California’s Electrified Future Requires More Transmission Lines Which Take Years to Build

California’s energy future is going to require electricity – a lot more of it. With the push to electrify transportation like cars and trucks and a climate characterized by hotter summers and colder winters, experts say California needs to triple the capacity of the grid by 2050. For the next 10 years alone, California will require 40 billion watts of energy, and to power this new future, the state needs to upgrade old transmission lines and construct new ones. But this is no easy task: Building new lines can take years, even decades – time that the state does not have if it wants to meet its clean energy goals. We’ll talk about what California is doing to build out the infrastructure to keep the lights on and get more electric cars on the road.

Guests:

Michael Wara, policy director for the Sustainability Accelerator at the Doerr School of Sustainability, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program and senior research scholar at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University

Nadia Lopez, environmental reporter, Cal Matters

Neil Millar, vice president of Infrastructure and Operations Planning, Cal ISO

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