The goal of California's new law banning the sale of small, gasoline-powered off-road engines in the Golden State beginning in 2024 is obvious—cleaner air. But the law's significantly disproportionate impact on rural residents and the lawn and garden trade is also obvious.

We are excited to announce a new podcasting collaboration between NewsData, our parent company Pioneer Utility Resources and Clatskanie People's Utility District in Oregon.

The global supply chain problems that are hindering the flow of goods around the planet are also hitting the California energy industry, mainly affecting battery energy storage but also solar energy equipment, to a lesser degree.

The Golden State shines within the public sphere for making great strides in decarbonizing its electric grid, but there is an uncomfortable reality underneath the glow—a whole lot of diesel generation is being built.

"Tumultuous" is a word that comes to mind when considering the tenure of outgoing California Public Utilities Commission President Marybel Batjer.

It's not too big of a surprise that California electricity grid officials this week were speaking of not angering the gods. There don't seem to be many other places to turn to as fall approaches.

A few weeks before the fire started, I stood under a dead evergreen tree that leaned toward the power line in my backyard. The tree looked as if it was tired; as if it was ready to find its final resting place below at any moment. Still majestic, the evergreen stood quietly among dead and li…

It's a handful of years from now, and things are going well for you. Years of intensive labor at your beloved vocation, with all the sacrifices that entails, are paying off. The financials at your independent business are great, despite the economic and social ravages of the COVID-19 pandemi…

California needs to prioritize transmission planning to meet its renewable-energy goals and reduce impacts on disadvantaged areas from fossil fuel generation, a coalition of environmental groups and labor unions said this week as they urged action on the issue.

Six years out from the Butte Fire and three years out from the Camp Fire, many people who have lost their houses due to conflagrations caused by Pacific Gas & Electric equipment have not been compensated. California newspapers are full of accounts of victims still living in trailers, the…

The U.S. electric system was generally reliable in 2020 despite extreme weather and other events, but energy and resource-adequacy issues escalated in parts of the Western Interconnection and Texas, the national reliability organization said in a new report.

About midafternoon on Aug. 4, I was sitting in Starbucks in Grass Valley getting some work done, with intermittent bouts of scrolling through Twitter as I often do (in a media job, this counts as work, it really does). On a day that was hot, but with a clear blue sky, a tweet from Yubanet Fi…

Battery energy storage is being added at a furious pace in the California Independent System Operator's territory and is already working to meet the evening net peak, the time of tight supply each day that is giving grid operators more and more gray hair as the risk of rolling blackouts looms.

Utilities and regulators are still sorting out how to integrate and regulate microgrids, which are gaining interest across the U.S. to meet reliability and decarbonization goals. But new business models and regulatory constructs will be needed for their integration, according to an expert panel.

The importance of updated methods of transmission planning to meet decarbonization and reliability goals was a hot topic at a recent national gathering of state utility commissioners, with the conversation energized by a renewed push at the federal level for more transmission.

California's electricity grid is already running close to the edge a few weeks into summer, with grid officials raising the alarm over short capacity and dwindling energy import capability—challenges that are shaping up to be in place for years to come.

California is aggressively moving toward its clean-energy goals, but uncertain grid reliability is leading to a massive buildout of diesel generation, often to power the computer servers that store our online data, social media postings, photos and videos.

The debate over changes to energy wheel-throughs in California intensified this week, with Arizona's top regulator charging that federal energy regulators allowed the California Independent System Operator "to unfairly block" electricity flowing to Arizona.

Power resources in the Western U.S. are stretched thin this summer with little margin to dampen price swings or in the worst case, to prevent outages, industry leaders said.

State lawmakers this week expressed frustration with the California Public Utilities Commission on several issues, notably the situation around solar net-metering reform that has become a roiling public debate.

A struggle in the West over access to transmission lines in California during the blazing heat of summer has landed at the desks of federal regulators, with little time left to settle the debate.

Leading energy experts from the Northwest and California will explore the 2021-2022 outlook for regional markets and power systems at the 5th Annual Pacific Northwest Wholesale Power Markets Conference on June 17 and 18.

Thousands of victims of utility-caused wildfires in California have suffered a hard road since the various blazes that raged through their communities in recent years, with many people still displaced and waiting for compensation. Their anger and frustration seem justified, with it becoming …

Leading energy experts from the Northwest and California will explore the 2021-2022 outlook for regional markets and power systems at the 5th Annual Pacific Northwest Wholesale Power Markets Conference on June 17 and 18.

