California's mandate to buy clean power — and who builds it

California's clean-energy law is usually summarized in a single number: 100% by 2045. But a target a generation out is easy to nod at and defer. What turns it into action is two things working together — a binding near-term deadline, and a regulatory machine that forces utilities to buy against it. In March 2026 the California Public Utilities Commission published a plain-language account of how that machine works, the first in a series titled Meeting California's Climate Goals: The Transition to a Carbon-Free Electric Grid. The machinery turns out to be more interesting than the target.

The short version: California doesn't reach a clean grid by hoping the market gets there. It requires its utilities and other load-serving entities to procure clean energy, on a schedule, in specified amounts, with regulatory enforcement behind it. And here's the piece that matters most for a company like ours — those entities largely don't build that generation themselves. They contract for it, through long-term power purchase agreements, with independent power producers. The mandate to buy clean power is, in effect, a standing order for the kind of projects independent developers build.

01The target, and the clock

The destination comes from SB 100 (2018): 60% of retail electricity from renewables by 2030, and 100% from renewable and zero-carbon resources by 2045. But that law left a conspicuous gap — it jumped from 60% in 2030 straight to 100% in 2045, with nothing binding in the fifteen years between, a stretch in which progress could quietly stall. SB 1020 (2022) closed it, adding two enforceable interim benchmarks: 90% clean by 2035 and 95% by 2040. It also requires 100% clean electricity to serve all state agencies by 2035, pulling government demand forward ahead of the broader grid.

California's statutory clean-energy trajectory

Year	Requirement	Source
2030	60% renewables (RPS)	SB 100
2035	90% clean electricity	SB 1020
2040	95% clean electricity	SB 1020
2045	100% clean electricity	SB 100

The 2035 deadline is what makes the target operational rather than aspirational. It's near enough that the resources to meet it have to be contracted and built in this decade — which is exactly why the procurement machinery described below is running hard right now.

02How the mandate actually works

A target is just a number until something forces action against it. That something is the CPUC's procurement machinery, and it runs through two linked proceedings. The Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS) proceeding sets the clean-energy obligation each load-serving entity must meet. The Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) proceeding is where each entity lays out the actual portfolio of resources it intends to use to meet forecasted demand — reliably, in compliance with the RPS, and at least cost to customers.

The cadence is what gives it teeth. Load-serving entities file RPS procurement plans annually and IRP plans every two years, and the CPUC reviews them, aligns them with the state's clean-energy goals, and authorizes procurement of new generation accordingly. The regulator doesn't just hope utilities buy enough clean power — it determines how much they must buy and holds them to plans they're required to file. Procurement isn't optional, and it isn't left to the weather of the market.

A clean-energy target is an aspiration. A procurement order with an annual filing requirement behind it is a purchase order. California has been issuing purchase orders.

03The numbers behind the order

The scale is what makes this real rather than rhetorical. Per the CPUC, since 2020 the state's retail electricity sellers have developed more than 27,000 MW of new clean energy supply, and have signed contracts to procure roughly 22,000 MW more by 2030. On top of that, a February 2026 decision ordered providers to procure an additional 6,000 MW of new clean energy and storage capacity by 2032 — and attached a requirement that should catch any developer's attention: at least 25% of that new procurement must come from resources with the attributes of clean, firm power and/or long-duration energy storage.

California's clean-procurement mandate, by the numbers (per CPUC, 2026)

Action	Quantity	Timeline
New clean supply developed	27,000+ MW	Since 2020
Additional clean supply contracted	~22,000 MW	By 2030
New clean energy & storage ordered (Feb 2026)	6,000 MW	By 2032
— of which clean-firm / long-duration	≥25% (≥1,500 MW)	By 2032
Battery storage installed to date	17,000 MW	Through 2025

04Why the last stretch needs firm power

That 25% carve-out is the tell, and it traces back to the 2035 clock. The first 60% of a clean grid is, relatively speaking, the easy 60%: abundant, cheap solar and onshore wind, backed by short-duration batteries to carry the evening. Getting from 60% to 90% runs into a different problem. The sun still sets; demand still peaks after dark and holds through cloudy, windless stretches. Each additional point of clean penetration has to cover hours that are progressively harder to reach with solar alone — the marginal clean megawatt-hour at 88% looks nothing like the one at 50%.

California's own figures show how far this has already come, and where the remaining gap lies. More than two-thirds of the grid now runs on carbon-free sources; it averaged nearly six hours a day of 100% clean power in 2025; and 17,000 MW of battery storage has been installed to shift abundant solar into the dark hours. What's left is a duration-and-firmness gap — and the procurement orders are now written to fill it. The state has enough solar. What it increasingly buys is clean power available when the sun isn't.

The last stretch toward a clean grid isn't about generating more clean energy. It's about having clean energy available at the right hours — a duration and firmness problem, not a nameplate problem. For the hardest-to-build of those resources, the state has even created a central buyer under AB 1373.

05Why it runs through independent producers

Here's the structural point the CPUC report makes almost in passing. The obligation falls on load-serving entities — the utilities and community choice aggregators that sell power to customers. But meeting it means adding tens of thousands of megawatts of generation and storage, and those entities overwhelmingly acquire that capacity by contracting for it, not by building and owning it all themselves. They sign long-term power purchase agreements with independent power producers who develop, finance, build, and operate the projects.

That arrangement is the engine of the whole clean build-out, and it works for everyone. The utility gets clean capacity to meet its mandate without carrying all the construction risk on its own balance sheet. The independent producer gets what it needs to finance a capital-intensive project: a long-term, creditworthy buyer contractually obligated — by a state mandate — to take the power. And the customer gets clean energy procured competitively, on the least-cost path the CPUC is required to pursue. The mandate to buy, in other words, creates durable, bankable demand for exactly what independent developers produce.

When the state orders its utilities to buy 6,000 more megawatts of clean, firm power, it isn't ordering them to become builders. It's creating a buyer for the companies that already are.

We are an independent power producer building exactly the resource category California is now ordering more of: hybrid solar paired with long-duration storage and a firm, carbon-captured layer — clean power that shows up across the evening and through the lulls, not just at noon. The February 2026 requirement that a quarter of new procurement carry clean-firm or long-duration attributes is, almost word for word, a description of what our campuses are designed to deliver. For us, the CPUC's report isn't abstract policy reading; it's the demand side of our business written down by the regulator.