The coal-fired San Juan Generating Station in New Mexico. (Photo: Matt Preusch)

"We currently have unit four offline, but units one, two and three are operating at full load," says Pat Themig, Vice President of Generation for PNM, the New Mexico utility that runs the plant.

"If you see the line where the stack is, everything going behind that is scrubber," he says, pointing past a towering smokestack.

Those scrubbers remove pollutants from the air emissions. But PNM has struggled to meet air quality standards and last month, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the plant to install new pollution control equipment. Those costs are generally passed on to the power plant owners, which, in this case, are utilities in Arizona, New Mexico and California. The San Juan Generating Station supplies power to several California cities and the Southern California Public Power Authority.

"People would be very surprised to know, particularly in Los Angeles, that historically, more of our electricity comes from coal fired power than from any other source," says Evan Gillespie of the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" campaign.

"Several decades ago, Los Angeles made a number of bad bets on coal fired power plants – that that would be the way of the future. That has clearly turned out to not be the case," he says.

Gillespie is talking about one particular utility: the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP). It's the largest municipal utility in the country.

Challenges for Los Angeles Utility

"We get about 40 percent today from coal and that is all out of state coal," says General Manager Ron Nichols. It comes from two coal-fired power plants, the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the Intermountain Power Project in Utah.

Historically, coal has been attractive to utilities for two reasons: it's reliable and cheap. "Coal tends to come around 5 to 6 cents a kilowatt hour. Our renewable portfolio today is around about 11 cents," says Nichols.

But that's changing, according to Nichols and most of the energy industry. Renewable energy is getting cheaper, while coal is getting more expensive due to stricter air pollution rules.

Two years ago, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa set a goal for DWP. "I'm directing the CEO of the Department of Water and Power to take every action necessary to reach these goals and eliminate the use of coal by 2020."

Meeting that 2020 goal isn't something DWP managers have committed to. That's because DWP's contract with the Utah coal plant isn't up until 2027. Nichols says ending it early is difficult because they have to negotiate with the plant's many owners.

But perhaps the bigger challenge is: that coal power has to be replaced with something else.

"Within a decade and a half, we're going have replaced on the order of 70 percent of our total power supply. And for a utility that thinks in decades, that's rocket fast," says Nichols.

DWP must generate a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, according to state law. But the problem with solar and wind power is that it fluctuates. The sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind stops blowing. Utilities often use electricity from natural gas power plants to fill in power gaps. But DWP has a problem there too.

Billion-Dollar Revamp for Natural Gas Plants

DWP relies on three coastal natural gas power plants, including the Haynes Generating Station in Long Beach. The 1800-megawatt power plant was built more than 50 years ago.

"If we walk out here, I'll show you how we get the ocean water," says DWP projects manager Nazih Batarseh. "For these old power plants, we use ocean water for cooling. And then we return it back into the ocean."

The technique is known as once-through-cooling. Everyday, almost 700 million gallons of seawater is pumped through power plant. That water holds fish larvae and plankton that die in the process. So last year, the State Water Resources Control Board ruled that coastal power plants must switch to a new cooling method over the next decade.

"It's a huge project. It is something that requires us to take plants down, plant by plant, and completely rebuild them. And those are plants that are key to our reliability," says Nichols.

Ron Nichols says rebuilding three natural gas plants will cost DWP $2.2 billion dollars. The utility recently convinced the water board to give it an extension to 2029.

Add that to investing in more renewable energy and moving away from coal power and it's a challenging time for the utility.

"It is a transition that every utility in the country will make says," Evan Gillespie of the Sierra Club.

Gillespie says Los Angeles's challenges are a snapshot of what utilities around the country will be facing as the country gradually puts national global warming rules in place. And he says those that embrace renewable energy first will benefit the most.

"A lot of these investments, while they create a lot of jobs, jobs that we desperately need, these are also investments that are going to modernize the utility. And I think the opportunity here in Los Angeles is to help provide that roadmap to help these other utilities around the country manage that transition," says Gillespie.

Almond shells at the West Biofuels biomass test plant in Woodland, California.

