Harnessing the Full Potential of Clean Energy ©SHUTTERSTOCK.COM/PASEVEN By Vahid Mehr, Salman Kahrobaee, and Manuel Avendaño C 28 The Role of Southern California's Utility Distributed Energy Resource Pilots CALIFORNIA IS COMMITTED TO ACHIEVING CARbon neutrality to reduce the threat of climate change by 2045. This will require deep decarbonization across all economic sectors and necessitate rigorous planning to keep energy safe, reliable, and affordable. Southern California Edison (SCE), a utility that delivers electricity to 15 million people across southern, central, and coastal California, undertook an indepth analysis to identify a feasible and economical path to realizing California's greenhouse gas reduction goals and achieve carbon neutrality at the lowest reasonable cost by Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2021.3072816 Date of current version: 21 June 2021 ieee power & energy magazine 2045. It was concluded that economy-wide decarbonization could be achieved through ✔ extensive decarbonization of the electric sector ✔ significant electrification of transportation and buildings ✔ use of low-carbon fuels for hard-to-electrify applications. Reaching California's greenhouse gas goals requires a major overhaul of how the state sources and uses energy across all sectors of the economy. The following milestones will enable a carbon-free future in the next 24 years: ✔ more than 80 GW of new utility-scale clean generation ✔ 30 GW of utility-scale energy storage ✔ 30 GW of generation capacity and 10 GW of storage from distributed energy resources (DERs) 1540-7977/21©2021IEEE july/august 2021http://www.SHUTTERSTOCK.COM/PASEVEN