For Clients & Friends of The Gualco Group, Inc.
IN THIS ISSUE – “A ‘final’ (State) budget will not be final…given the vast uncertainty over revenues…revisions could continue for months.”
Dan Walters, California’s senior political commentator
- Legislature Passes Placeholder State Budget; Leaders & Governor “Very Close”
- “Final” State Budget Won’t Be Final for Months
- Incoming Assembly Speaker Must Contend With Lingering Rivalry, Other Issues
- Republicans & Moderate Dems Deploy Fentanyl Measure as a Message
- Power Grid is Gridlocked; May Delay Renewables for Decades
- California Pioneering Predictive Analytics to Fight Wildfires
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique client service.
FOR THE WEEK ENDING JUNE 16, 2023
Legislature Passes Placeholder State Budget; Leaders & Governor “Very Close”
Sacramento Bee
California lawmakers have passed a spending plan for the upcoming year — but Gov. Gavin Newsom isn’t fully on board just yet. The Legislature on Thursday approved a $311.7 billion budget that will act as a placeholder while Newsom and legislators remain locked in negotiations over how to close the state’s estimated $31.5 billion budget gap. The legislative accord represents a deal between the Democratic caucuses of the state Senate and Assembly that was reached after 120 public hearings that spanned six months. California’s constitution requires lawmakers to approve a balanced budget by June 15 in order to get paid.
It’s become common practice during Newsom’s tenure to continue negotiations after the legislative budget agreement is passed and amend the bill prior to the start of the new fiscal year on July 1, when Newsom must sign off on the final budget.
Assembly Budget Chair Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, on Thursday said lawmakers and the administration are “very close” to an agreement, which he expects will come together in the matter of days.
During floor discussions, Republicans raised concerns about $42 billion in anticipated tax receipts that have been delayed until October. California residents in areas affected by severe winter storms received a tax-filing extension, which means leaders are not certain exactly how much revenue they will get this fall.
“We have a framework based off of risky revenue estimates,” said Assembly Budget Vice Chair Vince Fong, R-Kern County. “According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, it is more than likely revenues will come in below the governor’s estimates. And should revenues come in lower than estimated, we have a major budget problem.”
Here are the major differences between the legislative deal and the revised budget Newsom unveiled in May.
Newsom in May announced a new plan — made up of 10 budget trailer bills and an executive order — to expedite transportation, water, clean energy and other major infrastructure projects across California. Since then, it has become the most contentious issue of the budget.
Trailer bills are used to flesh out specific programs and policies in the main budget. But unlike the main budget, the deadline to pass trailer bills is the end of the session on Sept. 14. The legislature’s budget deal does not include trailer bills, including the ones pertaining to the governor’s infrastructure plan.
During committee meetings in recent weeks, lawmakers rejected Newsom’s package, saying they weren’t given adequate time to consider the complex proposals. The governor tried to squeeze the bills in just weeks before lawmakers were required to pass their budget plan.
Senate Budget Chair Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, said Thursday that discussions were ongoing and it was unclear whether an agreement would be reached prior to the budget vote later this month.
Unlike the budget, trailer bills do not need to be passed until the end of the session in the fall. “If the past is any kind of indicator, there will be some revisions,” Skinner said. Lawmakers are concerned the bills could be used to push through certain controversial projects like the plan to build a tunnel to transport water beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
Newsom’s budget plan would pare back $2 billion for transit capital projects in order to help fill the financial hole. But at a time when the state’s major public transit agencies face slumping ridership and a looming “fiscal cliff,” Democrats in the legislature are staunchly opposed to the governor’s proposal.
They, along with transit advocates, say the cuts would jeopardize the future of public transit across California and hinder the state’s emission reduction goals. The legislature’s agreement not only reverses Newsom’s proposed $2 billion cut to transit capital funds, but it also allocates $1.1 billion in largely cap-and-trade funds to public transportation operations.