When you think of where energy comes from, you might picture a power plant or maybe wind mills. You probably wouldn't think of a pile of 12 tons of almond shells.

California is hungry for renewable energy. Solar and wind power have taken off thanks to the state's ambitious clean energy goals. But there's another way to generate electricity — by using organic material like agricultural and tree waste. It's known as biomass power.

Matt Summers is an engineer with West Biofuels at their test power plant near Sacramento. California, by the way, is the world leader in growing almonds.

"So we've got more almond shells than anybody else. And you know, we know some companies that handle almond shells and they're always looking for somewhere to take them," says Summers.

Listen to the QUEST radio story How Green Is Biomass Energy?

But where some see a waste product, Summers sees an energy source.

"So this is the heart of the West Biofuels process," he says, pointing to a tower of industrial equipment that turns almond shells into electricity. First, the waste, or biomass, is fed into a reactor.

"We call it reforming, so we're re-forming what's biomass, what's almond shells into smaller particles that are gases," says Summers, describing their gasification technology.

The gas that's produced is a lot like natural gas, so it goes to an advanced generator where it's burned to produce electricity.

But this is where biomass is different from other renewables. The generator produces air pollution, unlike, say, a solar farm. So Summers and his team use pollution control technology to meet California's air quality standards.

Still, despite the emissions from biomass plants, many say there are big benefits to using waste as an energy source.

"Waste is pretty green," says Jim Boyd, a member of the California Energy Commission. "There's enough material out there to make thousands of megawatts of electricity."

Matt Summers of West Biofuels stands next to their fuel source.

There are a lot of unused energy sources out there, Boyd says, like construction debris and orchard cuttings. Biomass energy also has one big advantage over other renewables – reliability. Wind and solar power are variable since the sun and wind aren't available all the time.

"And instead of just thinking about building more natural gas plants to fill the void, we could utilize biomass plants because they are seven by 24 once you get them up and running," says Boyd.

But while other renewables are booming, biomass is on the decline in California. After dozens of plants were built in the 1980s, today, only a handful of new plants are being proposed. In 2009, biomass provided about two percent of the state's electricity.

"There's a great infatuation with wind and solar and very rare references to biomass and some of us are trying to turn that around a little bit," Boyd says.

One problem is simply cost. Biomass facilities need tons and tons of material and trucking it in from around the state isn't very economical.

The other issue gets back to the concern of whether biomass energy is really as green as supporters say. There's the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from biomass plants. Another controversy is over one particular fuel source: trees.

All those years of Smokey Bear and fire suppression in California have created very dense forests – which are at high risk for fires. Both private and public land managers have been trying to reduce that fuel load.

"In a lot of cases you'd do thinning operation where you take out some of the trees, usually the smaller trees, the less valuable trees," says Bill Stewart, a forestry specialist at the University of California – Berkeley.

Stewart says most of the material removed from forests is either burned or left to decay. So there's a lot of interest in using forestry waste in biomass plants.

But Debbie Hammel of the Natural Resources Defense Council says, "I think if you're talking about waste, it's important to define what you mean."

"If you take too much of that residue out of the forest, you're going to have an impact on the forest floor, the fertility of the soil, erosion and potentially wildlife habitat."

Hammel says there's a major debate over how much thinning is good for a forest. So, she worries that a larger biomass industry would create incentives to over-harvest forests. That's why Hammel says not all biomass is equal – and why waste like almond shells should be used before forest cuttings.

"There is a role for biomass done right, but it's a smaller role I think than some people imagine," says Hammel.

Looking ahead, Hammel says the next thorny issue is calculating the greenhouse gas emissions from biomass plants, which can be tricky since the fuels come from a number of sources. That's something the federal Environmental Protection Agency is reviewing now.

38.714854 -121.75320

Cows at Fiscalini Farms in Modesto, California.

Three years ago, we visited a Central Valley dairy that was taking an innovative approach to its waste problem. Instead of collecting thousands of pounds of cow manure in open holding ponds, Joseph Gallo Farms uses it in a renewable energy technology known as a methane digester.

