BLOCKING THE ROAD: CHALLENGES TO CALIFORNIA AND WASHINGTON’S CLEAN ENERGY GOALS
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2022-12
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Abstract
My Capstone project is focused on the policy, technology and science embedded within California and Washington’s climate change legislation to achieve a certain percentage of emissions reductions by a specified future point in time as well as both states’ goal to become net-zero by 2045. My classwork and professional experiences have provided me with a strong foundation in understanding climate change from a scientific standpoint and the emerging technologies and supportive legislation that can help mitigate and potentially reverse climate change in the future. Technical knowledge of technologies like green hydrogen, carbon capture and sequestration along with more mature technologies like wind and solar are incredibly important while evaluating policy objectives for state clean energy plans and targets. Diving further into my professional experience, I have been able to observe and analyze the economics of certain clean energy technologies based on both market forces and policy intervention. Both mature and emerging clean energy technologies will continue to play a crucial role to grid reliability, affordability and provide opportunity to meet future energy demand growth. Although it may sound like a simple concept to adopt renewables and say goodbye to all fossil fuels to serve our future energy needs, it is indeed much more comprehensive and complex than that. That is where my classwork and professional experience allow me to study and evaluate the complexities that lie beneath the surface with reliability issues from extreme weather, affordability given generation, transmission, and distribution cost dynamics as well as capital costs of one type of energy project compared to another. California and Washington’s clean energy goals are arguably the most ambitious in the country which brings about its own set of challenges as both states are looking to leverage multiple ways to reduce each state’s emissions footprint while also keeping citizens safe and delivering affordable electricity. I have the knowledge and expertise to investigate integrated resource planning documents that utilities have prepared for local state commissions to determine how and when each state will look to ramp up its transition to cleaner energy. The key objective in this analysis is to determine the feasibility of California and Washington’s clean energy timelines with the methods and technologies the state’s plan to incorporate to achieve these goals, and most importantly the challenges and roadblocks they may face in the process.