L.A. needs desert solar farms — but not everyone’s happy about it

“I really wish Obama would’ve given out that stimulus money to do rooftop solar instead,” Charpied says. “Like they’ve done in Germany.”

Jonathan Parfrey, a commissioner on the LADWP board since 2009 and executive director of Climate Resolve, an advocacy organization that builds understanding of climate change in Los Angeles, sympathizes with the Charpieds’ plight.

“I’ve been out in the desert; I know some of the people being impacted,” Parfrey says of the solar projects from his 15th-floor office in the LADWP building in downtown L.A. “I’m an enviro, I want to conserve that land. But it’s not just as easy as saying L.A.’s got to slap solar on rooftops. There has to be a balanced approach.”

Parfrey readily acknowledges that awareness of the environment in which solar farms are placed is critical; ideally they would avoid recreational spots or wildlife-rich areas. But he also asserts that in order to move forward with regional clean energy goals, these industrial-sized projects are imperative — it’s just the way the economics plays out. Putting solar on residences and businesses is expensive, as each job is custom and requires boots on rooftops, a liability issue. At this stage in the game, decentralized solar generation can also lead to voltage problems and challenges with distribution balancing.

Aside from the practical issues, there are also social and political realities to consider.

“In my view the transition to clean energy has to happen as inexpensively as possible,” Parfrey says. “Otherwise people will rebel and they won’t even want to pay for it in the face of climate impacts. They will say, ‘That’s too bad about what’s happening to the environment, but I can’t afford to put food on my table because my electricity bills are too high.’”

According to Parfrey, the LADWP is experimenting with ways of doing rooftop solar inexpensively. A solar feed-in tariff program, in which both residential and commercial power producers can sign contracts for up to 150 megawatts of solar power for above retail rates, was established this year. He sees the transition to clean energy as a slow but steady and secure one, with distributed solar eventually playing a much large role. In the meantime the city of Los Angeles is doing what it can with the available resources.

“L.A. is a wonderful city, but it is, however, not a wealthy city,” Parfrey says. “Our tax base is relatively low per-capita and 20 percent of our population is at or below the poverty line. So we simply don’t have the resources that San Francisco or New York might have.”

As decentralized solar potential grows and solar technology improves over the next decade, how to store that energy will become an increasingly important question. And alongside that, the question of how big utilities like LADWP can adapt to a decentralized grid in which there may be temptation for customers to go offline.

“If I could have my moment like in The Graduate where he says to Dustin Hoffman, ‘The future is in plastics,’ mine is how do we do distributed generation where we maintain the utility business model and we’re able to provide continual service for people,” Parfrey says. “When we find the magic key to that I think it will be a revolution. I think it will really help affect the transition away from fossil-fuel energy sources.”