Sustainable LA Grand Challenge

California is becoming hotter and drier because of climate change. From 2011 to 2015, the state experienced an extreme drought characterized by unprecedented high temperatures and low precipitation. The drought resulted in record-breaking dry soils, significant agricultural damage, and rapid depletion of groundwater resources. Despite ongoing efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, warming is expected to continue over the next several decades. Thus, it is now more important than ever to understand how anthropogenic warming will affect future drought conditions, like snowpack. As an important indicator of drought, the snowpack is especially relevant in California for the Sierra Nevada snowpack provides 60% of the state's water via a network of dams and reservoirs. 

The Sustainable LA Grand Challenge of UCLA has an ambitious goal of helping transition Los Angeles County to 100% renewable energy by 2050 through innovations in science, technology and policy. An important first step is to determine the balance of accessible renewable energy resources and its distribution and storage. To address this data gap, researchers assessed the 2050 renewable energy potential for the Los Angeles region (defined by the City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles County and the greater metropolitan area, including the surrounding counties) and presented feasible pathways for achieving the 100% renewable energy goal. This study is a preliminary assessment of the energy portfolio for the entire L.A. region.

The City of Los Angeles is undertaking various initiatives to track and reduce energy and water consumption in existing buildings. Currently, there are significant barriers such as unreliable data and non-standardized tracking mechanisms in obtaining consumption data from the City’s building stock. Recognizing this challenge, the objective of Howe’s project is to create energy and water prediction tools that will determine the future needs based on the historical record of municipal buildings using regression models. 

The pilot project launched by the City of Los Angeles in May 2015 combines the concepts of carsharing, EVs, environmental responsibility and equity. Operating on at least 80% EVs from the following underserved neighborhoods—Westlake-MacArthur Park, Pico-Union, parts of Downtown, Echo Park and Koreatown—Phase 1 of the pilot project aims to recruit 7,000 low-income residents.   However, carshare services and electric vehicle (EV) advertising tends to focus on middle to upper-middle-class individuals and communities. To address this gap, the objective of Barberena’s project is to provide recommendations on developing a carsharing model that successfully services low-income residents in Los Angeles through qualitative data analyses (e.g. interviews, literature review).  

Battery storage is a new and emerging renewable energy technology with various challenges that must be addressed before it can be deployed at a larger scale. California has begun supporting energy storage with AB 2514 (Legislation passed to create a cleaner electrical grid and increase the use of renewable energy through the use of energy storage technologies) in 2013 but concerns such as whether battery technology can store enough energy to power homes and the lengths of battery lifetimes remain. This project conducted legal research examining the barriers and challenges of widely deploying distributed energy resources, or “behind-the-meter” storage, for customers served by investor-owned utilities in California.