Methane gas is a natural byproduct of cow digestion. It's produced as bacteria inside their stomach break down food.  That process continues on the back end (so to speak) as cow manure decomposes.

Methane is also a powerful contributor to climate change – about 21 times stronger than carbon dioxide. The UN has estimated that 18 percent of greenhouse gases worldwide come from livestock. (Check out this story from KQED's Climate Watch for more on the sources of methane.)

By capturing methane, dairy digesters keep it out of the atmosphere. But they also create a source of renewable energy. Methane is a natural gas — it can be burned just like propane. So, Gallo Farms pipes the methane over to a generator, which produces enough electricity to run the farm and their cheese plant.

Since our visit, the story has taken an interesting turn. Both Gallo Farms and another dairy with a digester, Fiscalini Farms, are located in the San Joaquin Valley – an area with some of the worst air quality the country. The air district is consistently considered in "non-attainment" – which means they aren't meeting the federal limits on air pollution.

While both dairies' digesters are reducing one kind of pollution, greenhouse gases, they're actually adding to another kind.  Generators, like any other combustion engine, produce nitrous oxide pollution – or NOx – which is a component of smog. Given the smog problem in the valley, the local air district decided to put a pollution limit on the dairy digester generators.

Since then, both dairies have struggled to meet to the limits. Unlike pipeline-quality natural gas, the methane (or biogas) that comes from a digester varies in quality, which affects how much pollution is produced in the generator's exhaust. John Fiscalini of Fiscalini Farms has spent $200,000 on a pollution control device that reduces NOx pollution. But he says it's been a challenging process and he's concerned that other dairies have been discouraged by his experience with regulators.

For more on Fiscalini's story and more about the challenges facing dairy digesters, check out this week's radio story.

Listen to Cow Power Not Cutting It radio report online and check out the slideshow below for more on how dairy digesters work.

37.710486 -121.12798

[Casino Sound]

AMY STANDEN: The day the Golden Acorn casino opened, in August of 2001, Monique LaChappa stood right here, near the sliding glass doors, and watched as members of her tribe came in for their first look.

MONIQUE LACHAPPA: I just watched everyone come in and I just… just the look on the tribal members faces that day… It was so exciting.

STANDEN: The casino changed everything for the Campo Kumeyaay Nation, a small tribe of 329 people living in the desert mountains 60 miles east of San Diego. It bought a fire department, educational programs, jobs. But one modest casino– especially in a slow economy– isn't enough to sustain this community, where unemployment is almost 50 percent. LaChappa– who serves as tribal chairwoman– and others here have set their sights on a very different kind of project– one that sets the Campo apart from any other tribe in the country.

[Wind turbine sound]

STANDEN: Here, along a rocky spine of the Laguna Mountains is the only utility-scale wind farm on tribal land in the country, built in 2005. There are two dozen turbines, each 4 stories tall, supplying energy to 35,000 homes in San Diego County. Their huge blades sweep the sky with the steady whoosh of a heartbeat.
This project– called Kumeyaay 1– is an enormous source of pride for the Campo people, in part because it makes use of a resource that until recently, didn't seem to offer a lot of options.

LACHAPPA: Look where we're located. We're out here in the middle of nowhere. It makes it difficult for anybody who wants to be able to do more for their family, or send their kids to college.

STANDEN: But income from this wind farm is limited… because the Campo don't own this project. Instead, they lease the land to a private company. The Campo are in negotiations to build a second wind project, three times the size of this one. This time, they plan to go in as co-owners, partnering with the Chicago-based private energy firm Invenergy and San Diego Gas and Electric. Ownership is a tough deal to strike — one that's eluded other Indian tribes.

MIKE CONNOLLY: This has killed a lot of deals on Indian country.

STANDEN: Mike Connolly– solidly built, with wire frame glasses and a gray ponytail– is a former Campo tribal council member. He runs a consultancy firm that helps tribes get involved with renewable energy.

CONNOLLY Because the tribes want to have ownership. But when they do the numbers, the see that ownership is just not economically viable. So they end up not doing it, rather than doing it.

