I’ve been wanting to write about time for years, but I haven’t had the time.

I really have no good excuse. I don’t have children; I don’t work 12-hour days; I’m lucky not to have a long commute. So why do I feel like I never have enough time for the things I want to do?

It’s not just me. The lack of time is a frequent complaint, and it’s one of the main reasons so many of my friends look forward to retirement. But why is everyone so busy? How did this all start, and where will it end?

…

My predominant feeling on awakening the morning of September 9, 2020 was confusion. I thought it was the middle of the night. The sun didn’t appear to have risen, and an eerie red glow emanated from the sky.

The culprit was a thick but high layer of ashes and smoke from the state’s raging wildfires — which elicited comparisons to Blade Runner and Mordor from the stream of friends who posted photos on Facebook like the one above.

Daylight never made an appearance; it was so dark that we had to keep our lights on all day. This was the…

California aims to get to 50% renewables by 2030 and 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045. How will we get there?

To achieve our goals, we’ll need a mix of remote and local energy generation. With over 1 million solar roofs in the state and enough solar to power over 6 million homes — much of that coming from utility-scale installations — California is solidly placed as a national solar leader. But one solar market segment remains woefully underserved in the state.

The missing piece: Wholesale distributed generation (WDG)

That underserved market, wholesale distributed generation (WDG), is crucial to achieving our clean energy goals.

WDG = distributed energy…

This is the moment for microgrids. As the decade comes to a close, record wildfires in California and other disasters across the country, combined with the new normal of Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS), have catapulted microgrids into the spotlight. This is the moment the Clean Coalition has evolved for as we continue our groundbreaking work on Community Microgrids — a new way of designing and operating the electric grid.

This year, our work was covered extensively, including in mainstream publications like Mother Earth News, Bisnow, and The Washington Post. …

Energy resilience is a pressing need for our communities.

Our centralized energy infrastructure is costly, aging, and inefficient, which makes it highly vulnerable. Extreme weather events are occurring more frequently and causing extended power outages. From January through September 2017 alone, the U.S. experienced 16 weather-related events that incurred damage of at least $1 billion each. Recent wildfires, hurricanes, and floods have brought renewed attention to the vulnerability of our energy system.

It’s clear that we need energy resilience — and there’s no better way to provide that resilience than with renewables-driven Community Microgrids, which can keep critical loads online…

They say a tree grows in Brooklyn, but how many grow in all of New York City? You can’t have too many, and now the city has a million more trees than it did just 8 years ago.

New York is not the only city to see the value of trees. Others around the country have also joined in the Million Tree Initiative.

Why are cities jumping on the tree bandwagon? Because trees can do so much for us.

Benefits of trees

We love planting trees — it’s such a simple act with such big benefits! …

A number of friends have asked me for information on going solar. Rather than keep sending the same emails about it over and over, I thought I’d consolidate the information here.

Solar is getting cheaper all the time. So some people wonder if they should wait to go solar till solar prices drop more or solar technology improves.

Do you want to wait to start saving money? If you want to save now, the answer is No.

Solar is a mature technology. Going solar now means you’ll save on your power bill, and your savings will keep increasing as power…

Now several years into our Transmission Access Charges (TAC) Campaign, the Clean Coalition continues leading the effort to ensure that California’s ratepayers aren’t stuck with billions of dollars in unnecessary electric transmission spending. We have worked with California Senator Ben Allen to draft new bill language for Senate Bill (SB) 692, to create a certain path to the most viable solution for implementing our widely supported reform strategies.

Today, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) charges exactly the same amount for “using” the transmission grid whether the energy comes from a source thousands of miles away or a source next…