Government Energy Policy, Business and Technology

California Will Get Half its Energy From Renewables by 2020

Mother Jones: The US fight against climate change hasn’t exactly made much progress recently. Just this week, for instance, the Trump administration spent its time at the UN conference on climate change in Bonn praising the benefits of coal. But there is actually one bit of good news. A report released Monday from the California Public Utilities Commission shows that the state will get half of its electricity from renewable energy sources, including wind and solar, very soon—by 2020, to be exact, a full decade ahead of schedule.

In late 2015, Governor Jerry Brown signed landmark legislation regulating the state’s energy sources—setting a 2030 deadline to get half of the state’s electricity from renewables. What he didn’t expect was that last year, each of the state’s three largest utility companies (known as investor-owned utilities, or IOUs) would exceed the intermediate goal of achieving 25 percent renewable energy by 2016. California’s largest utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), alone sourced nearly 33 percent of its electricity demand from renewable sources, including solar, wind, and geothermal energy.

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