Mike O’Boyle from Energy Innovation wrote an article in the San Francisco Chronicle listing four ways other than building more natural gas plants to maintain reliability in the state. He summarizes a set of solutions for when the electricity grid can get 85% of its supply from renewable sources, presumably in the next decade. He lists four options specifically:

• Off shore wind
• Geothermal
• Demand response and management
• Out of state imports

The first three make sense, although the amount of geothermal resources is fairly limited relative to the state’s needs. The problem is the fourth one.

California already imports about a fifth of its electric energy. If we want other states to also electrify their homes and cars, we need to allow them to use their own in-state resources. Further, the cost of importing power through transmission lines is much higher than conventional analyses have assumed. California is going to have to meet as much of its demands internally as possible.

Instead, we should be pursuing two other options:

• Dispersed microgrids with provisions for conveying output among several or many customers who can share the system without utility interaction. Distributed solar has already reduced the state’s demand by 12% to 20% since 2006. This will require that the state modify its laws regulating transactions among customers and act to protect the investments of those customers against utility interests.
• Replacing natural gas in existing power plants with renewable biogas. A UC Riverside study shows a potential of 68 billion cubic feet which is about 15% of current gas demand for electricity production. Instead of using this for home cooking, it can meet the limited peak day demands of the electricity grid.

Both of these solutions can be implemented much more quickly than an expanded transmission grid and building new resources in other states. They just take political will.