California transit systems received an unprecedented flow of federal relief to maintain operations throughout the pandemic. But that funding is running out and systems that rely heavily on fare box revenue — those in the Bay Area and Southern California — said they would need to run trains less frequently and reduce hours of operation if they didn’t get operational funds to balance their budgets.
Senator Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said the legislative deal was a “meaningful and positive step towards solving the transit operation fiscal cliff so that our constituents can continue to get to work, to the doctor, or to the supermarket.”
California lawmakers and Newsom agree they want to continue moving away from mass incarceration by closing prisons and increasing programming at remaining facilities. They are not on the same page about how to make that happen.
Newsom, during his spring State of the State tour, announced plans to reform San Quentin State Prison and turn it into a rehabilitation center.
However, the Legislature rejected the governor’s request for $360 million in revenue bond authority to construct a new educational and vocational center and approved just $20 million for preliminary project planning costs.
As California’s incarcerated population continues to decline, more prison closures are likely on the horizon. But it’s unclear exactly how many facilities leaders will shutter and when the closures will occur. Assembly Democrats’ budget proposal suggested closing five more prisons by 2027. The governor’s May budget revision said his administration is “committed to meeting the needs of staff and the incarcerated populations while right-sizing California’s prison system.”
Continuing of providing California cities and counties with money to curb homelessness, Newsom’s plan would allocate $1 billion in one-time funding for a fifth round of grants through the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program, also known as HHAP.
The legislative deal goes further than the governor’s plan to guarantee an additional $1 billion for a sixth round of HHAP funding. Local leaders have long advocated for ongoing support, saying that one-time allotments make it difficult to plan for the future. Lawmakers say the additional round of funding would help local officials make longer-term investments to get more people off the streets and into permanent housing. The legislative deal also would fast-track the deployment of $360 million in HHAP funding that is currently set aside only to be used for local jurisdictions that achieve their goals around reducing street homelessness.
Lawmakers and the governor are also at odds over pay for child care providers. The state’s contract with a major industry union expires at the end of the month. Newsom signed a 2019 bill that allows providers who care for low-income children to collectively bargain with the state.
Child Care Providers United members signed their first contract with the state in 2021. Now, the union is back at the negotiating table, and their existing agreement comes to an end on June 30.
The Legislature’s budget would increase reimbursement rates and would restore 20,000 subsidized child care slots set to be released on July 1, 2024. Newsom’s spending plan proposed delaying funding for the slots to save money. In the meantime, the state will continue bargaining with the union.
Skinner wouldn’t provide details about negotiations between lawmakers and the governor over funding for providers. But she said Newsom’s administration is “also committed to child care.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article276197646.html#storylink=cpy
“Final” State Budget Won’t Be Final for Months
CalMatters commentary from Dan Walters
Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders are flying blind as they attempt to fashion a new state budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.
They know the state faces a multi-billion-dollar deficit that the budget will attempt to close – at least on paper – but they really don’t know how big it could be because they don’t really know how much revenue the state’s tax system will generate.
Not only have revenues stagnated over the last year, thanks to gyrations in the stock market and the larger economy, but the unprecedented six-month delay in the deadline for filing federal and state income tax returns creates even more uncertainty about how much money politicians have to spend.
Newsom picked a number – a guess, really – and declared in May that the state has a $31.5 billion deficit to close. The Legislature’s budget analyst, Gabe Petek, then declared that revenues would fall short of Newsom’s assumption and raised the projected deficit by several billion dollars.
This week, Legislators approved their joint version of the budget. It uses Newsom’s more optimistic revenue projection, rather than Petek’s, and would boost spending from $306.5 billion in Newsom’s budget to $311.7 billion.
After this week’s pro forma budget action – essentially a drill to protect legislators’ pay from being docked if the June 15 deadline was ignored – Newsom and legislative leaders will finalize a revised version.
However, whatever they adopt as a “final” budget will not be truly final, given the vast uncertainty over revenues, and additional revisions could continue for months.
There are some genuine differences to be resolved, along with the macro issue of potentially chronic deficits in the remainder of Newsom’s second and last term as governor.
