Gavin Newsom’s complicated legacy on climate and clean energy

Gavin Newsom’s eight-year run as California’s Democratic governor — and as self-styled U.S. climate change warrior — comes to an end in January. At this pivotal moment for the state’s clean energy transition, it’s worth reflecting on how he’s lived up to his clean energy commitments and what kind of climate legacy he leaves for his successor.

Under Newsom’s leadership, California has built gigawatts of new clean energy to keep up with its mandate to achieve 100% renewable and carbon-free power by 2045. The state has added millions of electric vehicles to its roads, and committed to end the sale of gasoline-fueled cars by 2035. And it has instituted policies aimed at protecting the environment and communities from industrial and fossil fuel pollution.

But Newsom has also taken heat for backsliding on his environmental justice promises, particularly during his second term. Many critics blame this shift on his unwillingness to take on major oil, gas, and utility interests, even as household energy costs — and corporate profits — have soared.

“I’m a hard grader — I’d give him a B,” said Dan Kammen, a noted climate scientist and longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is now Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Energy and Climate Justice at Johns Hopkins University.

Kammen faults Newsom for not acting as aggressively as he could have to curb fossil fuel use or raise the cost of emitting carbon dioxide under the state’s cap-and-invest regime. But he thinks those flaws have been counterbalanced by the governor’s successes in shepherding the growth of technologies at the core of the global transition to a clean electric economy.

In particular, California’s ​“solar and energy storage and EV story is amazing,” Kammen said.

The state has far more electric vehicles, far more utility-scale solar, and a staggeringly larger fleet of batteries now than it did when Newsom took office.

Significantly, California has hit these clean energy marks while growing its economy, proving that clean energy can coexist with prosperity. That, in turn, has strengthened Newsom’s credibility as the de facto U.S. climate representative in the face of the Trump administration’s depredations.

Newsom’s out-front and early opposition to the Trump administration has earned accolades even from those who think his record on climate is weak. ​“He was the leading Trump critic before anyone,” Kammen said, ​“and you cannot overstate how important that was.”

Still, Newsom has fallen short on his ambitions. His 2022 ​“climate commitment” to spend $54 billion over five years has been steadily eroded to cover shortfalls in state revenues. And he dealt with a series of emergencies in ways that strengthened the hand of fossil fuel interests and the states’ biggest utilities.

Under his watch, air regulators responded to oil companies’ threats to close refineries and send prices at the pump soaring by weakening the state’s carbon cap-and-trade program. In addition, California has continued to subsidize biofuels that experts say cannot be scaled up to decarbonize the transportation sector without adding more carbon emissions than they reduce.

If anything, Newsom’s wins have thrown his failures into greater relief, said Barry Vesser, chief program officer at The Climate Center, a California nonprofit think tank.

“He’s such a complicated person in terms of his climate legacy,” Vesser said. ​“Truly, he’s done some remarkable things, and truly he’s missed some tremendous opportunities.”

Backsliding on distributed clean energy

Newsom’s failure to embrace small-scale distributed solar and batteries encapsulates one of the biggest missed opportunities. Time after time, his administration has hampered efforts to harness these resources to help the California grid when they threaten the state’s politically powerful utilities.

“On distributed energy, he’s been pretty uniformly bad,” Vesser said. ​“And this is a place where California is completely poised to demonstrate a model for the rest of the world that can help with affordability, with reliability, with resilience, and with clean supply.”

In 2023, the California Public Utilities Commission, whose five members were appointed by Newsom, gutted the rooftop-solar net-metering regime that over two decades had boosted the state’s rooftop and distributed solar fleet to a nation-leading 20-plus gigawatts. The abrupt cuts to solar compensation for customers of the state’s three major investor-owned utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — were a huge setback for the rooftop solar industry, although supporters of the subsidy clawback say the market has since recovered.

Many environmentalists and energy economists argued the cuts were both justified and necessary to end incentives that rewarded wealthy homeowners while shifting the cost of maintaining the grid onto everyone else. But the California Public Utilities Commission has increasingly strained this underlying cost-shift logic to undermine solar programs for schools, farms, and apartments, as well as to reject a widely supported plan to boost community-scale solar and battery systems.

Newsom has also personally intervened to block policies that would enlist consumer technologies to mitigate growing stress on utility grids. He has vetoed not just bills to restore rooftop solar credits to schools, but also ones aimed at creating virtual power plants out of the batteries and electric vehicles that Californians lead the country in buying. Those VPPS could help reduce reliance on polluting gas plants whose sole purpose is to provide power in rare moments of peak electricity demand.

Those are puzzling decisions from a governor who ​“sees himself as so tech-forward,” said Arnab Pal, executive director of Deploy Action, a nonprofit that promotes distributed energy to combat rising electricity costs. ​“He missed the technological revolutions that are happening in the energy space,” Pal said. Instead, Newsom ​“listened to utilities and stuck with the traditional approach.”

But that business-as-usual utility model is now faltering under the weight of the costs it is pushing onto Californians. Lawmakers have continued to introduce bills meant to make better use of VPPs, including two that are on Newsom’s desk awaiting signature or veto this month.

Even Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and one of the most prominent proponents of cutting rooftop solar subsidies, recognizes the value of using distributed energy resources to curb the cost of overbuilding grids.

“The grid is only very constrained less than 100 hours a year,” he said. ​“That’s when you’re imposing a cost by using electricity, but the rest of the time we’re not.”

