The Future of Electric Trains in California
Plus stories about how cities are cutting emissions without gas bans, community composting, and a rundown of new climate laws coming to the state.
Welcome to the second issue of State of Change, a monthly newsletter from the Climate Equity Reporting Project.
Featured Stories
California Cities Planned to Shut off Gas in New Buildings, but a Lawsuit Turned it Back On. Now What?
By Twilight Greenaway, Inside Climate NewsA growing number of local governments in the state are adopting efficiency-based building codes in a continued push toward electrification for decarbonization.
How California Boosted Composting — but Broke Local Composters in the Process
By Twilight Greenaway, GristAs cities and towns contract with large waste haulers to comply with a California composting law, some community composters say they're being pushed to the margins.
Climate and Equity News from Around the State
Breathe a Little Easier
The Golden State’s air quality programs seem to be working, according to a new report from the California Air Resources Board. Between 2000 and 2022, the state’s emissions fell by 20%, with the largest drop in the transportation sector.
Climate Impacts
This month’s heat wave broke temperature records across the West—including in Palm Springs, San Jose, San Francisco, and at least one neighborhood of Los Angeles. The warmer-than-average temperatures are also linked to exacerbated fire risk and faster evaporation, which makes drought conditions worse, and increased power cuts.
Gov. Newsom has declared a state of emergency in Napa, Sonoma, and Shasta counties and requested a Presidential Major Disaster Declaration to respond to the aftermath of the Park and Borel fires. Meanwhile, if elected, Trump threatened to block emergency disaster funds for the state if Newsom fails to authorize water diversion for farmers.
Meanwhile, the state of California and four Bay Area environmental groups have filed separate lawsuits against Exxon Mobile for its alleged deception in the recyclability of plastics.
Energy Transition
Could your retirement account be fueling the fossil fuel industry? As part of an investigation into climate change fueled by investment groups like Vanguard and Blackrock, Reveal’s Johnathan Jones spotlights As You Sow, a Bay Area-based nonprofit that helps consumers find and demand fossil fuel-free retirement options.
California’s Senate approved Gov. Newsom’s special session to prevent spikes in gas prices, as state energy officials warn of another impending hike, despite supply being intact. Some blame overregulation in California, but others point to a pattern of price gouging. Yet another good reason to switch to electric.
Solar jobs grew in the past year, a new report from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council shows. And a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency found that 81% of the new renewable energy capacity added last year was cheaper than fossil fuels.
Despite a slight lull in the home solar market, rates of home solar battery installation have increased to 14% in California in the last year. The appeal and affordability of solar energy storage is likely bolstered by net-metering restrictions, more extreme weather events and increasing grid vulnerability.
Policy Watch
The state just passed a slew of bills to rein in oil drilling (AB 2716, AB 1866 and AB 3233 among them), but Gov. Newsom also just signed AB 218, a law that gives oil companies several extra years before they’re required to detect and fix leaking wells — even if they’re impacting homes and schools.
Twice a year, Californians will now receive a “climate credit” (on average $71) on their utility bills to offset rate hikes, funded by cap and trade dollars.
Building Decarbonization
California launched the first phase of the Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates (HEEHRA) program, which will provide $80 million in federal Inflation Reduction Act funding toward rebates for low- and moderate-income to retrofit their homes and apartments with electric heat pumps and other appliances. The first phase—for multifamily buildings—opened last Tuesday and the second phase, for single-family homes, will launch later this month.
Utility companies in the state often attribute their rate hikes to the rising cost of maintaining pipelines as a growing number of consumers turn to electric. But SB 1221, approved last month, offers a workaround: for 30 pilot sites, utilities can now spend the money they would have devoted to pipeline upkeep on electrifying homes, as long as two-thirds of residents are on board.
This American Life’s David Kestenbaum tried to replace his gas furnace with an electric heat pump, but ran into issues accessing the federal incentive programs. His experience highlights the need for a more efficient, accurate and user-friendly government system to deliver rebates to consumers looking to electrify.
Transportation
California’s backlogged grid is holding up its electric truck dreams; utilities (and regulatory action to hasten them) are failing to build charging capacity fast enough to meet the demand.
California received $340 million from the Biden Administration, including $54 million that will go toward the construction of a high-speed rail station in Madera.
The California Department of Transportation is also planning to dole out $206 million for 149 local, clean transportation projects. Among the recipients are the L.A. Metro’s light-rail system, the San Francisco Muni system, the Sacramento Regional Transit System, and the Orange County Transportation Authority, along with many others. A great deal of the funding will support free and reduced fare programs as well as new and enhanced services and “zero-emissions vehicles” such as hydrogen-fueled buses and battery electric trains. See the full list of recipients.
