How California Gov.-elect Becerra could be better on climate than Newsom

This is California Wire, a weekly newsletter from Jeff St. John on the state’s clean energy transition. Subscribe to get it weekly via Substack.

Welcome back, everyone! Well, we may have finally caught a break when it comes to making progress on climate and energy. The midterm elections have given Democrats control of Congress and dramatically expanded the party’s power in state legislatures and governors’ mansions. That’s opening up big opportunities for reinvigorated clean — and affordable — energy transition policies and actions across the country. 

In California, Canary Media just held what amounts to a big party for Golden State climate and energy aficionados: our fourth annual Canary Live Bay Area show, which brought nearly 400 people to The Freight in downtown Berkeley on Tuesday night. The vibe was fantastic — with so much exuberance at the blue wave lifting our common climate ambitions. And onstage and off, there was a whole bunch of gritty, detail-oriented discussion about how to best proceed on all the work ahead. 

I was thrilled to share the stage with Leah Stokes, the Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara; author of top-ranked climate books ​“Short Circuiting Policy” and the newly released ​“The Carbon Wave”; writer of the Substack ​“Notes from the Electric Era”; and one of the chief behind-the-scenes architects of the Biden-era climate triumph, the Inflation Reduction Act. She even created a Carbon Wave Calculator to help people understand how to make climate progress in their communities.

Stokes has a lot to say about outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s climate and environmental justice policy record — much of it not very flattering. She’s particularly angry that Newsom clawed back nearly $200 million in funding for schools to upgrade their heating, air-conditioning, ventilation, and plumbing systems — a move he made right when schools in Santa Barbara were reporting classroom temperatures of 93 degrees Fahrenheit. ​“Half a million kids were under extreme heat-modified days at the same time that Gov. Newsom gutted that program,” she said. 

She’s also critical of the way the Newsom administration has undercut the state’s biggest virtual-power-plant program, Demand Side Grid Support. While Newsom did sign into law a number of bills this year that will tap distributed energy to help solve the state’s rising electricity-cost crisis, his administration has consistently undercut DSGS in budget negotiations. That leaves the program without enough money to pay out would-be participants in 2027 — absent some intervention between now and then. That’s particularly unfortunate since, according to Stokes’ own research, the program offers disproportionate benefits to lower-income participants in the Central Valley and Inland Empire. 

She and I eventually turned to Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra’s potential climate agenda. She, for one, is feeling hopeful. ​“I think that there’s more of a focus on affordability, on holding the utilities accountable, on delivering on environmental justice,” she said. ​“I think that these are things that actually matter to Becerra.” 

In particular, she’s a fan of Becerra’s free ​“Power Hour” proposal for no-cost utility power when solar is flooding the state’s grid — an idea that’s been pioneered in Australia and floated for California by Stokes herself and a number of other climate thinkers. 

For more than a decade, California has been trying to design energy policy to solve for the ​“duck curve” — excess solar at midday, not enough grid power as the sun goes down. Batteries can soak up that power, obviously. But so can heat pumps and air conditioners that preheat or precool homes and buildings, as can heat-pump water heaters, which store energy in tanks of hot water, she said.

Structuring utility rates to charge customers less when power is cheap and clean will require raising them at times when it’s scarce and dirty, she said. But she sees a way to ​“either shift the prices up at the peak time in the 4 to 9 [p.m.] period, or keep them flat and use taxpayer funds to backfill that.” 

Utilities’ wildfire liability is the most immediate crisis facing the incoming governor. Stokes has ideas for how to tackle that, too. She contends that utility shareholders, not customers, should pay those costs. Or oil companies, whose products are responsible for the climate crisis, could be forced through lawsuits to pay up as well, although she conceded that these solutions haven’t gained any political traction yet. 

“But I’d rather be pie in the sky and on the side of everyday people, who should not be paying for wildfire costs in their bills,” she said. 

My take

One idea I was particularly excited to get into with Stokes was avenues for replacing that lost funding to finance on-site solar, batteries, electric school buses, and efficient, all-electric HVAC systems for the state’s nearly 10,000 public schools. The way I see it, that’s a public good that goes well beyond climate. With those systems in place, schools could be positioned as resilience centers for communities in the midst of wildfires, heat waves, and other climate change–intensified disasters.

Stokes, who collaborates with the nonprofit UndauntedK12 to find funding streams for projects like these in California schools, proposed the idea of a ​“children’s climate bond” ballot measure to raise money for this kind of work. ​“It’s crazy living in like the fourth-largest economy of the world, and yet there’s never any money to do the things that need to get done,” she bemoaned. 

During the intermission, I heard another idea of how to cover the cost of school electrification from Lorenzo Kristov, who helped transform the operations of the California Independent System Operator for the renewables age. Kristov is also a luminary in the world of distributed and community energy policy — and, full disclosure, a Canary Media supporter. Kristov told me his plan for transforming California’s schools into solar-and-battery-powered revenue generators and allowing them to sell their excess power to their neighbors. 

Unfortunately, the economics of school solar have gotten worse, not better, in recent years. Regulators weakened compensation for shared-solar systems at schools, farms, and apartment buildings back in 2023, and Newsom vetoed a bill meant to restore the old system for schools in 2024. Perhaps Becerra will take a different approach.

What else I’m watching 

My colleague Alison F. Takemura has a story out this week on the state’s latest consequential — yet confusing — step on its long march toward shifting buildings from fossil-fueled to electric-powered heating. 

On Nov. 4, the Bay Area Air District board voted on final amendments to a measure setting requirements for new water heaters starting in 2028. It’s an important milestone for the district’s 2023 plan to phase out appliances that emit nitrogen oxides, which have harmful human health and air quality impacts. The regulation will significantly restrict new installations of gas-fueled furnaces and water heaters in the Bay Area. 

Last week’s vote doesn’t go as far as initially proposed. Affordability exemptions for low-income households and other buildings that could struggle to find electric options that work for them are likely to apply to about half of the region’s installations in the coming years. Multifamily buildings will have until 2033 to do the upgrade work to make the switch to all-electric heating. And the district has yet to finalize rules on space heating, which makes up a bigger share of emissions than water heating. Still, it’s a big ​“first” for getting gas out of buildings. 

The scene at Canary Live Bay Area

My Canary Media compatriots live all over the country — Asheville, Nashville, Seattle, New York City — so we don’t get to hang out in person nearly as often as we’d like. And like so many modern-day information workers, I spend a lot of my time interacting with people on tiny screens. That’s one of the reasons I look forward to our live events so much — we all get to meet each other, talk face-to-face, and celebrate our common humanity and common purpose. This week’s Canary Live Bay Area event was no exception. Check out our photos from the event! 

One more thing

Lily the corgi normally spends a lot of her time relaxing. But this week has been one of great vicarious excitement for her, vibing to her mom’s and dad’s general enthusiasm about the course of human events. So we can’t blame her for seeking out the comfort of her friends Barbara the stuffed-animal corgi and Henry the monkey for some quiet time in her favorite spot on the Eames chair ottoman by the front door.