STANDEN: The primary problem, he says, has to do with the special legal status that tribes occupy: Tribes are sovereign nations, which means they can't take advantage of federal tax credits for renewable energy. And those can cut the price of a large wind project in half. Connolly says the lack of credits, of capital, combined with all the red tape surrounding tribal development threatens to leave American Indians out of the green economy. And that, he says, would be a terrible shame.

CONNOLLY: Especially when you think of the fact that Indian reservations are some of the poorest places in the country. I mean, there's this debate over double digit unemployment, we have reservations that have gone 4 or 5 decades of unemployment that's over 60 percent. And here you have an opportunity to build economies in Indian countries and to create a base that that's sustainable type of development that can go on and on.

STANDEN: On to places like the Morongo reservation, west of Palm Springs, where a grassy hillside rises behind the administration building. DeAnna Meetze would like to see this plot of land covered in solar panels, but she's been frustrated by some of the same tax hurdles the Campo face. Meetze says the history of tribes in this country has left other, subtler obstacles, too.

DEANNA MEETZE: With tribes inherently, there's a level of distrust among anyone who comes from the outside in. And you have to make sure you're dealing with someone of integrity, and that they're not there to take advantage of you.

STANDEN: Those obstacles will subside over time, she says, especially if the federal government helps level the playing field. That process has begun.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Too often, you face unique hurdles to developing these renewable resources…

STANDEN: President Obama, speaking before the Tribal Nations Conference last November.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We're securing tribal access to financing and thanks to the recovery act (FADE UNDER) for energy development…

STANDEN: Over the last two years, the pot of federal aid for Indian energy development has doubled to about $7 million a year. Tribes are also eligible for stimulus grants. And a new federal bill called the Indian Energy Promotion and Parity Act, would take the biggest step: making tribes eligible for the tax credits. The question is whether that bill will suffer the same fate as other energy legislation… so far, stalled out in Congress. For QUEST, I'm Amy Standen, KQED News.

LAUREN SOMMER: Inside an unmarked building outside of Sacramento, dozens of people are glued to computer screens.

DAVE HAWKINS: So did you look at the load curve yesterday?

SOMMER: On the wall, there's a display plotting a big red line, showing how much electricity California is using right now.

SOMMER: So these are the people that are keeping the lights on.

HAWKINS: Yep, this is the real-time operations.

SOMMER: This is the California Independent System Operator or ISO, where Dave Hawkins is the Lead Renewables Power Engineer, though he recently retired. The ISO is the traffic cop of the state's electric grid. It's their job to forecast how much electricity the state needs and to make sure it's supplied. And they do it every four seconds.

HAWKINS: Our electric grid today, as we've built it and managed it, is a huge "just in time" delivery system. Just in time.

SOMMER: Hawkins says in order for the lights to come on when we flip the switch, energy supply and demand have be in perfect balance. But since the demand for power is continually changing, they're continually rebalancing the grid.

HAWKINS: If we don't get all the numbers correct, then there's some major imbalances and some unpleasantness that happens in the system.

SOMMER: Today, most of the state's energy comes from natural gas plants, which produce a steady power supply. But record amounts of wind and solar power are being switched on every year. And because the sun disappears behind clouds and the wind dies down, renewable power is variable.

HAWKINS: The curves that are showing up so far are pretty erratic. You'll see 40, 50, 60 percent change in the output in a very short amount of time. And it not only goes down, but it will also then come back up.

SOMMER: Better weather forecasting could help the ISO anticipate the fluctuations. But Hawkins says they'll need something else to fill in the gaps.

PRAVEEN KATHPAL: We're looking at what we call Project Sano. It's a 2 megawatt energy storage unit.

SOMMER: Just next to the Pacific Ocean in Huntington Beach, Praveen Kathpal of AES Energy Storage shows me one of the biggest batteries in the state. From the outside, it looks like a simple shipping container.

KATHPAL: It's pretty unspectacular to look at, uh, which is good. We don't like excitement in the power business if we can avoid it.

SOMMER: The container is packed with small lithium-ion battery cells.

KATHPAL: There are approximately 83,000 of those cells within this container.

