SAN FRANCISCO — Today the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) finalized a groundbreaking decision to build innovative high-tech energy storage systems that will lead California toward a future of clean, renewable energy and away from dependence on fossil fuels.
The decision will require power companies to expand their capacity to store energy, improving storage and delivery of renewable energy resources, reducing the need for gas-fired power plants, cutting climate change pollution, and making California’s electrical grid more reliable. In the decision, the state’s investor-owned utilities must begin buying a combined 200 megawatts of energy storage technology by 2014 and reaching 1.3 gigawatts (1,325 megawatts) by the end of 2020.