Dive Brief:
- Los Angeles-region city and county governments, energy providers and other groups on Wednesday published a road map to hasten greenhouse gas emissions reductions in advance of the Summer Olympics coming to Southern California in 2028.
- The road map charts a path for accelerating building electrification, deploying distributed clean energy generation and developing local grid resilience.
- The document establishes several new, specific targets, from the number of heat pump installations in the region to the number of jobs to be created, said Matt Petersen, co-chair of the Clean Energy Partnership, the public-private group that published the road map. “High-level policies have been passed at the state and local level, but to detail how we're going to get there, it hasn't been done before.”
Dive Insight:
The 2028 Olympics is “a moment in time for the region to come together,” said Petersen, who is also CEO of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, the city-established nonprofit leading the Clean Energy Partnership. Coordination is critical in Los Angeles County, which is home to 88 cities and millions of residents, he said.
The road map defines three calls to action for the region to achieve through policies, pilots and other initiatives:
- Accelerate building electrification by reducing Los Angeles County’s building greenhouse gas emissions an additional 29% by 2028.
- Deploy 1,298 MW of clean, responsive distributed energy generation, including a virtual power plant — a collection of small-scale energy resources that work together to power a community.
- Develop a smart, modernized local distribution grid to increase community resilience and enable clean technology innovations while improving affordability, creating green jobs and reducing health risks.
“Getting the investment priorities right” is the biggest challenge to accomplishing the goals in the road map, Petersen said. “How do you unlock the private capital that is needed to take advantage of the public-sector investments? How do we get the panel upgrades, the heat pumps installed? To achieve the building decarbonization and transportation policies in place at the state and local level, all of these things need to work together.”
The Clean Energy Partnership follows a similar public-private partnership the LA Cleantech Incubator launched in 2018 that focused on boosting regional transportation electrification. “We don’t take credit for all the progress, but in 2018, we set a goal of 80% of the cars to be sold across the county to be electric,” Petersen said. “Now we've seen the beginning of a hockey stick of sales in battery-electric vehicles in California.”
