging SunFunder on this project, and working with off grid clean energy entrepreneurs demanding $500 million for their sector, we have a few lessons we think have big implications.
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