SOMMER: The battery only holds enough power for 1,500 homes, but Kathpal says that's not the point. Batteries are fast. This one can change its output every four seconds. That's a level of responsiveness that a power plant can't match.

KATHPAL: Yeah, it allows you to do things that you really couldn't imagine being able to do before. All of a sudden, you're able to provide a level of power immediately and with certainty.

SOMMER: Grid operators could "dial up" this power to smooth out the second-to-second fluctuations on the grid. Kathpal says he sees a booming market for energy storage like this. And he's not alone.

DAN RASTLER: Energy storage is really undergoing a renaissance right now.

SOMMER: Dan Rastler is with the Energy Storage program at the Electric Power Research Institute, a research group in Palo Alto sponsored by the nation's utilities. He says longer-term energy storage will also be important when it comes to wind power.

RASTLER: Unfortunately, a lot of the wind blows at night and we don't want to spill wind, you know. We've made this investment in renewable energy.

SOMMER: If nighttime wind power could be stored several hours, grid operators could use it during the day when energy demand is highest. Rastler says there are other storage technologies that could use excess energy, like pumping water uphill to reservoirs for hydro power or compressing air that could be released to run power turbines. Still, there's one big hurdle that's held energy storage back.

RASTLER: The reason you don't see a lot of storage deployed right now is the cost issue.

SOMMER: At its best, battery storage is twice as expensive as traditional power sources. That's kept most utilities away. But Rastler says the federal stimulus funding could change the game.

RASTLER: It's been huge. I believe it's around 250 million of stimulus funding really is jumpstarting a number of key demonstrations.

SOMMER: Several of those demonstrations are being lead by California's largest utilities. But given the costs, scaling up energy storage could take decades and California's utilities are on a tight timeline. The state legislature is also debating an energy storage bill that's the first of its kind in the nation. If passed, it would require the state to begin setting energy storage goals for 2020– the same year the renewable energy goal comes due. For Quest, I'm Lauren Sommer, KQED News.

A 2 MW battery the AES Huntington Beach power plant.

Energy storage (through batteries) is something we use everyday in our cell phones and computers. So it may be a little surprising that when it comes to the electric grid, storing energy is something that's rarely done.

California's grid is designed to deliver electricity on a real-time basis. Every four seconds, the grid operators at the California Independent System Operator have to ensure that the energy supply meets the demand in the state – something that's known as "balancing the grid." (You can check out today's electricity forecast on their site). As a result, they coordinate the one piece of the system that they have control over: the generators, like natural gas plants.

Luckily, most generators produce a steady power supply. But California is adding increasing amounts of solar and wind power to the grid each year.  Since the output of a solar or wind farm depends on the sun or wind, the power they produce is variable (here's a time-of-day profile of renewable energy on the grid today).  That causes problems for the grid operators on a number of levels.  Wind farms produce most of their power at night, but that's when demand for power is lowest. Solar farms using photovoltaics can drop off substantially when the sun disappears behind clouds. And large solar thermal farms ramp up extremely fast when they are first hit by the sun in the morning.

Energy storage is one of the ways that utilities and grid operators can address this intermittency.  By having some extra electricity on hand, they can smooth out the bumps caused by these renewables.  Just how to store energy is another issue.  Here are some of the ways it can be done.

Pumped Hydro

In the energy storage world, this is as old school as it gets.  Hydro power uses water and gravity to generate electricity.  Storage is added by pumping that water back uphill to the reservoir, so it can generate power again.  Of course, it takes electricity to run the pumps, but usually this is done a night when there is cheaper or excess power on the grid. California's largest pumped hydro facility is PG&E's Helms Pumped Storage Project outside of Fresno, which has a 1.2 gigawatt capacity (for more on how it works, check out this powerpoint). PG&E is reportedly looking at 2 gigawatts of new pumped storage at two other sites in California.

Batteries

There are a number of different kinds of batteries that can be used in grid-scale installations. I visited a 2 megawatt battery in Southern California that uses lithium-ion cells, much like a hybrid car uses. Southern California Edison is working on an 8 MW battery project near the Tehachapi wind farms.  But lithium-ion technology has plenty of competitors, many of which have been awarded federal stimulus funding.  The primary barrier for batteries is the cost. A Beacon Power flywheel.