Housing
Officials in San Diego are trying to tackle the housing crisis with a new program encouraging construction of row houses and townhomes (rather than high-rises) in an effort to bring density to neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes. The change would be a step towards both carbon savings and housing accessibility for lower-income residents, but critics (largely single-family homeowners) worry about its impact on neighborhood aesthetics.
Waste
ExxonMobile greatly exaggerated the effectiveness of their plastics recycling technology, resulting in far more plastic waste than their marketing let on, a ProPublica investigation revealed. California’s attorney general cited the story in a landmark lawsuit against the company last month.
80 percent of jurisdictions in California now have curbside composting, but some have been slower to implement SB 1383. One of the latest to join the party is the city of Long Beach, which will provide its residents with green bins starting this week.
And in an effort to curtail food waste and the emissions that come along with it, California has become the first state to ban the food labels “sell by” and “best by.” The labels, which are unregulated by the federal government, cause consumers to throw out perfectly edible food, wrestling in nearly 20% of the nation’s food waste.
The Q&A: Are Electric Passenger Trains the Future of California?
Last month, after nearly a decade of construction and months of buildup in the local media, a shiny new set of electric trains began running on the 51-mile-long rail system connecting San Francisco and San Jose. According to Caltrain, “the Electrification Project not only decreases emissions and noise pollution in priority equity communities, but also provides better access and more robust and flexible service for everyone.” The rail line’s new overhead wires will also one day be put to use as the northernmost stretch of the California High-Speed Rail system currently being built.
At first glance these developments might suggest that the state is moving toward a future filled with electric trains—but dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that that future is far from guaranteed. We spoke with Adriana Rizzo, the cofounder of Californians for Electric Rail and a geochemistry PhD student based in Riverside, to learn more.
Here's an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Why is your group advocating for more electric passenger trains in California?
I’ll just start by saying that most of the pollution from trains in California is coming from freight trains. There are fewer passenger trains and they run less often, and they also tend to be more efficient. So, for example, Metrolink [in Southern California] has a large pool of tier four trains, which is the cleanest, lowest emitting type of diesel train. But a lot of the benefit of electric passenger trains is really about their ability to get people out of cars, which are the largest source of greenhouse gasses in California, and contribute significantly to air pollution as well.
Because electric trains have faster acceleration, you can go in and out of stops faster, meaning they basically cut down your travel time. For instance, Caltrain’s new service is going to cut travel time by 25%. Electric trains also cost less to maintain than diesel trains. So these are all things that can allow you to run more frequent service without increasing your operating costs. These benefits also make transit more attractive and usable for people who might otherwise drive, and that's really what we're interested in with passenger rail electrification.
California is phasing out sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035, and it’s unlikely that everyone will be able to afford electric vehicles. Can better, more efficient trains help fill the gap?
We can’t just replace every gas car with an electric car and expect that to magically solve all our problems. And the financial aspect is really important. We’ve essentially made it mandatory to own a car in so many parts of the state and that is really inequitable and harmful for low income people. [Lower income households spent 30% of their after-tax income on transportation in 2022.] Here in the Inland Empire, for instance, only 2% of people commute by transit. So improving public transit quality—particularly in these suburban areas, which are increasingly where working class people live in California and where they have to commute into urban centers—is very important. Buses are great, but they [tend to have shorter routes and] aren't a good solution for people with long commutes.
Is the Caltrain project indicative of a larger shift toward electric passenger trains in California?
There was huge enthusiasm for [the new Caltrains]. I heard they had around 16,000 people RSVP for the opening weekend events alone. I've also heard anecdotal reports that ridership is way up. And that's something that’s been seen worldwide. It’s called the “sparks effect”; ridership increases after you switch to electric, because of all the improvements in service.
As for your question, the transition to electric trains is not happening fast enough. This isn’t new technology. They've had electric passenger trains on the East Coast for decades, along the Northeast Corridor. It's also in Chicago and Denver. And yet the Caltrain project took years and went far over budget. One obstacle was a lawsuit brought by the city of Atherton, an extremely affluent enclave near Stanford that filed a California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) lawsuit to try to stop the project. They were complaining about the visual impact and the lawsuit was ultimately thrown out. But it caused three years of delays because it pushed it into the Trump administration, and then there was a political fight over whether it would happen at all.
