The governor should limit energy costs, stimulate innovation

By Tracy Hernandez, special to CalMatters

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The governorship of California is a special prize. This November’s winner will inherit a powerful office that is one part bully pulpit and two parts hot seat. Suddenly, every decision they make will affect the fifth largest economy on Earth and the daily lives of 39 million people.

The winner will pay the price for that power, saddled immediately with a spiraling affordability crisis hitting the state’s middle class. A good place to start? The price of power.

If several decades of housing failure in California are driving the spending crisis, our ideology energy policy ride shotgun.

Energy costs feed into everything, eating into household budgets directly and through higher prices. Voters feel it. Employers are running away from it.

We at the New California Coalition—a nonpartisan alliance of business, labor and civic leaders—conducted extensive surveys and focus groups with Californians. Our findings align with Stanford University’s Lab for Deliberative Democracy and the Public Policy Institute of California: Voters want a cleaner energy future — but not if it destroys jobs, doubles bills or drives out the middle class.

It is a dual mandate with common goals: climate leadership — including resilience and resilience — and shared economic prosperity — meaning affordability, reliability and economic opportunity.

We found that 85% of Californians prioritize affordability over emissions, not because they doubt climate action, but because they doubt the state can achieve it without hurting jobs, energy reliability and hitting the middle class.

The next governor must get even with Californians: The state counts less than 1% of global emissions. We can shut down every factory, park every car and kill every gas plant tomorrow and global temperatures will not drop. The other 99% of the world just keeps broadcasting.

Energy costs and the California Dream

High energy costs are stifling the California Dream. When electricity and fuel become more expensive, everything gets expensive — housing, food and freight.

Businesses in need head to cheaper locations and hire jobs there. And the industries we say we want—artificial intelligence, chipmaking, cleantech, advanced manufacturing—need a robust, affordable network. California is effectively telling them to enjoy Arizona.

So what do voters want? Stanford has found that it supports major energy technologies — including advanced nuclear power — on the condition that it keeps energy and fuel affordable and reliable.

What they reject is magical thinking: destruction of existing energy sources before the new ones become viable. This is not an ideology or climate denial. This is common sense.

The next governor must treat energy as a top priority. Whether through direct oversight, an energy czar, or a cabinet-level leader — direction must come from the governor’s office, with streamlined permits and measurable goals tracked publicly.

That means building a counterweight to the regulatory state: an economic growth agency backed by job creators and a formal workforce development role to train Californians for the jobs this transition will create.

It also means redirecting containment funds and investing in innovations that advance the common goals of climate leadership and shared economic prosperity.

The next governor needs to get serious, fast. He or she must first untangle the bureaucratic snarl blocking transmission lines and unleash distributed energy generation, which includes small, localized energy generators such as rooftop solar, small modular reactors and local microgrids.

We can’t electrify everything while choking the grid.

The new governor must then expand the Diablo Canyon operation. It’s California’s largest source of carbon-free electricity, and it works. Ending the outdated ban on small modular reactors. The core is clean, stable here as well.

California’s leader must also ensure the state continues to invest in existing oil and natural gas infrastructure while developing new infrastructure for future diversified energy sources.

And the state must begin an aggressive push to convert biomass to bioenergy—turning organic waste into energy—so it clears wildfire fuel, generates power, and helps revitalize rural economies. These are three benefits in one policy.

Finally, the new governor should increase support for research and development to commercialize breakthrough technologies like fusion and space solar, which puts solar panels on satellites.

These are not vain dreams; they are political decisions waiting for leaders with the courage to implement them.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.