California Watch: Governor's Conference Renewable Energy

The Governor’s Conference on Local Renewable Energy Resources
California's Path towards the Future
July 25 - 26

Governor Brown has called for 12,000 MW of renewable power generated within the local power distribution grid. Implementing this effort will provide important advantages in California’s drive for clean power – development of local resources, avoided costs of new intercity transmission or remote generation, and additional consumer autonomy.

Achieving this goal calls for new approaches and coalitions between consumers, community leaders, utilities and power providers. Promising innovations:
-Financing tools that help build new power sources, but also keep costs as low as possible.
-Improvements to existing wires and transformers, and new policies to speed connections.
-Policies and techniques to measure and manage power demand and variable power sources
-New efforts in local land use, building and fire codes to speed up deployment.

This two-day conference will explore these challenges in detail by catalyzing discussions between experts, regulators and other stakeholder groups. The invitation-only conference will be highly participatory and requires extensive facilitation and advance work. Some participants will take roles as participants or facilitators. All participants will review, in advance, conference materials including discussion papers set for each panel.

Complete Agenda with links to Overviews of Issues and Recommended Reading.