(Ken James / California Department of Water Resources)īut the greener power grid has come at a cost: Less reliability.ĭuring severe heat waves, millions of Californians turn on their air conditioners, spiking demand for electricity. A drone provides an aerial view of a cloud mist formed as water flows over the four energy dissipator blocks at the end of the Lake Oroville Main Spillway. Those laws are working - about 35% of the state’s electricity is from renewable sources now like solar and wind, and 59% if large hydropower and nuclear are included. Over the past 20 years, California has been steadily increasing the amount of solar and wind power it requires utilities to purchase to reduce smog and greenhouse gas emissions.
“It gives us more tools in the toolbox, more capacity to work with,” said Lindsay Buckley, a spokeswoman for the California Energy Commission, a state agency in Sacramento.
More hydropower means more clean electricity, less need to burn natural gas and other fossil fuels, less risk of blackouts during heat waves, and less smog and greenhouse gas emissions, experts say. This year, billions of gallons of water are once again spinning turbines in power plants at huge dams like Shasta, Oroville and Folsom, and will be all summer and into the fall as the snowpack melts. But by 2021, in the middle of California’s most recent drought, it provided just 7%. In 2017, a wet year similar to this one, hydropower made up 21% of all the electricity generated in California. With reservoirs full across the state, hydroelectricity generation from dams is expected to expand dramatically this summer, after three dry years when it was badly hobbled. It’s also changing how Californians keep the lights on. The huge snowpack that has blanketed the Sierra Nevada this winter has done more than end California’s drought and extend ski season.
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