One of the highest profile conflicts is whether the state will give local transit systems the billions of dollars they say they need to avoid a “fiscal cliff” that would compel cutbacks in service or fare increases. Newsom’s budget provides virtually nothing new for transit systems, while the legislative budget would give them $5.1 billion over the next few years – a major factor in the Legislature’s markedly higher overall spending.
Another biggie is the demand of local governments for billions of dollars in ongoing aid to support homelessness programs – something that neither Newsom nor the Legislature is willing, so far, to provide. Newsom has been critical of what he calls lackluster efforts by local officials while they say they need dependable streams of revenue to be more effective.
Underscoring this year’s wrangling over budget details is the prospect of chronic fiscal problems in future years.
In a recent report on the state’s fiscal issues, Petek projected that continuing the spending in Newsom’s 2023-24 budget to the following year would cost $30 billion more for the two-year period. Moreover, Petek projected annual deficits averaging $18 billion over the next three years.
“This means that, if the Legislature adopts the governor’s May revision proposals, the state very likely will face more budget problems over the next few years,” Petek warned.
Since the Legislature want to spend billions more than Newsom seeks, its version would increase projected shortfalls even more.
Finally, all of the deficit-ridden budget scenarios floating around the Capitol assume that the state does not experience a recession, which some economists believe is still possible as the Federal Reserve System raises interest rates to battle inflation.
Even a moderate recession would decrease revenues by tens of billions of dollars and quickly exhaust the state’s “rainy day” reserves.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/06/california-politicians-blind-state-budget/
Incoming Assembly Speaker Must Contend With Lingering Rivalry, Other Issues
Politico
Robert Rivas set out last year to become one of California’s most powerful Democrats. But the fast-rising, second-term state assemblymember from the Central Valley had a problem: The man who was in the post wasn’t ready to step aside.
The caustic power struggle that ensued between the two former allies, much of which played out behind the scenes and involved mudslinging by proxies, was the most bitter leadership fight in recent memory. Even now, as Rivas prepares to take over as Assembly speaker in the coming weeks from Speaker Anthony Rendon, the intraparty standoff is poisoning the atmosphere in Sacramento.
“The caucus needs the temperature brought down so they can focus on their work,” said former Assemblymember Autumn Burke, a Los Angeles County Democrat who left office last year and became a political consultant.
Rivas, who grew up in farmworker housing, a world away from California’s wealthy tech and entertainment hubs, overcame formidable obstacles to get here. Now he faces another one: holding a huge and fractious Democratic caucus together after a fight that may have undermined his influence and ability to get things done.
He and Rendon hold similar political views and were on good terms before Rivas — working to get ahead of a rumored run by another assemblymember — launched his bid. Rendon even once speculated to members that the up-and-coming Democrat could be the next leader.
But Rendon, who has served as speaker since 2016 and doesn’t leave office until after next year, took the move by Rivas personally, resisting the transition and ultimately delaying the vote.
A succession deal reached in November did not end the acrimony.
In an interview this month, Rendon said that what happened, which he saw as a hostile takeover, still “doesn’t sit well with me.”
“I think it certainly makes it impossible to leave here with a kumbaya, like a collective hug with 80 people on the floor,” he said.
Democrats have never been more powerful in California, holding three-quarters of the seats in both houses. But to remain in power, Rivas will need a majority of Assembly Democrats in his corner at any given moment, said former Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez.
“The math works the same — every day when you’re speaker, you have to have 41 votes to support your speakership,” Nuñez said, “no matter whether you have 70 Democrats or 40 Democrats.”
The speaker-in-waiting, who assumes the new role June 30, insists the power struggle is in the past. Some of the lawmakers he must soon lead see things differently. They fear animosity will continue to plague the caucus. They note a quick-fizzling speakership bid that followed the succession deal, seeding yet more uncertainty. They wonder whether Rivas’s brother, who has guided Rivas’ campaigns and worked for influential Sacramento interest groups, will wield outsize influence in the chamber.
