California has always been a pioneer, and nowhere is this myth more compelling than in the world of energy. But time has not been kind to the Golden State. With state legislators getting back to work Monday, their votes in the coming weeks may help determine whether California can regain some of its luster, or continue to fade away into the sunset as an iconoclastic and now largely irrelevant player on the national and international stage.

Despite the hype and California's clear legacy of innovation, the rest of the nation no longer looks to the state for models and solutions. Part of the reason is that we have Barack Obama as president, and Washington, D.C., is finally grappling with challenges such as global climate change and the need to shift to a more sustainable energy supply.

There is something larger going on here, however. We are still the breeding ground for creativity and entrepreneurial fervor. Yet when it comes to actually implementing cutting-edge solutions to energy, we seem to fall flat on our collective faces.

There are exceptions – with solar photovoltaics, tiny semiconductors that can transform sunlight directly into electricity, being the prime example. The California Solar Initiative has been wildly successful in adding these clean energy sources to the grid. Yet if Assembly Bill 560 by Nancy Skinner, D-Oakland, is not passed this month, customers of Pacific Gas and Electric will bump up against an arbitrary limit on solar PV installations in its service territory, halting one of our few recent success stories for most of Northern California.

The story with other renewables such as wind power is not nearly as positive. First Texas, and now even Iowa, have surpassed California's wind power capacity totals. The United States now leads the world in terms of wind power production, with most of the activity occurring in the nation's heartland in the Midwest, hardly a place known for major energy advances. Meanwhile, California has been trying to figure out how to tap the last remaining prime wind resource site in the Tehachapi Mountains in Kern County since the infamous energy crisis of 2000-01, and has still come up short.

Before I delve into some other key bills seeking an up or down vote in the dog days of summer, a short little history lesson may be in order.

Used to being first

After the Gold Rush faded in the Sierra Nevada in the 19th century, many of the 49ers turned to a new form of gold: the water gushing down mountain streams. Hard to believe, but PG&E traces its roots to a few entrepreneurs who figured out how to transmit hydroelectricity from places such as Nevada City first to Sacramento and then to Oakland.

After hydropower, it was oil that put California on the world's energy map, most of it in the Los Angeles area. It wasn't until an oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast in 1969 that Californians turned their backs on this industry, though petroleum still remains our primary source of energy due to our freeways, suburban sprawl and addiction to automobiles.

Then came nuclear power, which California initially embraced with gusto. Moorpark in Ventura County once bragged that it was the nation's first completely nuclear-powered city. But then dozens of nuclear power plants were canceled when a few environmentalists pointed out reducing consumption made more sense than building expensive power plants. Sacramento made history in 1989 when it became the only community in the United States to close an operating nuclear reactor by a public vote. And today, a de facto ban on any more nuclear power plants for the state is still in place.

State blazed path on renewables

In the '80s, California literally created the entire world's renewable energy industry, with California owning bragging rights to 90 percent of the world's renewable energy resources with a diverse portfolio featuring solar, wind, geothermal and biomass power. In the '90s, we figured out more ways to consume less and less energy before "deregulation" blew up in our faces and the lights went out.

Peter Asmus is author of "Introduction to Energy in California" (University of California Press, 2009). He will be making a presentation at the UC Center Sacramento at 4 p.m. Thursday. For more information, go to uccs.universityofcalifornia.edu and click on public events.