In response to the lawsuit, Californians for Electric Rail recently helped pass a law that will exempt passenger rail systems from having to file a CEQA report [when electrifying]. The logic is that these are projects that are unambiguously good for the environment. So we're very enthusiastic about that. But in terms of electrification in California moving forward, I think it's still a very open question. Kyle Gradinger, one of the higher ups at Caltrans, recently said the agency won’t be electrifying any more trains anytime soon because there “are a lot of obstacles” and the governor's office is investing in hydrogen trains instead.
Can you say more about the pros and cons of hydrogen-powered trains?
In the Inland Empire the local transportation agency has been touting a new hydrogen fuel cell train that arrived in the region in June, but it's still awaiting [final] Federal Railroad Administration safety certification. The state of California also purchased six more of these hydrogen trains for use on various state-owned, state-supported rail lines, such as the San Joaquins line, which runs through the Central Valley.
The one in San Bernardino is the first hydrogen fuel cell train in North America, and we are very concerned about this for a few reasons. Whenever you're the first of something, there's a lot of potential failure points. They’re also expensive. Several international studies have found that the total lifecycle cost is much higher for hydrogen trains compared to electric trains. And when hydrogen trains have been tried in other countries, like Germany, they have had massive service cancellations, as well as mechanical and fuel supply issues. So we're concerned that if we go all in on hydrogen right now, that's what we're going to see in California, and it's going to be a bit of a boondoggle.
It's particularly concerning from a climate perspective because we're in a critical interval where we need to rapidly reduce emissions. We need to reduce vehicle miles traveled and have fewer people driving, but if we're turning all of our regional rail into hydrogen technology, we're potentially going backwards. There are also concerns about where the hydrogen is coming from. You can make zero-emission hydrogen by splitting water with electricity, and we're creating infrastructure with that in mind. But there are a lot of uncertainties right now about how fast we're actually going to be able to scale up green hydrogen production, and how much it will cost. And most hydrogen on the market still comes from fossil fuels. It's not zero-emission; it creates CO2 emission in the process.
If you create a bunch of demand for hydrogen, that will ultimately just go to fossil hydrogen and extend the lifeline of fossil fuel infrastructure. That's why Chevron and SoCal Gas are very heavily promoting “clean hydrogen” right now.
From an environmental justice perspective, hydrogen is even more challenging to handle and store safely than natural gas. It's a smaller molecule, so it leaks more easily and is more explosive. It also has an invisible flame and embrittles steel, so you really need specialized infrastructure to do it safely. A hydrogen bus caught on fire during refueling in Bakersfield last year. And most of this infrastructure is going into environmental justice communities. The technology itself also has the potential to offer less frequent, less reliable service in communities where people already have poor access to transportation. So it's perpetuating the inequitable status quo.
All that seems like it's veering away from the vision that your group has for more electric trains throughout the state. What would be the best-case scenario from your perspective?
We'd like to see investment in overhead electrification, or catenary wires, for both freight and passenger rail. One priority is the Metrolink San Bernardino line, which has a high ridership and also goes to the region with the worst air quality in the country.
Electrifying that line would have a lot of benefits for transit riders in a very impacted community. It might also help incentivize some freight electrification in the Inland Empire. It would also connect to Brightline West, the [private] high speed rail line that will travel from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga. On a larger scale I would like to see elected leaders across the state championing electric trains and people in Congress advocating for funding these projects.
Why hasn’t the state’s High-Speed Rail project created more demand for electrification?
California High-Speed Rail is supposed to start operating between Bakersfield and Merced in 2030. They've picked a contractor for the overhead catenary, and we'll see that go up in the next few years. High speed rail is going to travel on Caltrain right-of-way between San Jose and San Francisco and it is also planned to come to Southern California and it will terminate in Anaheim in phase one …. So there's an opportunity to do the same thing down here, and for Metrolink to start planning [to electrify] that segment. But the leadership has to decide that's a priority and start planning for it and seeking out funding. There will definitely be wires, at least on that segment, so why not build out the rest of the system to be compatible with that rather than run hydrogen trains—which use a completely different set of infrastructure—and build two systems?
Brightline West isn’t planned go all the way to LA. If Metrolink were to electrify, add more tracks, and increase capacity that could change. But again, we need political leadership to decide that it matters.
Do you have tips or feedback? We’d love to hear from you.
State of Change is brought to you by the Climate Equity Reporting Project, a project of the UC Berkeley Climate Journalism Lab in association with the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group, supported by a Climate Action Seed Grant from the State of California.
