California

To achieve these goals, Advanced Energy United’s recommendations for California’s next Governor focus on these core tenets: 

• Build it: Accelerate least-cost clean energy and transmission projects to keep up with projected load growth, meet compressed federal incentive timelines, and relieve rate pressure on all customers, residential, business, and industrial. This includes ensuring that recent reforms to speed project permitting and expand transmission capacity are working as intended, maximizing our ability to connect new clean generation to the grid through surplus interconnection, and ensuring that the state’s emissions targets are guiding the procurement and building of new resources. 

• Make it Flexible: California can lower costs right now by making it easier to harness technologies that make demand flexible. This means scaling up distributed energy resources (DERs), energy efficiency (EE), virtual power plants (VPPs), electric vehicles (EV), and building electrification solutions via state programs, plans, and innovative rates. These technologies make it easier for grid operators to keep costs down in the near term as well as in the long run, benefiting all ratepayers. They also prepare the grid for increased electricity demand from data centers, domestic manufacturing, EVs, and heat pumps. The state’s current policies create significant headwinds for these technologies, and it is imperative that the next governor lead with a different approach.  

• Make it Affordable: Energy costs will be higher if we do not properly plan energy investments. Our next governor can take steps to ensure that our utilities are planning, optimizing, and delivering the right types of energy investment at the lowest possible cost, while also identifying least-cost financing avenues for projects both big and small. This also includes ensuring that recent reforms such as the new public transmission authority and neighborhood decarbonization pilots are delivering on cost savings, and aligning utility planning processes with affordability and clean energy as north stars. 

• Support the Continued Growth of the Electric Vehicle Market: California has historically led the nation in EV adoption and policy ambition—but success now hinges on scaling up. California can take advantage of the many benefits of electric transportation, including decreased transportation costs for consumers, lower electric rates, and backup power during high-stress grid events. California must continue to support EV manufacturing, charging incentive programs, and scale programs that allow EVs to become grid assets.  

To download the California state policy roadmap, please complete the form.