Rivas and his allies are eager to put the leadership struggle behind them and project unity. They note there’s little appetite for protracted conflict in a large class of first-year members who are still getting acclimated to Sacramento.
“I think we are ready to move on,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), another Rivas ally. Rivas dismissed suggestions that “our caucus isn’t unified,” calling them “inaccurate.”
But doubts persist. Many members heard a thinly veiled jab in Rendon’s session-opening speech in December, when he cautioned that “if you’re trying to become a leader to get power, you should not be a leader.”
Rivas also has been forced to answer uncomfortable questions from fellow lawmakers and others about the influence his brother, who advised him during the speakership battle, will wield behind the scenes, and the overlap between their work.
Rick has worked for an array of powerful interest groups and is now employed by the American Beverage Association. He regularly mingles with Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento, and concerns about his sway over elected officials became a sticking point during the closed-door caucus that led to a handoff agreement.
Robert reiterated in an interview that he has always drawn a line between his work and Rick’s.
One of the more striking aspects of Rivas’ rise in the statehouse is the district he represents. California’s rural areas tend to be overshadowed by the urban centers around Los Angeles and San Francisco that send the most members to Sacramento. In the leadup to his bid to succeed Rendon, Rivas stitched together a bloc that encompassed those areas and spanned the ideological spectrum from progressives to business-friendly Democrats.
“I think part of why he was able to ascend to the speakership is he could get people from different parts of the state and wings of the caucus,” said Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, a close ally.
“Just becoming speaker and assuming that responsibility and that role is kind of a job unto itself,” said Jim DeBoo, who worked for multiple speakers and as Newsom’s chief of staff, “and he’s coming in possibly having to deal with the back end of the budget, dealing with a year when there’s going to be significant financial constraints, and then pivoting to a campaign cycle.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom sucks up a lot of the oxygen in Sacramento, and he’s far and away the most recognizable political figure in California to the national audience he often courts. But the Assembly speaker is one of the most influential politicians in the state — a role once filled by towering figures like Willie Brown, “the ayatollah of the Assembly,” and Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh.
Speakers can elevate colleagues to influential committees, sideline others, and play an outsize role in which bills make it to the governor’s desk. They also command a multimillion-dollar campaign operation.
Now, with Newsom claiming a national Democratic leadership mantle, 43-year-old Rivas will shape the progressive agenda in one of America’s most influential blue states — if he can unify his party.
MORE:
Republicans & Moderate Dems Deploy Fentanyl Measure as a Message
Sacramento Bee
A group of Republicans and a handful of Democrats are turning a failed fentanyl bill into a constitutional amendment they want to put to voters. It would require judges to warn drug dealers they could face homicide charges if they sell counterfeit drugs that kill people.
The GOP will likely never get exactly what it wants to address the state’s fentanyl crisis.
But what it does have is a new vehicle for conveying a traditional Republican message to moderate and independent suburban voters — that Democrats are soft on crime. “Republicans aren’t going to win right now on issues like abortion or guns, generally, in these suburban districts,” said Matt Rexroad, a Republican political consultant. “So here’s an issue that works for them very well. They’re very clear on it, and it’s not going to go away. It’s on people’s minds.”
When the Legislature welcomed the expelled-then-reinstated Democratic Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones in May, Assembly Republican James Gallagher of Yuba City invoked fentanyl to rail against one-party rule.
During a recent debate over concealed carry permitting, Sen. Janet Nguyen, R-Huntington Beach, raised Democrats’ alleged failures on fentanyl. Republicans even dragged fentanyl into a discussion about Skittles. A bill from Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, D-Woodland Hills, would ban chemicals used in food products, including the chewy, fruit-flavored candy.
California Republicans have found an issue to use as their cudgel against the Democratic majority. For the past month, they have wielded it in nearly every policy debate in the Capitol.
“It’s pretty tough to claim you’re protecting our children by taking away their candy yet not doing everything in your power to help get lethal fentanyl pills off the street that are poisoning children and destroying families,” the state GOP wrote in a May email newsletter.
