Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
Note that this news outlet has a history of sending lawyers to harass people who post paywall-bypassing archive links. So don't do that on this post.
The deal was, if you installed solar panels you could pump the power back into the grid and get credit for it. This subtracted from your power bill. The 'refund' rate for the generated power was enough so solar installation companies made bank.
Last year, they reduced the credit from 20-30 cents to 5 cents per KWh and added an extra 'grid participation' fee that could run $500 extra per year. So the math for installing solar that fed back to the grid no longer made sense. Hence the drop in demand.
None of this had to do with solar + batteries. With batteries you could get off the grid completely but the batteries cost $$$. Given current interest rates, financing was tough. If the cost of batteries drop and interest rates fall, the return on investment will make more sense and the graph will shoot back up.
If California wants to get even more solar adoption, they could incentivize batteries. But that would affect revenue to the power companies (who have lots of lobbyists) so not sure it'll ever happen.
Meanwhile, at least one power utility jacked up their rates by 13%: https://abc7news.com/ca-pge-bill-rate-increase-2024-energy-rates-electricity-bills/14173599/
In regards to PG&E's rates, for those interested in how much that 13% brings it up to:
https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf