When the Olympics return to Los Angeles in 2028, we can make history— and vastly lower our electric rates, clean our air and employ our people— by making sure the Games are 100% powered with local-generated solar energy.
That clean green electricity should not be wired in via an obsolete, over-stressed grid, coming from places that should otherwise be left in their natural state. Instead we have four full years to cover every appropriate southern California rooftop with photovoltaic cells.
That would mean installing solar arrays atop this mega-city’s many square miles of wahouses, businesses, factories and homes. It would also embrace our parking lots and structures, sports stadia, aqueducts, canals, rivers, reservoirs, all powering local-based micro-grids that can save billions in unnecessary generation and transmission costs.
This Olympian deployment would be a great long jump for southern California’s power supply. As we’ve seen from the state’s 1.8 million rooftop PV installations, solar-generated electricity can be far cheaper than anything coming from fossil or nuclear fuels.
Our state-wide grid now regularly goes 100% renewable, usually in our sun-drenched afternoons, where photovoltaic power becomes “too cheap to meter.” By then charging batteries across the state, our demand surges in the evenings are covered cheaply and reliably.
Until very recently our rooftop solar businesses employed some 70,000 Californians. But now we’re losing far too many good jobs to devastating regulatory manipulations that have gutted far too many of our state’s green businesses.
An Olympian push can make this great green industry boom again, especially if the cells and panels are manufactured here.
Advanced battery storage is plummeting in cost. Within the past few years California has installed more than 10,000 megawatts of stored capacity— nearly five times what we get from the two dangerous, expensive atomic reactors at Diablo Canyon.
Advanced battery technology can now permanently protect the region and state from any future melt-downs or blackouts. When it does, our soaring electric rates will head straight down.
The 2032 Games are already scheduled for Australia, exactly a century since they first happened right here. But the Aussies are eagerly pushing their Solartopian transition nationwide. It’s already a good bet that the Brisbane Olympics will be entirely green-powered.
Los Angeles must do no less. We still have residual playing fields and event structures in place from the 1984 Games. SoFi and other recently built facilities that will be part of the festivities have already taken significant steps toward solarization.
In 2028, our City of Angels will become the third city (behind London and Paris) to host three modern summer Olympics. By then, we can and should become the first to host Games that are totally solar-powered.
By then, we can also become the world’s largest, cleanest, most profitable green powered urban center. We have a golden opportunity to show the world that we Angelenos are serious— and smart— about preserving our ability to live and prosper on this planet.
Converting southern California’s electric supply to locally-generated green power will give us true independence from the fossil/nuclear fuels that are killing both our ecology and our economy.
Four years is more than enough time to devise and adopt a workable plan, process the permits and install the hardware that can make our county the world’s largest working solar collector.
Which is exactly how Los Angeles can win our beleaguered Earth’s ultimate Gold Medal.
Let the Solartopian Games begin!
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Valley resident Harvey Wasserman co-hosts the “California Solartopia Show” on KPFK-Pacifica, 90.7FM. He is co-founder of The Solartopian Olympics Committee, and author of The People’s Spiral of US History.
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