Blog: California eases environmental requirements to address threatened electricity outages
On June 30, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 205, a legislative effort to bolster the state’s energy resources and avoid outages like those California experienced in August 2020. AB 205 creates a Strategic Reliability Reserve that will secure new emergency and temporary generators, retain existing resources, and encourage the development of new clean energy projects and energy storage systems. To secure the resources needed to maintain the reliability of electric service, the legislation temporarily relaxes some of California’s strict environmental requirements.