Finding a way to reduce those costs will be critical, he said. Over the past quarter century, the rates charged by California’s major investor-owned utilities have risen far faster than inflation. The surge accelerated in the past half decade or so, pushing up typical household rates to roughly twice the U.S. average, even as utilities have reported record profits.

Expensive electricity is a major barrier to getting households to switch to electric cars and heat pumps, and getting industries to swap out fossil-fueled furnaces and boilers for cleaner grid-powered alternatives. It’s also a serious burden for the nearly one in five California households struggling to pay their utility bills.

Tamping down utility costs isn’t easy, particularly when demand for electricity is rising. But there’s also no politically viable way to achieve the transition without tackling the problem, Kammen said.

“You’re not going to solve climate without integrating justice. And you’re not going to solve justice without making clean and reliable and affordable energy available to everyone,” he said.

Solutions that outlast the politics of the moment

To be clear, California’s electricity affordability crisis isn’t Newsom’s fault, Kammen said. Even his harshest critics concede that he was dealt a tough hand, having to confront one emergency after another during his governorship.

Roughly three weeks after Newsom was sworn into office in January 2019, Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s biggest utility and a key supporter of his political rise, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The utility had been staggering under the weight of tens of billions of dollars of liabilities after a poorly maintained transmission line sparked the state’s deadliest wildfire.

Newsom ushered through a deal, both unpopular and largely viewed as the best available option at the time, that allowed PG&E to emerge from bankruptcy in July 2020. But it also committed the Newsom administration to a status quo approach to managing the state’s politically powerful utilities, rather than pressing the advantage to institute more radical reforms.

“There were people calling for a statewide publicly owned grid — you’d basically wipe out the regulated monopoly utility model,” said Vesser of The Climate Center. That would have been a truly radical option — ​“but there was a lot you could do before you got” to a public takeover ​“to add new reforms,” he said. Instead, ​“he just passed bills and bailed [the utilities] out.”

Then, close on the heels of PG&E’s restructuring, California underwent another energy emergency: rolling blackouts triggered by heat waves, which strained the grid past its limit. Newsom responded with a series of all-of-the-above emergency actions. He authorized the use of more dirty diesel generators and aging gas peaker plants. He ordered regulators to issue procurements driving a massive expansion of clean energy and batteries. And he launched programs that pay customers with batteries, EV chargers, and other fast-responding devices to earn money for turning their spare capacity to serve grid needs.

But in the years since, the Newsom administration has withdrawn support for the more innovative customer-facing parts of that portfolio. Most notably, it has nearly eliminated funding for the state’s most successful VPP program to date, the Demand Side Grid Support program, which has enlisted more than 500 megawatts of customer-owned, grid-relieving batteries.

Newsom has also sought to retain some of the more questionable parts of the state’s core centralized energy portfolio. He pushed to postpone the long-planned closure of PG&E’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant despite significant concerns over the costs and safety risks. And the California Public Utilities Commission delayed closure of the Aliso Canyon underground fossil-gas storage site, despite Newsom’s pledge to shutter it after a massive leak over four months in 2015 and 2016, because it supplies power needed during times of high electricity demand.

To Michael O’Boyle, senior director of policy and strategy at think tank Energy Innovation, these decisions reflect a pattern of reactive policymaking. During the grid emergencies of 2020 and 2022, ​“there was a collective sense in California that the grid was falling apart,” he said. But as milder weather and rising battery capacity have eased peak grid pressures, Newsom’s interventions have given way to ​“trying to preserve the existing structure of investor-owned utilities,” he said — even as ​“public faith in the institution of investor-owned utilities has degraded.”

California regulators have good reason to be leery of obstructing steady increases in utility grid investments, even as utilities’ regulated profits on those investments have boomed. But wildfire threats in particular have become a black hole of utility spending, driving the lion’s share of near-term rate increases.

Ultimately, Newsom may have simply kicked the can down the road — to California’s next governor. The final legislative session of Newsom’s tenure recently ended with lawmakers rejecting a plan to insulate the state’s major utilities from potentially ruinous wildfire liability. The next day, PG&E unveiled a strategic review, meant to reverse a precipitous slide in its share price, that included deferring $2 billion in capital investments for 2027. Such a drastic reduction could crimp its ability to meet grid expansion and clean-energy interconnection goals.

In a sense, PG&E has Newsom over a barrel — just as it did when he first took the reins.

California’s next governor will have no quick fixes for these problems. Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee and presumptive frontrunner for the November election, has put forth some politically attractive plans, like offering two hours of free electricity per day supplied by the state’s surplus of afternoon solar power.

A new report compiling input from 20 California energy experts highlights that addressing rising energy costs will likely take longer than any single governor’s tenure. But that hard work is vital if California leaders are to convince skeptics that clean energy progress and affordable power can coexist.

“California rates went up much faster than inflation, and faster than the rest of the country, under Gavin Newsom’s leadership,” said Energy Innovation’s O’Boyle, one of the contributors to the report. That had nothing to do with California’s clean energy transition, however. Renewables and batteries are the cheapest form of new energy available. ​“California has to get this right to prevent false narratives from waylaying the state’s clean energy goals,” he said.

If California can find a way to use clean technology to meet its climate needs while controlling costs, that could drive a greater global climate impact than whatever the state does to reduce emissions within its own borders, the Energy Institute’s Borenstein said. After all, California is responsible for less than 1% of global emissions, which means ​“the point is not to hit a particular number. The point is to do something that’s scalable,” he said. ​“The rest of the world has to see us and say ​‘What California has done is doable; that’s something we should look into’ versus ​‘That’s what caused the affordability crisis.’”