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To be sure, since 2010 California’s job growth has outperformed the national average, propelled largely by the tech-driven Bay Area; its 14% employment expansion over the past six years is just a shade below Texas’. But dial back to 2001, and California’s job growth rate is 12%, less than half that of Texas’ 27%. With roughly 10 million fewer residents, Texas has created almost 2.8 million jobs since the turn of the millennium, compared to 2.0 million in California.

The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab has taken on the task of doing an annual evaluation the state of solar and wind power in the United States. With the data in hand from 2015, it recently completed a look at the trends in the two renewable power sources, both of which appear to be booming. Thanks to a restored tax break, wind installations have returned to levels last seen in 2012. But that’s tame compared to solar, where 2016 is on track to see more than double the previous record for utility-scale installations

Environmentalists, urban planners and economists are pushing cities such as New York and San Francisco to build more housing to help combat rapidly rising rents and home prices that are crowding out the middle class. But trying to build upward in order to keep cities accessible to average families may be a losing battle, according to findings to be released Wednesday by BuildZoom, a website for contractors. . . “What you’ll get there is an exacerbation of the problems we already have in expensive cities. The distinction between homeowners and renters will become less and less a stage of life and more and more if your parents can help you. That’s not a future that seems very welcoming to me,” Mr. Romem said.

Residential installations are expected to increase by 21 percent this year, but in 2017 the figure will inch upward by about 0.3 percent. The change comes as utilities push back against mandates to buy the electricity and shifting tax policies curb demand. Throw in sliding electricity rates and it’s clear the economic benefits of rooftop panels are no longer so obvious to consumers.

“(The housing crisis) is not just displacing tens of thousands of low-wage workers but also nonprofits who work with them,” O’Hara said.

By 2018, monthly bills for natural gas will be 11.6 percent higher than they were in January 2015, according to estimates provided during Thursday’s meeting of the state Public Utilities Commission.

California’s last nuclear power plant will be phased out by 2025, under a joint proposal announced Tuesday morning by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and labor and environmental groups.

One victim is Gov. Jerry Brown’s $3.1 billion plan to spend auction proceeds, now on indefinite hold. It not only affects a $500 million allocation for Brown’s bullet train project, but another $500 million for “low carbon transportation and fuels.”

A growing number of Bay Area residents — besieged by home prices, worsening traffic, high taxes and a generally more expensive cost of living — believe life would be better just about anywhere else but here.

When California’s “cap-and-trade” auction of carbon emission allowances imploded a month ago, it clobbered ambitious plans by Capitol politicians to spend many billions of dollars.

The consumer-price index, which measures what Americans pay for everything from car repairs to potatoes, increased a seasonally adjusted 0.2% in May from the prior month, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the third straight monthly rise in overall prices as the damping effects of low oil prices and a strong dollar faded.

Pork barrel politics is colliding head on with starry-eyed green policymaking in California, and the result isn’t pretty. The fact that this latest quarterly auction generated such dismal revenues is only the beginning of the state’s cap-and-trade problems.

The agreement includes a $10 per year increase in the vehicle registration fee that funds the Department of Motor Vehicles and California Highway Patrol. It’s effective April 1, 2017.

In California, there is so much solar energy that grid operators have to switch off solar farms. One solution of dealing with the additional power generated is to share the renewable wealth across state borders – but in the West, it’s sparking some not-so-neighborly opposition.

Fifteen years after blackouts rolled through some California neighborhoods, utility customers are still feeling the effects of post-energy-crisis regulatory changes that pushed the risk of costly projects from utility investors to ratepayers.