Andrew Acosta, a Democratic political consultant, said the issue is one that divides Democrats based on how blue their districts are. “There’s clearly folks in very safe, uber-progressive areas who will never touch this with a 10-foot pole,” Acosta said. “But there’s other folks, maybe folks in the Valley and in the Inland Empire, who would say, ‘Yeah, this is something I’m going to be supportive of.’”
Suburban voters view the problem with increasing urgency, which makes it possible for Republicans to win over lawmakers who represent purple districts. However, the GOP still has limited power, and progressive Democrats insist the party is making more noise than actual headway.
Fentanyl is a cheap, powerful synthetic opioid that dealers cut into other drugs to increase their potency while reducing their own costs. Customers who might think they are buying a different substance end up ingesting a fatal dose of fentanyl that has been disguised and marketed as another drug.
More than 7,100 people died of opioid overdoses in 2021, and 83% of those fatalities were related to fentanyl, according to the California Department of Public Health. Accidental fentanyl overdoses affect habitual drug users, as well as young people having initial experiences with opioids.
Republicans and some moderate Democrats want to see the state crack down on fentanyl dealers, which is at odds with California’s push to alleviate prison overcrowding and reduce penalties for drug crimes.
For the past 15 years, the state has been under a federal court order to cut its prison population. Lawmakers and voters have curbed sentencing for lower level drug offenses and moved some inmates from state prisons to county jails. It means Democratic leaders — and lawmakers in safely blue districts — have consistently pushed back against stronger criminal penalties for fentanyl dealers.
Instead, they promote community-based programs and recall the failed war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s, which resulted in the mass incarceration of Black and brown people, even as overdoses continued.
As prisons have become less overcrowded, Republicans have begun to challenge policies that reduce sentencing for drug offenses, saying they have caused crime to increase.
Although violent and property crimes rates were up in 2021, both have stayed “relatively low” since hitting peaks in the 1990s, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Republicans have reserved special ire for Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, D-Los Angeles, who chairs the Assembly Public Safety Committee. This spring, they claimed he was refusing to hear a handful of fentanyl-related bills, some of which came from Democratic lawmakers.
He eventually held a special meeting in April to consider the bills, although almost none of the criminal penalty-related measures advanced.
On the moderate side, Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Irvine, and Assemblyman Brian Maienschein, D-San Diego, both presented bills at the April Public Safety Committee hearing that would have created crimes or increased penalties related to fentanyl-dealing. About 40% of voters in Petrie-Norris’s District 73 are registered Democrats, while nearly 27% are Republicans. In 2022, Maienschein narrowly won re-election in his District 76, where nearly 38% of voters are Democrats and about 31% are Republicans.
As the legislative session reaches crunch time, Republicans are considering new ways to pursue their fentanyl proposals. Their latest play is a constitutional amendment that would send a measure called Alexandra’s Law to voters. The bill is named after Alexandra Capelouto, a 20-year-old woman from Temecula who died of an accidental overdose after unknowingly ingesting fentanyl.
Sen. Tom Umberg, D-Santa Ana, authored the bill, which requires judges to warn dealers about potential homicide charges that could result from knowingly selling fentanyl that kills people.
The measure failed to advance from the Senate Public Safety Committee in April. As a result, Assemblywoman Diane Dixon, R-Newport Beach, authored Assembly Constitutional Amendment 12, which would require a similar warning. Republican leaders are confident the public is on their side when it comes to policies like ACA 12.
“You can’t have an ordered, safe society if you don’t have rules,” Gallagher said. “And I think a lot of people are seeing that now. Are they becoming Republicans? I don’t know if they’re becoming Republicans, but I think they’re agreeing with us on issues, or they’re agreeing with us on policy. And I think that is resonating with independents and moderate Democrats.”
Assemblyman Matt Haney, D-San Francisco, chairs a Select Committee on Fentanyl, Opioid Addiction, and Overdose Prevention. He called Republicans’ vocal stances on fentanyl “background noise,” because they “don’t have the power to stop bills or pass bills.”