Flywheels

This technology uses rotational energy to store power. Flywheels have an internal rotor that uses electricity to spin at high speeds.  When energy is needed, the rotor slows down and generates electricity through a motor.  This is used for what's known as "frequency regulation" on the grid.  Since they can charge and discharge power on a second-to-second basis, flywheels can smooth out the short-term fluctuations on the grid. Beacon Power has installed flywheels in Tehachapi, California as part of a demonstration project there.

Compressed Air

Using energy produced at non-peak times (at night), compressed air energy storage projects pump air into large underground caverns. When demand for energy is high, it's released to run power turbines. PG&E is now planning a 300 MW compressed air facility in Kern County.

Of course, for all these technologies, cost is major issue, not mention the siting and planning considerations. For a good comparison, check out thesetechnology comparison charts from the Energy Storage Association.

Listen to Energy Storage: The Holy Grail radio story online and check out the rest of our stories in the 33×20 renewable energy series.

37.398255 -122.14449

As part of our ongoing series "33 by 20," we conclude a look at the Panoche Valley, south of Hollister, which is finding itself in the center of one of those debates. Andrea Kissack reports.

KISSACK: Ringed most of the year by dry, rolling, scrub covered hills, this ranchland in rural San Benito County gets 90-percent of the solar intensity of the Mojave Desert. But the Mojave, with its protected federal lands and desert tortoises, has turned out to be a nightmare for big solar entrepreneurs. For the Cupertino-based company Solargen, Panoche Valley seemed a better bet for a 420-megawatt solar array that would power about 120,000 homes. PG and E already has transmission lines running right through the valley and five cattle ranchers have agreed to sell their land. But to its critics the company's plan to cover part of the valley in panels doesn't seem like such a green idea.

KIM WILLIAMS: They would like to build an industrial project that extends the entire length of the valley. Once you take the vegetation off the soil, the high winds are just going to be whipping up the top soil and creating dust.

KISSACK: Kim Williams moved to the tranquil Panoche Valley about four years ago from the Bay Area to run an organic egg business called Your Family Farm.
[Sound of Williams talking to her hens]

WILLIAMS: When you travel around California there are not many valleys that you say I am stepping back into time, this is amazing.

KISSACK: Panoche Valley's unique landscape also turns out to be rich in wildlife. The valley floor is teaming with creatures, some of them endangered like the San Joaquin kit fox, and the blunt nose leopard lizard. More than 130 species of birds have also been observed in the area, including bald eagles. Looking out at the project site, Brandon Hill, President of the Fresno Audubon Society, says the valley has too much biodiversity for a big solar plant.

HILL: When you are taking up four thousand acres plus you are basically destroying the habitat, much of it is under panels or converted into roads and it is going to drastically change the habitat out there.

KISSACK: To find out just what is out there Solargen's investors have spent over seven million dollars to gather information for a required Environmental Impact Report. More than twenty biologists have spent much of the past year searching out every fox den on the project site, canvassing creek beds and geo-tagging lizard scat.

KORPOS: Does anyone have an anemometer to measure the wind?

KISSACK: Today, in high winds, wildlife biologist Michelle Korpos leads her team through a barbed wire fence and onto an adjacent parcel called "mitigation land" – about eleven thousand acres that Solargen would set aside for wildlife to offset the impact of the project.

KORPOS: Presumably the species can disperse from the site because the mitigation lands are contiguous to the site. And the larger mammals like the kit fox and badger, they can make their way over the hills into little Panoche valley which offers greater biodiversity and topography.

KISSACK: These biologists are taking a multispecies conservation approach – which could speed up the permitting process. The San Joaquin kit fox, for example, thrives in grazing areas and if it can do well in the mitigation lands, it's assumed so can other grassland species. But not everyone agrees. In fact, local environmentalists are concerned that the surveys are being rushed to meet the deadline to qualify for federal tax credits. Chicken farmer Kim Williams says she is all for solar — just not big arrays.

