Culver City, known to NPR listeners as the home of NPR West, is experiencing a building boom and growing pains as it has become a go-to city adjacent to the so-called Silicon Beach area of L.A.’s Westside: Apple and HBO are preparing to grow their Culver City presence; Amazon Video is already here and Sony Pictures Entertainment, which owns Columbia Pictures, has occupied the former MGM lot for more than 30 years. Clean, renewable energy and Culver City would seem to go together like a mint julep on the porch at Tara.

     For Culver City resident Marvin Campbell, this is nothing new. He committed to clean, renewable energy when he installed photovoltaic solar panels 20 years ago, making him an early adopter. For him, a key to getting his fellow residents to change over to solar panels is making it easier to help residents finance it. He'd like to see a bond issue put into place to help incentivize the changeover because, as he put it, “Americans don't like to pay for things in advance.” 

     While rooftop solar also makes sense to Paul Scott of nearby Santa Monica, Calif., his passion is gettng Americans to change from gasoline and diesel-powered ICE vehicles to battery-powered electrics. Scott, who appeared in the 2005 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?" and co-founded the nonprofit PlugInAmerica.org, which was formed in 2008 to advocate for increasing the use of battery electric vehicles (BEVs), says he likes what he sees so far under the Biden administration, especially with regard to the news that Biden wants the federal government’s enormous fleet of vehicles to change from ICE vehicles to BEVs.

     Meantime, Boulder-based Vibrant Clean Energy, which was founded by Dr. Chris Clack, released a report in December 2020 titled “Why Local Solar for All Costs Less: A New Roadmap for the Lowest Cost Grid.” The report from VCE, which consults on “ … intelligent transformation of the electric and energy system to meet the needs of the 21st century,” concluded that rooftop PV systems and batteries, properly deployed, made economic and climatic sense.

     A Los Angeles Times article by Sammy Roth summarized the VCE report thusly:

     … when they optimized for smaller-scale solutions — the thing Clack says his model is uniquely good at — they found the cheapest way to reduce emissions actually involves building 247 gigawatts of rooftop and local solar power (equal to about one-fifth of the country’s entire generating capacity today). In this scenario, consumers would save $473 billion, relative to what electricity would otherwise cost.

     Even without strong national climate policy, they found, Americans would spend $301 billion less on energy compared to business as usual, if only utilities and regulators could be prodded or compelled to help people put solar panels on their roofs and batteries in their garages wherever it made economic sense.

     Regarding the alluded-to battery storage for solar-power generated electricity, in 2015 Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the formation of Tesla Energy and its version of home battery storage, the Powerwall, along with a commercial-grade product called the Powerpack. Since then, several other companies have also begun offering this option for those who have already invested in rooftop solar and electric vehicles. The introduction of lithium-ion backup batteries for the home not only can, in theory, provide electricity during a power outage, they are believed to be able to help overstressed utilities, i.e., “the grid,” during demand surges caused by heat waves, when thousands upon thousands of customers turn on their air conditioners at once.

     As noted, President Carter tried to set an example in the 1970s by installing solar panels at the White House, after which his successor, President Reagan had them removed. What may be less known is that Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama, had photo-voltaic solar panels installed at the White House in 2014. Now, it may be possible for Biden to one-up Obama and add wind turbines and battery backups to the White House and lead by example by turning the White House into the Green House.

     Culver City's Mayor Fisch, meantime, is confident that the steps the city has already taken can — and will — move to the next level, regardless of what happens in Washington.

     ”We’ve done really well, I think, with getting carbon emissions out of our electrical system here in California,” said Fisch. ”I’m confident that the economics are there and that the regulations are there, and we’ll drive that to zero sooner than people think. Then we get to the next, harder fruit to pick off the tree and that’s going to be exciting to deal with, ultimately. I think it’ll be politically tricky but I think that there’s so many good things that are going to come from decarbonizing, building construction and the way you live. I’m very optimistic even though it seems like a huge challenge.”