Clean Energy Finance Forum

On September 6, this story spotlighted utilities' shoddy record at restoring and sustaining electricity for low-income communities of color.

A mandate from the Golden State to hook up new buildings to renewable power opens a path for ideas about financing energy upgrades in the vastly higher stock of buildings already in use.

This June 8 article, riffing off an architectural association's awards, shows how green engineering can lower a building's energy cost and improve its returns.

Now, in states from New York to California, the focus of the conversation has moved from: How can utilities weather the shift toward distributed energy without suffering big losses? to: How can utilities, their customers and the electric grid as a whole best harness the benefits of distributed energy resources?

Early this month, three community-choice aggregators and one municipal utility serving much of California’s San Francisco Bay Area launched a 30-megawatt distributed energy storage-plus-solar solicitation. It breaks ground on multiple fronts.

In a nutshell, the state needs utilities that partner with communities to maximize local resilience and self-sufficiency, and whose financial fortunes are tied to their performance in that pursuit.

Bill Johnson is a utility executive, not a climate scientist. That didn’t stop the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) CEO from wading into California’s complex climate conditions. Noting that Northern California’s wildfire risk has grown exponentially in recent years, Johnson placed much of the blame on climate change, not PG&E’s compromised electricity grid.

California is decreasing its energy intensity (energy consumed per unit of GDP) and its carbon intensity (carbon emissions per unit of GDP).