WILLIAMS: You could do smaller solar fields around cities as well as utilizing all rooftops and shade and parking areas and bus stops.

KISSACK: Energy analysts say California can't meet its clean power goals without big solar farms and that line of thinking has some surprising supporters.

BOYLE: There are a few of us who have been working very closely with the generators and increasingly with the state and federal regulators trying to find a pathway through these conflicts.

KISSACK: Barbara Boyle oversees clean energy solutions for the Sierra Club. She thinks the :us vs. them" approach that has helped win a lot of environmental debates, in the past, needs to change when it comes to siting clean energy projects.

BOYLE: We also need to get out there and identify where are the good places for solar and wind to go so they know when they invest hundreds of millions of dollars in their proposals they are going to a place that has a high probability of getting permitted.

KISSACK: In the Panoche Valley Charlie McCullough steps out of his modest home and looks over the hills behind him. He and his brother are among the ranching families that have agreed to sell land to Solargen, in his case, for several million dollars.

MCCOLLOUGH: Everybody in the valley is mad at us for bringing the solar in. I'm going to hate to see a bunch of panels out there, too but I know that we have to have solar. If you can't have it here, you can't have it anywhere.

KISSACK: The San Benito County Board of supervisors is expected to vote on the project before the end of the year. To see a map of solar intensity throughout the U.S, go to KQED.org/33×20. I'm Andrea Kissack, KQED Public Radio.

Where did California go wrong? And as other states try to learn from its lessons, does the Golden State have any hope of reaching its next ambitious target – 33 percent renewable by 2020? Follow KQED’s environmental and science initiatives, QUEST and Climate Watch as we explore the obstacles to achieving California’s ambitious renewable energy goals. Over the next several months we will explore some of the challenges including: finding a home for big solar and wind farms, energy storage, California’s complex permitting process and where to build new transmission lines.

Can California get one-third of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020? Stay tuned to our series 33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown.

We’re launching the series this week with a story from Lauren Sommer about how we got here and how far we have to go. But what are your questions about renewable energy? What would you like us to cover in the months ahead? Leave us a comment and let us know!

37.733106 -121.652541

LAUREN SOMMER: Thousands of wind turbines dot the rolling hills here at the Altamont Pass, just outside of Livermore. Thirty years ago, this was one of the places where California's renewable energy legacy began, when Larry Barr arrived with the first wind turbine, built in his neighbor's garage.

LARRY BARR: Back then, they were small enough that we had specially built trailer that we towed behind a van. You could load and entire wind turbine on it. And so we drove from Pennsylvania to California with this thing.

SOMMER: Altamont became one of the first large-scale wind farms in the country, but at the time, it wasn't exactly a mainstream idea.

BARR: You'd meet somebody and they'd ask you what you do for a living and you'd say, well I run a wind plant. What? And you'd explain the whole thing to them and they'd just "really?" you know. Today, everyone knows exactly what you're talking about.

SOMMER: That's because renewable energy has taken center stage in the state, especially for one particular elected official.

GOVERNOR ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: When I took office the law, of course, required our utilities to deliver 20 percent of this renewable energy by the year 2017. And I said we can do better than that.

SOMMER: Three years ago, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger shortened the timeline –committing utilities to get 20 percent of their electricity from renewables such as solar, geothermal, and wind, by the end of this year. It's an ambitious goal and now the question is: will we make it?

JULIE FITCH: Uhh, probably not.

SOMMER: Julie Fitch is the Energy Division Director for the California Public Utilities Commission, the agency overseeing the renewable goal.

FITCH: We'll get really close. We're projecting that by the end of this year, 2010, we'll be at about 18.5% and by 2011 that we'll be fully there.

SOMMER: Thanks to a three-year grace period, utilities won't be penalized for being a year or two late. But it does put them behind. That's because last fall, the governor set an even more aggressive goal— 33% renewable by 2020. According to Fitch's agency, given our growing need for energy, it will require an unprecedented effort— at least a doubling of transmission lines and a doubling of renewable energy.

