California’s aging gas plants are costing us more than our health | Opinion
California’s grid operator leaves no room for doubt: the state has made it through another summer without rolling blackouts, a trend continuing for the past two and a half years, thanks to renewable energy paired with battery energy storage systems.
In 2020, California had just 500 megawatts of battery energy capacity that covered less than 2% of peak demand. By 2025, capacity surged past 15,700 megawatts, theoretically capable of meeting more than a third of the state’s peak demand. In the past two months, we’ve broken records for charging batteries, deploying battery energy and renewable generation on the grid. We’ll soon eclipse our own clean energy generation from last year — and we’re not even through 2025 yet.
Yet, California is stubbornly clinging to the one-third of its grid that still runs on gas, despite a plan to phase them out. This addiction to fossil fuel power — and this addiction is costing us our money and our health, particularly in frontline communities (populations that are disproportionately impacted by climate change and environmental damage). Of the 200 gas plants in California, more than half are located in working class communities of color, a symptom of environmentally racist land use planning.
In a state where affordability is top of mind, we need to prioritize solutions that will benefit our wallets and our health. It’s time for California officials to get serious about creating a concrete plan for weaning ourselves off of that last part of our grid powered by fossil fuels as fast as possible.
Under Senate Bill 100, a state law passed in 2018, California is required to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2045. Despite this ambitious target, the state currently lacks a clear plan to retire its gas plants. Even more concerning, the state’s interpretation of the law doesn’t necessarily require that every gas plant be shut down to reach 100% clean energy. And with increasing electricity demand on the horizon, there’s a real risk we could miss the 2045 deadline if we don’t act soon.
Retiring the state’s remaining gas plants well before the 2045 deadline is not only the environmentally responsible choice, it’s also the most cost-effective and equitable path to protecting our communities. Batteries paired with California’s abundant solar resources are already saving money and squeezing out gas from our energy markets organically.
Regenerate California, a nonprofit partnership between the California Environmental Justice Alliance and the Sierra Club, recently released a report identifying the savings and health benefits batteries provide versus gas plants. Battery storage is cheaper to maintain, and more efficient than gas plants. Batteries can be deployed instantaneously at times when the grid most needs support, such as in the evenings when demand goes up and solar power winds down. This kind of flexibility in how to dispatch power is attractive for markets, since batteries can be counted on to provide a predictable number of megawatts at any given time.
Gas plants, on the other hand, take hours to ramp up, spiking their emissions as they start up. As a result, batteries are already outcompeting gas in an energy market designed for fossil fuels.
As the effects of climate change translate to hotter summers, longer heatwaves and more extreme weather, the costs of maintaining reliable energy capacity for homes and businesses go up. Between 2023 and 2024, the cost of ensuring reliability nearly doubled, and ratepayers ended up footing the bill. Regenerate’s report found that those costs will lower as more gas generation is phased out and replaced with renewable energy coupled with batteries, thus easing ratepayer burden.
In our report, we presented the Non-Energy Impacts of gas combustion versus battery energy storage — cost savings just as key as the market shifts indicated above. Gas plants emit climate warming pollutants as well as fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides which are linked with increased emergency room visits, decreased lung function and death. Total health care costs associated with fossil fuel combustion and climate change are estimated at $820 billion.
Regenerate has studied the reliability of gas plants in the past. During the extreme heat event of August 2022, many of the dirtiest gas plants in environmental justice communities were unable to perform.
Retiring gas plants in frontline communities would deliver the greatest health benefits — protecting groups of individuals who have shouldered the burden of fossil fuel pollution for far too long.
California has never been in a better position to kick its gas addiction, as 2025 may very well be the third year in a row that the grid operator has avoided the need for backup gas generation in peak load times, widespread blackouts and last-minute Flex alerts. In 2023, California became the largest economy in the world to power its grid with two-thirds clean energy, largely thanks to battery storage that capitalizes on the Golden State’s abundant solar power.
State leaders must ramp up battery storage procurement, ensure that storage solutions are prioritized through Resource Adequacy and speed up the retirement of aging gas plants. While other states with grids dominated by coal and gas struggle to keep air conditioners running, California can lead by example.
Heena Singh is the energy justice manager at the California Environmental Justice Alliance. Julia Dowell is a senior campaign organizer at Sierra Club.