The technology to achieve 100 percent carbon-free electric power doesn’t yet exist because the main sources, solar panels and windmills, require the sun to shine and the wind to blow. Making them dependable would require enormous banks of batteries or some other form of reliable storage.
The legislation slyly backtracks on previous policy by, in effect, allowing large hydropower reservoirs to be counted as renewable sources. Even so, some means would have to be found to reliably replace the nearly 50 percent of California’s power now generated by natural gas, coal or nuclear reaction.
And then there’s the cost of such a conversion, even if it’s technically feasible. Opponents of SB 100 noted that California already has some of the nation’s highest utility rates.
Dorothy Rothrock, president of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, said, for instance, “We do know that middle-class manufacturing jobs will disappear as ever-higher electric rates divert resources from expansions, modernization, wages and product development.”
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