In a recent blog post, Clean Air Task Force’s Nelson Falkenburg and CSG’s Sam Uden explore one of the main drivers behind California’s decade-long lead times to transmission development, which is a key permitting application at the California Public Utilities Commission known as the Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity. Nelson and Sam compare these […]

One of the biggest challenges faced by California in decarbonizing its economy is the need to capture carbon dioxide and store it effectively and safely. While a variety of technologies may ultimately be available to capture and store carbon, the current main option is to store it deep underground. The 2022 Scoping Plan identified the […]

The pace of clean energy deployment in California is currently too slow to achieve the state’s ambitious climate targets. The Governor’s proposed Clean Energy Central Procurement mechanism in the 2023-24 energy trailer bill is a powerful policy concept that has the potential to correct this trajectory. In this blog post, we highlight how strategic public […]

Biomass management has been a neglected climate problem in California. That is, until recently – when the 2022 Scoping Plan identified both the significant scale of the biomass challenge and importance of mobilizing organic waste to provide clean fuels and carbon dioxide removal in a net-zero economy. In response, the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience […]

California’s 2022 Scoping Plan identified the unprecedented amount of new clean energy needed to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045, including developing a 20 GW offshore wind industry from scratch and more than tripling the state’s utility-scale solar capacity. How can the state deliver on these major ambitions?  In this blog post we highlight the essential […]

As the United States seeks to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonize will be aviation. Aviation makes up nearly 7% of the total U.S. transportation sector emissions (Figure 1). As planes are expected to remain reliant on liquid fuels for the foreseeable future, commercializing non-fossil, low-carbon […]

Yesterday, CSG’s Director of Climate and Energy Policy, Sam Uden, had an op-ed published in CalMatters that describes how a forest products strategy could help reduce megafires in California.  In partnership with Sierra Business Council, a lead organization that represents more than 3,000 businesses, local governments and NGOs in the Sierra Nevada, the op-ed is timed with key […]

Today, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) released its proposed 2022 Final Scoping Plan, providing a roadmap for how the state can achieve net-zero emissions by 2045. The Plan identifies a key role for technological carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Specifically, it identifies a need for 75 million tons of technological CDR delivered via a combination of […]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified that technologies that capture, transport and store carbon dioxide (CO2) are essential for achieving net-zero emissions targets. SB 905 (Caballero; Skinner) establishes a comprehensive framework to deploy carbon capture and storage in California. In this blog post, we review SB 905 and describe how capturing CO2 from industrial […]

To achieve net-zero emissions by 2045, the sheer volume of new clean energy projects that must be planned, permitted, built and commissioned in only 23 years is unprecedented. AB 205 – a 2022 budget trailer bill passed by the Legislature and signed by the Governor – establishes a number of landmark siting and permitting reforms […]