California Energy Commission chair: rapid storage build and electrification show a 100% pathway is feasible

David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission, addressed the committee on differences and transferable lessons from California’s energy transition. Hochschild highlighted California’s rapid additions of storage and renewables, long-duration storage investments and wide EV adoption as central enablers of system reliability and decarbonization.

Hochschild said California is investing in long-duration storage technologies and that the state has directed roughly $300 million toward that sector; he noted lithium-ion batteries typically provide four hours of dispatch, while newer chemistries are being developed for 100-hour durations. "Storage has saved our bacon," he told the committee when asked about reliability, saying storage deployment was the single biggest success on the California grid in recent years.

He detailed system-level metrics: California recorded days last year when parts of the grid reached 100% clean energy for hundreds of days cumulatively (279 days with periods of 100% clean energy), has roughly 2.5 million EVs on the road and runs large virtual power plant programs enrolling hundreds of thousands of customer-sited assets.

Hochschild urged Hawaii policymakers to leverage storage and procurement speed and to lean into market transformation effects that drive technology cost reductions. He offered California’s experience as evidence that aggressive buildouts of solar, storage and efficiency — accompanied by regulatory and procurement streamlining — can be achieved at scale without systemic reliability failures.

He closed by offering partnership and invited questions from the committee; members pressed on reliability, wind potential and policy mechanisms to lower procurement costs.