I think this law change would be stupid. I say this as someone who has 32 solar panels on his house, drives an electric car, is waiting on the Tesla Model 3 (I placed my order the first day) for a second electric car and uses artificial grass in my backyard and half my front yard to save water and yes I recycle. Given the subsidies for solar panels they are pretty competitive already, but improvements to solar technology should make them extremely competitive in the future.

So why do I think the law would be stupid? The increasing competitiveness of solar energy will “naturally” encourage people to transition to solar over time. Not many people ride horses to work these days and I expect within 20 years most people in California will have some of their energy needs met with solar or other renewable fuels including a fair share of their transportation energy.

But there is a place for fossil fuels, a diminishing place, but one none the less. We still don’t have an effective way to fly planes without them. We keep a “gas”car for long trips where “refueling” with electricity does not makes sense. Sticking to “home use”, renewable energy for evening use means “batteries”, huge batteries, which dramatically increase the cost of solar energy compared to using solar during the day and going on the grid at night. Yet if utilities were going to store enough solar electricity to run the power demands at night the acreage devoted to batteries and solar panels would be horrible… what’s even worse it would be unnecessary and the cost of power would skyrocket.

But one argument for “renewable” energy sources is that we are using up fossil fuels at an “alarming” rate and the other is they add CO2 to the air. Well than lets invest more in technologies like artificial photosynthesis which produces “carbon” sugars which are the building blocks of carbon based fuel like fossil fuels. In addition, we need to invest in reverse combustion which take CO2 out of the air (effectively recycling energy “waste” back into carbon based fuels). In other words, all energy is “renewable”, but some energy sources “naturally take longer to form” in nature, but with the right technology could be “manufactured”.

So I am all for investing in ways to “speed” up the carbon cycle so we can convert CO2 back into carbon fuels for energy consumption. And I am all for solar power. I am simply pushing back on an “artificial” timeline that will cause irrational investments into energy production and infrastructure that will tie us to obsolete transitional technologies or impede the roll out of new technologies. For comparison purposes imagine if this law went into effect 50 years ago, but said we had to stop using fossil fuels to produce electricity, the state would be covered in nuclear power plants and when better technologies came along like solar, we would face the problem of how to pay for all the nuclear plants we subsequently decided were less safe than alternatives. We still have that problem, just not as big as if we had “forced” the transition.

Innovation is moving a lighting speed these days and new technologies enter while old technologies wither away. I still have a “laser disc” player, a VCR player, DVD players, and access streaming… why because I have investments in discs, tapes, DVDs, and Wi-Fi. I don’t want to buy the content all over again when a new technology comes along. I no longer invest in discs and tapes, and only rarely in DVDs, but I would not want them “outlawed” either. Bottom line, no need to force the issues, investing in alternative energy production will drive technologies that will naturally displace fossil fuels when it makes sense and faster than most people think it will.

That said, if you have not had a solar company evaluate the suitability of using solar energy, you should. I have and I am saving money, but only because I can use “the grid” at night. So where we are today is a mix of energy sources with solar and wind energy sources playing an increasing role, but not an exclusive one.