Will electricity demand clash with CAs climate goals? [Video]

California wants to run on 100% renewable energy by 2045. But surging demand for electricity is headed for a head-on collision with the state’s climate goals.

For the past two decades, improvements in power efficiency have offset rising demand, keeping overall electricity use stagnant. That’s changing now due to growing electricity consumption from data centers, electric vehicles, and industrial facilities.

Severin Borenstein, director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley, told KNX News Chief Correspondent Charles Feldman it will take “a lot of work” to keep up with electricity demand.

“First of all, there’s the electric vehicles. In some ways, those are the least of our problems, because moving them to off-peak times or times when we have plenty of solar power should be pretty easy to do,” he said. “It’s the other sources of electricity demand, particularly building heating and cooling, that are much more difficult to shift to other times.”

Bornstein said …