The 2020GreenEnergy Plan

The California Energy Agencies’ (CEA’s) Role

 The California Energy Agencies (CEA)   will plan, guide, and support the growth of CEInet into the robust 21st-century Energy Grid that California needs for sustainable prosperity.  CEA will do for CEInet what NASA does for America's Space Program.

CEA, as part of its expanded role, will have strong oversight to avoid bureaucratic bloat and to keep it lean and mean.

In building CEInet, CEA will begin with California's existing power grid.  One by one, new components consisting of

  • Certified CleanCleanEnergy Sources, mostly solar panel and wind turbine installations,
  • transmission links, and
  • energy storage units

CEInet components of all types can be built and owned by individuals and businesses, and by just about any other kind of entity that can own property.  The vast majority of these will be solar installations, most of which will comply with CEA CleanGreen Energy Certification requirements .

For example,

  • a homeowner with solar panels on the roof,
  • a group of homeowners or businesses who form a co-op or consortium to own and operate a large wind turbine located away from their property,
  • a traditional electric utility like Southen California Edison (SCE), Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), or San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E),
  • a city which partners with a private company to set up a manufacturing operation for solar panels, and
  • the State of California.

will each own a piece of CEInet.

Redundancy of CEInet components will be encouraged.  For example, a company operating a transmission link between two points in California could get competition from other companies with transmission links between the same two points.  If genuine competition fails to occur, then full regulation will be automatically triggered!

CEA will insure that competition is fair between owners of competing CEInet components.  For example, operating at a loss to steal market share from competitors would be strictly forbidden.

CEA can also initiate the construction of needed CEInet components.  When CEA determines that a component is needed, it can:

  • issue a call for others to build the component,
  • form a partnership with another entity to build the component, or as a last resort,
  • build the component itself.

Public-Private partnerships will be CEA’s dominant method of getting new CEInet components built.  Private entities will provide the funding and do the construction.  In most cases, they will also operate and maintain the completed components, usually, but not always, for a profit. 

CEA will provide guidance during design and construction, so that completed components can be seamlessly integrated into CEInet.

CEA will arrange for manufacturing and fabrication, to be done in California when practical, of all parts which go into CEInet components.  The most important example of this would be solar panels, which would be manufactured locally in plants around the state.  This would assure an available supply of affordable solar panels and at the same time, create a lot of very good new jobs for Californians.

CEA will maintain an aggressive Technology Program to obtain the best possible technology for CEInet for the generation, distribution, and extended large-scale storage of renewable energy. 

Currently, the most pressing need is for practical, modular, affordable energy storage units which can be trucked to a site and stacked to proovide the needed capacity.

Among the more promising energy storage technologies are:

  • hydrogen,
  • magneticially suspended flywheels,
  • super capacitors,and
  • advanced battery technologies.

CEA will work to bring technologies to maturity,in the form of affordable, modular storage units as mentioned above.  The necessary research and development may be conducted in-house in some cases, but more often by arrangements with other entities such as California’s world-class universities.

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