California’s Massive Grid Build Ahead

California is poised for unprecedented growth in energy demand that will be satisfied by renewables and a massive infrastructure buildout.

That is what Steve Powell, the President and CEO of Southern California Edison, one of the largest utilities in the United States, told the Grid Talk podcast.

Grid Talk, the U.S. Department of Energy podcast, can be downloaded on your favorite podcast platform or at energy.gov/gridtalk.

“We expect to see a lot more solar and wind development to support the load growth that’s needed,” he said. “If you take it to 2045 … we think it’s actually 80 maybe 120 gigawatts of new renewables to meet that demand.”

To link it together will require significant investment in transmission.

"The engineers are beginning to think about how do we design it differently in new areas and how do we support load growth in areas that are already built out,” Powell said.

“California has added more than 10 gigawatts of energy storage just in the last five years,” he said.

“You look at the California Independent System Operators’ 20-year outlook and they’re talking about fifty-plus billion dollars of new transmission that needs to get built,

“We’re going to need to build transmission miles at four times the pace that we’ve seen historically so that’s a lot of challenge,” Powell told Grid Talk.