Acosta, the Democratic consultant, said Republicans’ focus on fentanyl is the party “playing ball with the small tools they have available.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article276242006.html#storylink=cpy
Power Grid is Gridlocked; May Delay Renewables for Decades
NY Times
America’s fragmented electric grid, which was largely built to accommodate coal and gas plants, is becoming a major obstacle to efforts to fight climate change.
Tapping into the nation’s vast supplies of wind and solar energy would be one of the cheapest ways to cut the emissions that are dangerously heating the planet, studies have found. That would mean building thousands of wind turbines across the gusty Great Plains and acres of solar arrays across the South, creating clean, low-cost electricity to power homes, vehicles and factories.
But many spots with the best sun and wind are far from cities and the existing grid. To make the plan work, the nation would need thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines — large power lines that would span multiple grid regions.
To understand the scale of what’s needed, compare today’s renewable energy and transmission system to one estimate of what it would take to reach the Biden administration’s goal of 100 percent clean electricity generation by 2035. Transmission capacity would need to more than double in just over a decade:
There are enormous challenges to building that much transmission, including convoluted permitting processes and potential opposition from local communities. But the problems start with planning — or rather, a lack of planning.
There is no single entity in charge of organizing the grid, the way the federal government oversaw the development of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and ‘60s. The electric system was cobbled together over a century by thousands of independent utilities building smaller-scale grids to carry power from large coal, nuclear or gas plants to nearby customers.
By contrast, the kinds of longer-distance transmission lines that would transport wind and solar from remote rural areas often require the approval of multiple regional authorities, who often disagree over whether the lines are needed or who should pay for them.
“It’s very different from how we do other types of national infrastructure,” said Michael Goggin, vice president at Grid Strategies, a consulting group. “Highways, gas, pipelines — all that is paid for and permitted at the federal level primarily.”
In recent decades, the country has hardly built any major high-voltage power lines that connect different grid regions. While utilities and grid operators now spend roughly $25 billion per year on transmission, much of that consists of local upgrades instead of long-distance lines that could import cheaper, cleaner power from farther away.
“Utilities plan for local needs and build lines without thinking of the bigger picture,” said Christy Walsh, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Study after study has found that broader grid upgrades would be hugely beneficial. A recent draft analysis by the Department of Energy found “a pressing need for additional electric transmission” — especially between different regions.
The climate stakes are high. Last year, Congress approved hundreds of billions of dollars for solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and other technologies to tackle global warming. But if the United States can’t build new transmission at a faster pace, roughly 80 percent of the emissions reductions expected from that bill might not happen, researchers at the Princeton-led REPEAT Project found.
Already, a lack of transmission capacity means that thousands of proposed wind and solar projects are facing multiyear delays and rising costs to connect to the grid. In many parts of the country, existing power lines are often so clogged that they can’t deliver electricity from wind and solar projects to where it is needed most and demand is often met by more expensive fossil fuel plants closer to homes and businesses. This problem, known as congestion, costs the country billions of dollars per year and has been getting worse.
The dearth of long-distance transmission isn’t just a climate problem, said Mathias Einberger, a manager for RMI’s Carbon-Free Electricity Program. It spells trouble for reliability, too.
Many power operators are increasingly struggling to keep the lights on as demand rises and extreme weather events become more frequent and severe. More capacity to transfer power between regions could help, so that if a storm knocked out power plants in one area, its neighbors could send electricity. Texas, for example, could have suffered fewer blackouts during a deadly winter storm in 2021 if its isolated grid had more connections with the Southeast, one analysis found.
There are a few efforts underway to ease the bottlenecks. The Biden administration has billions of dollars to help fund transmission projects, and Congress has given the federal government new authority to override objections from state regulators for certain power lines deemed to be in the national interest.
“There’s no silver bullet,” said Maria Robinson, the director of the Department of Energy’s newly created Grid Deployment Office. “Every transmission project is unique like a fingerprint, facing its own challenges, so we need a large arsenal of tools to try to move things along.”
