Photo: Mario Tama / Getty Images
One of the most polluted cities in the United States, Los Angeles, aims to become the first large city in the country that works exclusively with clean energy for 2035, fifteen years before the goal set by the United Nations at the COP climate summit 26 , which is celebrated these days in Scotland.
And the key that this horizon is achievable is that Los Angeles has a unique advantage over the majority of the other major cities in the US: the company that manages the energy of the metropolis is municipally owned, not privately .
“That gives Los Angeles legislators and ultimately voters a lot more influence over the energy future of the city than in other places ”, explained in an interview with Efe Laura Jay, regional director for North America of the organization C 40 Cities, which connects cities internationally to fight against climate change.
This energy control also allows the Los Angeles City Council to take aggressive positions on the fight against climate change, as when the mayor, Eric Garcetti, ordered in 2019 the “New Green Plan for LA”, with a package of twenty measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero in the next decade.
Also this year, Los Angeles became the first US city to endorse the Non-Proliferation Treaty of Fossil Fuels .
That document, which this week has gained prominence at the COP 26, aims to stop oil exploration and extraction, gas and coal, and phase out the production of comb ustibles fossils , in line with the objectives of the Paris Climate Agreement and betting on international cooperation for a transition to clean energy .
Green structures
Measures like these from the public sector played a relevant role in the last analysis on Los Angeles National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a US center specializing in the research and development of renewables and energy efficiency, owned by the US Department of Energy
During that three-year study, NREL analyzed millions of scenarios and determined that the publicly owned Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, should accelerate the construction of wind farms, large-scale solar installations and electric recharging points .
This pla n would have a total cost of about $ 86, 000 millions of dollars, an amount that, distributed in more than a decade, “would not have a significant impact on the economy of a city that moves billions of dollars,” according to expert estimates.
The program would imply, In addition, that more Angelenos acquire solar panels for their homes and electric cars , goods that are already subsidized at the state and federal level.
Innovate to advance
But this goal faces a number of technical, regulatory, institutional and sociological obstacles, according to Eric Hoek, professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.
On the technical side, Hoek argued or Efe that one of the main problems is that solar and wind energy are “intermittent”, that is, that only produce during a certain period of the day, when there is light or wind.
“That is why we must produce excessively during the day and during the sunniest seasons and store all that energy in some way, although there is currently no profitable and technologically capable medium to do it “, explained Hoek, who leads the UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge, an initiative to transform Los Angeles into the first sustainable megacity for 2050.
Among the projects of this university program, which have already received public-private funding and are beginning to become a reality, there are mechanisms to reduce spending on drinking water, extend the life of electric batteries and increase the storage capacity renewable energy, among others .
In addition, students and teachers of UCLA have presented ideas to lessen the impact of droughts, reduce air pollution and boost the use of public transportation.
There is also still a long way to go in the regulatory and institutional frameworks, a although efforts in this direction in the last decade are “beginning to bear fruit” today .
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