California wants to run on 100% renewable energy by 2045. But surging demand for electricity is headed for a head-on collision with the state’s climate goals.
For the past two decades, improvements in power efficiency have offset rising demand, keeping overall electricity use stagnant. That’s changing now due to growing electricity consumption from data centers, electric vehicles, and industrial facilities.
Severin Borenstein, director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley, told KNX News Chief Correspondent Charles Feldman it will take “a lot of work” to keep up with electricity demand.
“First of all, there's the electric vehicles. In some ways, those are the least of our problems, because moving them to off-peak times or times when we have plenty of solar power should be pretty easy to do,” he said. “It's the other sources of electricity demand, particularly building heating and cooling, that are much more difficult to shift to other times.”
Bornstein said artificial intelligence is forecasted to cause computing-related electricity use to skyrocket in the near future, but it’s not happening yet.
“And it's very unlikely to happen in California, in part because of our astronomical electricity rates,” he added. “The rates are so high that this isn't where you want to put a server farm.”
As for whether the state will meet its goal of producing entirely renewable energy within two decades, Bornstein said reaching 100% renewable isn’t really the point.
“California is less than 1% of world greenhouse gas emissions. The point is to make a major shift and to show how it can be done,” he said.
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While we’ll still be using some fossil fuels for many years, Bornstein is confident we’ll be using less and less of them. He said the amount of renewable energy capacity California needs to build out is “quite manageable,” especially considering the state’s abundance of clean energy sources like sunshine and offshore wind.
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