Sustainable Approach to Energy and Environment
Energy is vital and critical to the economic growth of a country. Our current sources of energy have their own environmental challenges and heavy reliance on fossil fuels. We need to preserve the environment for our future generations while ensuring a sustainable long-term energy strategy that makes us self-sufficient in energy resources. However, we need to bring a balance and ensure a sustainable approach that ensures we have access to various alternatives and are not heavily dependent on only one source. We cannot afford the country to come down and be manipulated if there is a shortage of a resource. We saw this recently with Russia controlling much of the gas supplied to European countries.
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I would propose, support and implement following:
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Holistic Strategy: Develop a strategy that provides an opportunity to use alternative energy sources while limiting the impact on the environment. While we need to reduce our carbon footprint, we cannot rely on just electric energy to run our vehicles. We need to ensure there are alternative sources available in case of a catastrophe that shut down our electric grids. California is prone to natural disasters and one big earthquake can cripple our infrastructure. We need to ensure there are alternative means of energy available to us and there should be equitable allotment for sustainable growth.
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Solar Energy: Promote the use of solar energy that is available in abundance within the state and work with utility companies to bring rate plans that bring them on equal footing to them. Currently, most of the utilities have moved away from original plans to provide credit for solar energy generated by the homes as original allocations have been exhausted. We need to work with the utility companies to understand how we can bring back these credits and rates that can benefit both the consumers and the utilities, who have to invest more due to increased demand.
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Infrastructure development: to support increased demand and sustainable growth to lower the cost of production. The infrastructure Bill passed by President Biden has allocated specific funding for electric infrastructure development. However, we also need to identify how the costs of generation and supply can be reduced to ensure electricity is affordable.
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Enhance incentives: on electric vehicles. While the current government has ensured that incentives for electric vehicles are extended, these cars are still out of reach for most Americans. We need to identify ways to bring the cost of cars down and make them more affordable. We need to increase incentives and also work with electric car companies to bring a balance between the cost of cars and profits. We need to have a public-private understanding that helps both sides in making things affordable without impacting the nation’s exchange. We need to also have this incentive offered to hybrid cars that are more affordable currently.
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Water conservation: is key to California. We were in a drought for several years but were fortunate to have a great winter that most of the state is now out of the drought. However, we lacked the infrastructure to store all the water received during this period. While we have our reservoirs full currently, we had to release large amounts of water as we did not have the capacity to retain it. We need to build and increase our infrastructure for better water storage and harvesting. Our heavy reliance on the Colorado River for water supply also needs to be reviewed and we need to identify alternative sources for future generations including identifying how to use the waste amount of ocean water that is available to us in abundance.