A target written into city law
In 2021, the Los Angeles City Council backed a goal that still reads as audacious: one hundred percent carbon-free electricity for the city by 2035. The directive landed on the desk of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest municipal utility in the country, which serves around four million people across a basin that invents new ways to need electricity every summer.
The date matters. California's statewide clean-energy standard runs roughly a decade later, and most large American utilities plan toward 2045 or 2050. LA's plan, worked through with researchers at the University of Southern California in the "Pathway to 100% Clean Energy" study, argues the faster timeline is not only possible but, on its accounting, no more expensive than going slow. That claim deserves skepticism, and the survey will keep applying it. But the direction of the utility is no longer in doubt.
The scale is easy to miss. The DWP owns everything from hydro plants in the eastern Sierra to gas units on the coast, runs the aqueducts that made the city possible, and still leans on imports for a large share of supply. A target set by the council lands on that whole machine at once: every power purchase, every retirement date, every transmission upgrade gets measured against 2035 from here on.
The desert edge answers
Begin with the number that anchors the arithmetic. In 2019, the DWP board approved long-term power contracts for two projects from the developer 8minute Solar Energy called Eland 1 and Eland 2, built on the Mojave floor in Kern County, a few hours north of the city. At last public report, the pair totals roughly 400 megawatts of solar generation paired with about 300 megawatts of battery storage, which is 1,200 megawatt-hours across the full discharge. When the contracts were signed, the utility billed them as the cheapest large solar-plus-storage deals in the country, and the battery portion exists for exactly one reason: to hold the noon sun and hand it to the evening.
The evening is the hard part
Every plan for Los Angeles bends around the hours after sunset. The city's famous sun is, from the grid's point of view, a bell curve that peaks near noon and vanishes by dinner, while demand builds into the early evening, when air conditioners are still working off the day's heat and homes light up together. Utility planners call the resulting shape the duck curve, and September heat waves are its stress test; in 2022 the state asked residents to ease usage during a string of flex alerts as supplies ran tight.
Storage is not a green garnish on this plan. It is the plan.
That is why the battery number in the Eland contracts matters more than the panel number. Four hundred megawatts of solar is a rounding error in a state that adds that much in a slow quarter. A contract that guarantees the sun four hours later, after the panels have gone dark, is what turns a solar farm into a power plant the city can actually plan around.
The bet has a second front, and it sits on the roofline. Since 2020, California's building code has required solar on most new homes, and the state's 2023 shift to net billing changed what rooftop systems earn at sunset, pushing installers toward panels paired with home batteries. Los Angeles adds thousands of small systems a year, and each one trims the evening peak a little. The desert plants carry the load; the rooflines absorb the edges.
Coal's long goodbye
The bet also has a negative image: what the city is leaving. For decades, Los Angeles imported a large share of its electricity from out-of-state coal, most of it through the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the Intermountain link in Utah. The Navajo contract ended in 2019, and the Intermountain line is being retired, with the corridor rebuilt to carry cleaner power, hydrogen-ready gas as a bridge, and a large battery at the Utah end. Each retired coal megawatt has to be replaced by something dispatchable or storable, which is why the desert contracts and the rooftop programs keep arriving in pairs.
What could still slow it
The honest list of obstacles is long. Transmission lines take the better part of a decade to permit and build, and the power has to cross the Tehachapis to reach LA. Desert projects face land-use review, tribal consultation, and community scrutiny that deserve to be slow. Supply chains for panels and batteries swing with trade policy, and the city's own remaining coastal gas units, including the Scattergood complex, need clean replacements online before the next record heat wave, not after. The 2035 date is a direction with milestones, not a finish line already crossed.
Why it matters beyond LA
If a city of four million, with a famously hot basin and an economy the size of a mid-sized country, can run on carbon-free power by 2035, the playbook gets copied. If it cannot, every other city with the same ambition learns where the plan breaks first. Either way, the measurement matters, and the measuring starts on the desert floor, at the stations where the sun is collected and saved for after dark. That is the reading this survey will keep pinning to the board.