Urgency is the name of the game as state regulators prepare to order up another 11.5 GW of resources to help keep the lights on in California, bringing total planned and new resources to more than 20 GW—a massive number.

Please join us for the 5th Annual Pacific Northwest Wholesale Power Markets Conference the mornings of June 17 and 18, and expand your knowledge and understanding of the 2021-2022 outlook for regional markets and power systems.

State regulators are set to recommend that the California Legislature halt expansion of the electricity choice program known as Direct Access, pointing to the questionable grid reliability and greenhouse gas emissions in the Golden State right now, but large commercial buyers and renewable-e…

The United States electricity grid is really three different grids mostly lacking interconnections, but linking them could strengthen the grid, aid in renewables development and avoid blackouts such as those suffered in California and Texas, experts say.

California's regulations around rooftop solar are due for a possible major shake-up with new legislation that would establish a new net-energy metering tariff with a "grid access charge"—an idea that has drawn rapid condemnation from solar advocates.

There is a growing recognition that a great deal of new high-voltage transmission infrastructure will need to be constructed for the United States to meet its carbon-reduction goals, and a new plan issued by President Joe Biden's administration this week holds promise for this expansion to t…

Every month, more than 11 million electricity customers throughout California pay for electricity they cannot use. This fee has been climbing rapidly over the past few years, including yet another 27-percent increase implemented in February here in Southern California. Importantly, these 11 …

California has been breaking renewables records left and right in recent weeks, but that phenomenon has wider impacts and big implications for electric grid reliability and market prices.

California energy planners and grid officials have embarked on a dizzying number of new initiatives and programs to prepare the electric grid for the demands of this summer.

Editor's note: This is the third in a series of articles on the "tangled web" involving the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and Riverside Public Utilities.

A new study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is getting a lot of attention because it says Los Angeles can meet a goal of 100-percent renewable energy by 2045, but it has some important caveats.

That morning, Paul* was driving his Pacific Gas & Electric truck on company business near Paradise when he saw the smoke plume from the beginnings of the Camp Fire. It was between 7 and 7:30 a.m. He grabbed his cell phone and called a co-worker who lived in Paradise.

Due to an editing error, the original published version of this article omitted several paragraphs related to Pacific Gas & Electric procurement and the growth of community choice aggregators. The story has been updated to include those paragraphs.

Demand-response providers came away from California's August blackouts with a bit of a bruised reputation, but they say there is more to the story.

About one-third of the demand response that was counted toward California's utility resource-adequacy capacity was not available during the August grid outages, according to a new market-monitoring report that sheds more light on demand-response performance during the events.

The energy information war going in the United States was on full display this week as supporters of various fuel types lobbed rhetorical bombs at each other over the dangerous blackouts that plunged most of Texas into darkness in the depths of February winter. The frigid weather also caused…

The market value of utility-scale solar declined in California in recent years as its penetration grew, according to a new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that provides a detailed look at the impact of solar in the Golden State.

Many participants in the California Independent System Operator say CAISO is trying to do too much in too short a time frame to prepare for summer, and should focus on problems identified during blackouts last summer.

Offshore wind development is starting to gain more attention along the West Coast, and with a new clean-energy-friendly administration now in control in Washington, D.C., it only seems a matter of time before some ambitious developer looks at the waters off the Pacific Northwest or Californi…

President Joe Biden during his first few days in office set the stage for a national energy policy modeled on California's, but a question remains as to whether this will also lead to the growth of the many energy hiccups and problems facing the Golden State.

The federal government in the last days of the Trump administration is making efforts to increase renewable-energy development and other uses in Western deserts, drawing fire from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said she will work to nullify the proposal.

California electric grid operators will be relying on a new technology used in unprecedented ways to avoid blackouts this summer, similar to those that rolled across the state last August. And the time frame for success is short.

The year 2020 has been a rough one for many, so NewsData is spreading some holiday cheer with this year's batch of energy-related holiday carols. NewsData will be closed the week of Dec. 28 through Jan. 1, and we will resume our usual publishing schedule the week of Jan. 4. Happy holidays to all!

We are excited to announce an upcoming webinar on the timely and vital topic of resource adequacy in the Western power sector.

Elliot Mainzer has a laundry list of challenges ahead of him as he takes the helm of the California Independent System Operator, most notably reforming a resource-adequacy program that has run off the rails a bit in the state, as well as improving the ISO's relationship with state agencies.