Discussion of high-tech solutions to climate change and the proliferation of electric vehicles turned to soil amendments and forest management at last week’s California Energy Commission EPIC Symposium.

The annual three-day summit is an expo for the cutting-edge projects funded by the state’s Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) to ratepayers. The program awards more than $130 million a year to entrepreneurial efforts to electrify buildings and transportation, and to store renewable energy and enhance grid resilience.

Typically, the summit fills exhibit halls with the latest electric vehicles from the likes of Honda and BMW and packs ballrooms with hundreds of participants. This year’s summit tried to recreate that experience with virtual exhibit halls and a variety of forums in which stakeholders discussed the state’s latest efforts toward decarbonization.

On Wednesday, Wade Crowfoot, secretary of California’s Natural Resources Agency, talked with CEC Chair David Hochschild in an online “fireside chat” about the state’s role in clean energy innovation. Crowfoot said an Oct. 7 order by Gov. Gavin Newsom to better manage the state’s forests and farmlands was a new front in the battle against climate change and wildfires.

More than 4 million acres have burned in California this fire season, one of the worst on record. Smoke blanketed the West and traveled to the Midwest and East Coast. Particulate matter choked Los Angeles and San Francisco, giving California the worst air in the world at times in August and September.

Tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gasses billowed skyward, canceling out the state’s gains in reducing emissions from fossil fuel generation and gas-powered vehicles, Crowfoot said.

“All that smoke that’s going into the air and going into our lungs is obviously finding its way into the atmosphere,” Crowfoot said. “And unfortunately, this catastrophic fire [season] is actually wiping out these emissions savings that we have in all of these other areas. So, smart land management of working forests, for example, will reduce emissions from these catastrophic wildfires.”

Newsom’s order instructs Crowfoot’s agency and other state entities to develop strategies to restore wetlands, manage forests and improve soils, with the goal of sequestering more carbon.

“There’s been an increasing global movement that recognizes the way that we steward land — both our natural areas and our working lands, like farms and ranchlands — actually matters to the global effort to combat climate change,” Crowfoot said. One effort he cited involves recycling organic waste and adding it to farmland, allowing soil to absorb more carbon and retain more water.

The governor’s order was sparse on details, leaving implementation to state agencies. The extent to which the state can direct forest owners to act on the order must still be determined. Millions of acres of the state’s forests are owned by the federal government, logging companies and utilities such as Pacific Gas and Electric. Those forests contain immense stands of dead and dying trees from years of drought and bark beetle infestation. The Creek Fire in the rugged Sierra Nevada foothills near Fresno grew into one of the largest fires ever, at 359,000 acres, by feeding on dead trees in and around the Sierra National Forest.

On its Earth Observatory website, NASA showed the dense concentrations of black carbon fouling the air after a series of lightning-sparked wildfires in mid-August.

“Black carbon particulates, commonly called soot … can harm humans and other animals by entering the lungs and bloodstream; it also plays a role in global warming,” NASA said.

Mass Switch to EVs and Electric Heating Needed

Crowfoot called a Newsom order on EV adoption a “huge and bold stroke” toward electrifying transportation. The Sept. 23 order requires all new passenger vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs) by 2035 and provides a much needed market signal to car manufacturers to focus their efforts on EV production, he said.

The transportation sector accounts for more than half of California’s carbon emissions; the order will reduce automobile emissions of GHGs by 35%, the governor’s office said. (See Calif. to Halt Gas-powered Auto Sales by 2035.)

Meeting Newsom’s mandate — and the state’s larger decarbonization goals — will require rapid acceleration of EV sales and charger installations. (See Can California Meet Its EV Mandates?)

Senate Bill 100 requires the state’s load-serving entities to provide retail customers with 100% carbon-free energy by 2045, and an executive order by former Gov. Jerry Brown requires the state to attain carbon neutrality the same year. Brown signed both in September 2018.

To meet the requirements, Southern California Edison estimates that 75% of light-duty vehicles on the road must be EVs by 2045, along with two-thirds of medium-duty vehicles and a third of heavy-duty vehicles, Russell Ragsdale, SCE’s director of asset and engineering strategy, said during a symposium panel on accelerating the integration of renewable energy.

SCE is pushing forward with adoption of EVs through its “charge-ready” programs for light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, Ragsdale said. The utility is “looking to accelerate the adoption [of EVs] across California by enabling access to charging and helping to limit range anxiety,” the fear drivers have of running out of power, he said.

In August, the California Public Utilities Commission gave SCE’s efforts a big boost by authorizing $437 million to fund the installation of 38,000 charging ports for EVs via SCE’s Charge Ready 2 infrastructure program, the largest single-utility EV charging program in the nation. (See CPUC OKs 1.2 GW of Storage by 2021, 38,000 EV Chargers.)

Switching to EVs won’t be enough; Californians must electrify buildings so that 75% of water and space heating will be electric to meet the state’s 2045 decarbonization requirements, Ragsdale said.

Moreover, California will need huge new amounts of renewable energy, including 80 GW of utility-scale generation and 30 GW of utility-scale storage, plus 30 GW of distributed generation and 10 GW of distributed storage, he said.

“This combination of cleaning the power source and then electrifying these various uses will help us to get the carbon out of our economy,” Ragsdale said.