Solar and wind power, along with natural gas energy, is a viable solution for many but not all, areas. California has whittled down its coal plant dependency to less than 1%:
San Diego Union-Tribune, May 2016:
"....First, California’s total megawatt hours attributed to coal has dropped from 1 percent in 2007 to just two-tenths of one percent in 2015.
And second, in an EIA report released last week, California saw a 96 percent decrease in electric power consumption by coal during the same time frame. That’s the steepest fall by percentage of any state.
“As a provider of power into the grid, (coal in California is) dead as a door nail,” said Bill Corcoran, the western regional director for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. "
We had 14 panels installed on our roof in Nov 2015. PG&E charges $10/mo grid connection. We qualified for net zero metering and the Federal solar refund (the state refund was gone, alas) with a 20-yr period for the NZM.
This gives us retail cost credit for all watts we put into the system. It effectively reduces our electricity cost to $11/mo, which is a long sight better than the $125/mo we used to pay.
The latest proposal in storage (badly needed) is the possibility of using Hoover Dam as a giant energy battery. Still just a proposal, would need a long process to do, but it's a fascinating look on how scientists are working on the energy issue in those "out of the box" ways:
The $3 Billion Plan to Turn Hoover Dam Into a Giant Battery
NY Times July 24, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well
(excerpt)
" Hoover Dam helped transform the American West, harnessing the force of the Colorado River — along with millions of cubic feet of concrete and tens of millions of pounds of steel — to power millions of homes and businesses. It was one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century.
Now it is the focus of a distinctly 21st-century challenge: turning the dam into a vast reservoir of excess electricity, fed by the solar farms and wind turbines that represent the power sources of the future. "