TOM BOTTORFF: I think a lot of people have doubts about whether or not the utilities can do it. I'm in the camp that believes that it's feasible and doable and we're working very hard to make sure that happens.

SOMMER: Tom Bottorff is a Senior Vice President at PG&E, one of the utilities responsible for getting all that renewable power on the grid. He says the company has signed more than 100 contracts with solar, wind and geothermal developers.

BOTTORFF: But we're concerned whether all those projects that we've contracted with will actually come online. It's been a tough economy.

SOMMER: In most cases, it's up to developers to find the financing to build solar and wind farms, which has been hard to come by since the economic downturn. They've had some help recently from the federal stimulus funding.

BOTTORFF: That's been critical and we're very thankful that those opportunities are available.

SOMMER: Bottorff says the other challenge is California's complex permitting process. Since many solar and wind projects cover hundreds of acres in environmentally sensitive areas, developers must navigate local, state and federal agencies for permission to build, which can be a tricky process.

MICHAEL PICKER: I would probably describe it as painful, torturous and highly complicated.

SOMMER: Michael Picker is the Governor's Senior Advisor for Renewable Energy Facilities.

PICKER: The reality is that each one of the projects that we permit this year will immediately become the largest in the world. People are having to learn how to actually manage these projects through the pipeline.

SOMMER: Picker says the Governor's office is committed to speeding up the drawn-out permitting process, which will help put the 33% goal in reach. But even with the Governor's help, a number of major obstacles remain, like where to build new transmission lines and concerns about the impact of solar or wind farms on wildlife.

PETER MILLER: What we're trying to do is extremely ambitious in California.

SOMMER: Peter Miller is a Senior Scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group in San Francisco. He says California's renewable standards aren't just about energy. For one, they're key to reaching the state's landmark global warming goal to cut greenhouse gases emissions a quarter by 2020. Their significance also goes beyond state borders.

MILLER: California has always been a leader on energy and environmental efforts and this, the RPS program, is no exception.

SOMMER: Over thirty states have renewable energy goals, though California's is one of the most aggressive. That means many states are watching how California's does— both its progress and its missteps.

For QUEST, I'm Lauren Sommer, KQED Radio News.

The Rice Solar Energy Project will produce enough electricity to meet the demand of 60,000 households—about 150 megawatts—beginning in 2013. Click here for a full-size version of the diagram. Courtesy of SolarReserve.

In a world energy landscape dominated by coal, gas, oil, and nuclear, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar don’t stand a chance if we can’t find a way to store energy when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. In my last blog entry, I wrote about storing electric energy in a battery made of paper and nanotech ink (see The Paper Battery Chase). But it isn’t necessary to store electric energy. We can create hydrogen, using electricity generated from photovoltaic panels, and then use the hydrogen to fuel a fuel cell, which recreates the electricity. The Leaf Community in Italy is experimenting with this process. And energy changes forms in other ways. We can store heat from the sun and use it to create electricity in the dark. As in any energy storage and conversion process, if we can do it without losing too much energy in the process, we can add another tool to our renewable energy toolbox.

I add a little salt to the water when cooking spaghetti—it raises the boiling point so that you can cook the pasta more quickly, although I’m not sure it makes a big difference. Mostly I add salt to make the spaghetti taste better. The properties of a liquid salt—a mixture of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate—are a little different. This liquid salt will store heat up to a temperature of 1,000⁰F, which is much higher than the boiling point of water, 212⁰F at sea level. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company, (PG&E) has contracted with SolarReserve LLC to store energy using liquid salt. The Rice Solar Energy Project will produce enough electricity to meet the demand of 60,000 households—about 150 megawatts—beginning in 2013.

The Rice Project uses a large circular field of mirrors to reflect light onto a central tower. Liquid salt is circulated through the tower and, once heated, it is stored in an insulated tank. When the sun goes down the liquid salt will still be able to heat water well past the boiling point to create steam, which can be fed into a conventional steam turbine to produce—Walla—electricity. The liquid salt, now cooled, is stored in another tank and is ready to begin the process all over again.

Take that coal, gas, oil, and nuclear!

37.7749295 -122.4194155