The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to transition to 100% clean energy by 2035, in line with President Biden’s national goals and a decade earlier than the city originally planned.

The LA100 plan would see the city replace its natural gas electricity generation with wind, solar and battery storage, while also improving energy efficiency and transmission. It was approved by the city council in a 12-0 vote.

The council also approved an equitable hiring plan, which instructs the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to increase hiring from environmentally and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and focus on "ensuring project labor agreements, prevailing wage and targeted hiring requirements" for clean energy jobs. The city anticipates creating some 9,500 new jobs as part of the transition.

The goal now puts LADWP, the nation’s largest public utility, on track for an aggressive transition that backers said would present a model for the nation. Coming as California fights the Dixie and Caldor fires and just weeks after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued what authors called a "code red for humanity," councilmember Mitch O’Farrell said the aggressive 2035 goal was a necessity.

In March, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) released a report commissioned by the city showing that Los Angeles could achieve 98% clean energy within a decade and 100% clean energy by 2035 without blackouts or disruptions to the economy. In fact, the report used an economy-wide model to show that any economic disruption would be "small in relationship to the 3.9 million jobs and $200 billion in annual output in the LA economy as a whole," with the potential to create thousands of new jobs in the clean energy industry.

Read the full article about moving towards clean energy by Jason Plautz at Smart Cities Dive.