LA's Bold Plan to Transform Its Energy Mix - Affordably

The nation’s largest municipal utility, serving Los Angeles, plans to rapidly boost its renewable energy generation and is banking on the rapid development of energy storage technology, according to Simon Zewdu, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power director of transmission planning, regulatory processes and innovation.

Equity will be center stage, bringing affordable energy transformation to all customers, he said.

“One thing that we know is that the renewable level that we’re going to increase it to, almost like 80%, we’re going to depend on solar and wind,” Zewdu told the Grid Talk podcast, smartgrid.gov/gridtalk.

“We need to either import a lot of energy from out of California,” he said.

“For those reasons, we need to significantly increase the capacity of existing transmission lines that we have. The Department owns and operates about 3,600 miles of transmission lines that traverse in five western states.

“Not only that, we need to look into how we can come up with some new corridors, collaborate with other agencies to build new transmission lines to be able to support the load within the City of Los Angeles, Zewdu said.

Innovation is in the wings, and it will be pivotal.

“Innovation is on our radar screen 24 hours a day and even the last five years, we’ve seen a lot of improvements. The green hydrogen technology for example, and the Infrastructure Bill that was passed by Congress a few months ago, we believe that is going to help us a lot by supporting some of the emerging technologies and I think supporting some of the pilot projects.

“Those are the type of investments that government can make, and to really accelerate some industries to build up economies of scale so that the affordability of those technologies is evident. So, we truly believe that the energy storage industry will, advance significantly in the next five to 10 years.”