written 24 December 2023
published 31 December 2023
The Winter Solstice and Christmas mark the return of light and hope, and the New Year is a time for aspirations and resolutions. I want a habitable planet for our descendants, and I resolve to work to make that happen.
A month ago, Randy Howard, the general manager of NCPA, Ukiah's power provider, informed the City council that the State of California has a goal of decarbonizing the economy by 2045. This ambitious push to stop adding more atmospheric carbon recognizes a hard reality many still deny: our current energy system is killing the planet.
Locally, the 2017 wildfires changed minds, giving us tangible evidence that everything we now take for granted, can disappear overnight. The climate is a non-linear system, while humanity lives in a linear mindset. In the beginning, a linear change and an exponential change look the same. But eventually, exponential systems begin rapid acceleration. For example, this summer Greece experienced 21 inches of rain in one day. Acapulco expected a tropical storm, but the next day a category 5 hurricane damaged or destroyed every building in the city.
Some feel it is already too late, with human extinction in a few decades, while other feel the climate issue is just a partisan hoax. Some books suggest massive expansion of nuclear power and trust the corporate dominated "free market" will save us, while others imagine a planet with only a billion humans.
I still live between the extremes, envisioning a maturing species, shifting from furiously burning through our dwindling inherited energy savings, to living sustainably within our energy income. How fortunate that when we need to change our entire energy structure, we can now capture free energy and store it, on a scale and efficiency never experienced before. The problem is not HOW to do it, but WILL we do it. I admire California for stepping up to the plate.
In order to replace all the fossil fuels, decarbonization will require three times as much electricity as is now produced, and all this will have to be produced carbon free. There are three parts to this plan: producing more renewable power, shipping it to where it is needed, and expanding the local distribution system to handle the increased power.
This is a big deal, requiring rapidly changing an energy system that has evolved slowly. Because of the decades of delay, funded by the fossil fuel industry and their short-sighted greed, the climate situation is now changing rapidly, so the time pressure is intense.
The growth of renewable production is increasing every year, and big money is already investing to make this happen. NCPA is responsible for shipping the power from where it is produced to where it is needed. Ukiah has the responsibility of planning and building out our distribution of the increased power within the city limits.
But the existing transmission grid infrastructure, as currently managed, is barely able to handle peak loads at our current power levels, let alone beginning to ship significantly more power. NCPA, nor any other power provider, has yet to manifest any viable solution for this issue. However, they are beginning.
NCPA has told Ukiah it must begin planning to produce 15 percent more of our power locally, avoiding adding to grid congestion. Ukiah consumes an average of 300MWh per day, so we will need to produce another 45MWh a day, which will require about 11MW of solar array. NCPA and the City utility have begun discussing possible locations, including at the airport, which could support about half the array needed.
All Ukiah City facilities, including the sewer and water systems, consume a average of 17MWh per day. This push from NCPA, combined with significant grant funds coming from the Federal IRA, means Ukiah has the opportunity to do strategic design, moving the city toward increased power resilience.
For example, the sewer and water systems now have fossil fueled backup power systems, sunk investment, unused most of the time. By installing sufficient solar and storage at each of these locations, not only would Ukiah help satisfy the need for increased local power production, but these essential services would become power resilient. This same kind of planning could be applied to other essential City services, such as emergency communications.
Now is the time to envision a resilient Ukiah, ready to survive a turbulent 21st century. Let's begin building for a habitable planet for the future.