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an independent agency that regulates interstate transmission of electricity, gas and oil, is exploring ways to encourage grid operators to do more long-term planning and to strengthen ties between regions. Some lawmakers have proposed bills that would give the commission more power to approve the routes of major new lines that pass through multiple states, the way it does with gas pipelines.
But these efforts still face plenty of resistance. Utilities are sometimes wary of long-distance transmission lines that might undercut their local monopolies. Some Republicans in Congress say giving the federal government more authority over transmission would trample on states’ rights. During the debt ceiling debate, Democrats floated a proposal to mandate more connectivity between different grid regions, a provision that was opposed by some utilities and Republicans, and was eventually dropped.
If the country continues to struggle to build long-distance transmission, it might need to opt for more expensive measures to fight climate change instead, a recent study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found. That could mean building more advanced nuclear plants or gas plants that capture their emissions, which could in theory be built closer to population centers.
Getting better at managing how and when we use electricity could also relieve some of the pressure on the grid. For example, utilities could provide incentives for people to charge their electric cars and other devices when demand is low or ask them to turn off unnecessary appliances during extreme weather events.
But even that wouldn’t entirely cancel out the need for a lot more transmission.
“The grid is already a critical element of our energy system,” said Matteo Muratori, an analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “But it’s going to become the central piece of the future energy system.”
California Pioneering Predictive Analytics to Fight Wildfires
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review
At the height of California’s worst wildfire season on record, Geoff Marshall looked down at his computer and realized that an enormous blaze was about to take firefighters by surprise.
Marshall runs the fire prediction team at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (known as Cal Fire), headquartered in Sacramento, which gives him an increasingly difficult job: anticipating the behavior of wildfires that become less predictable every year.
The problem was obvious from where Marshall sat: California’s forests were caught between a management regime devoted to growing thick stands of trees—and eradicating the low-intensity fire that had once cleared them—and a rapidly warming, increasingly unstable climate.
As a result, more and more fires were crossing a poorly understood threshold from typical wildfires—part of a normal burn cycle for a landscape like California’s—to monstrous, highly destructive blazes. Sometimes called “megafires” (a scientifically meaningless term that loosely refers to fires that burn more than 100,000 acres), these massive blazes are occurring more often around the world, blasting across huge swaths of California, Chile, Australia, the Amazon, and the Mediterranean region.
The Creek Fire was a case study in the challenge facing today’s fire analysts, who are trying to predict the movements of fires that are far more severe than those seen just a decade ago. Since we understand so little about how fire works, they’re using mathematical tools built on outdated assumptions, as well as technological platforms that fail to capture the uncertainty in their work. Programs like Wildfire Analyst, while useful, give an impression of precision and accuracy that can be misleading.
At that particular moment in California last September, several unprecedented fires were burning simultaneously. Together, they would double the record-setting acreage of the 2018 wildfire season in less than a month. But just as concerning to Marshall as their size was that the biggest fires often behaved in unexpected ways, making it harder to forecast their movements.
To face this new era, Marshall had a new tool at his disposal: Wildfire Analyst, a real-time fire prediction and modeling program that Cal Fire first licensed from a California-based firm called TechnoSylva in 2019.
The work of predicting how fires spread had long been a matter of hand-drawn ellipses and models so slow analysts set them before bed and hoped they were done in the morning. Wildfire Analyst, on the other hand, funnels data from dozens of distinct feeds: weather forecasts, satellite images, and measures of moisture in a given area. Then it projects all that on an elegant graphic overlay of fires burning across California.
Every night, while fire crews sleep, Wildfire Analyst seeds those digital forests with millions of test burns, pre-calculating their spread so that human analysts like Marshall can do simulations in a matter of seconds, creating “runs” they can port to Google Maps to show their superiors where the biggest risks are. But this particular risk, Marshall suddenly realized, had slipped past the program.
MORE (for the exciting ending!):