California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order directing state agencies to fast-track energy projects so they can take advantage of federal tax credits before the credits expire at the end of the year.
The executive order directs the Infrastructure Strike Team to identify projects that are eligible for Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) tax credits that might be lost in the wake of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) passed in July.
The order stipulates the projects must also be capable of commencing construction before July 2026 or come online by December 2027. Newsom directed the Infrastructure Strike Team to “support state agencies in taking all steps necessary and authorized by law to accelerate and prioritize all permitting, approval, and other agency actions that would enable and expedite the development of such projects.”
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In face of “Trump’s wrecking ball,” the governor said on Twitter the order would maintain its progress in adding clean energy while protecting thousands of good-paying jobs.
Within 90 days of the order, the Infrastructure Strike Team must submit a summary of the actions and progress taken, along with recommendations for additional actions to support clean energy infrastructure project deployment. Newsom’s 2023 executive order established the Infrastructure Strike Team to fast-track infrastructure projects and remove barriers to project development.
The order includes requests specific to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), the California Energy Commission (CEC), the California Environmental Protection Agency and other state agencies.
For the CPUC, the order requests the commission to “identify critical generation and storage projects expected to come online in the next three years and request that utilities under its jurisdiction prioritize actions to enable them to interconnect.” The order also requests the CPUC to streamline project reviews by relying on recent updates to the CPUC’s transmission siting and permitting process.
The Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA) said in a statement it urges the CPUC to treat Newsom’s directive as a call to accelerate and strengthen the Community Renewable Energy Program (CREP), which must be finalized by Jan. 1, 2026.
“The CREP program is the vehicle we already have to bring clean, local power to families and small businesses across the state,” said Derek Chernow, western regional director at CCSA. “But unless the CPUC acts with urgency to finalize rules and make the program truly scalable, California risks missing this narrow window to capture billions in investment tax credits and lower bills for ratepayers.”
Following the order, the Sierra Club, Vote Solar, and 12 other public-interest groups sent a letter to Newsom offering recommendations to support the governor’s order. The recommendations include providing guidance to:
- The CPUC to issue a near-term procurement order that reflects the updated load forecast to meet the state’s 2028-2032 reliability needs.
- CAISO to leverage existing transmission capacity by accelerating the repowering of new, clean projects located on sites where older projects have announced – or may be considering – retirement.
- The CPUC to evaluate how best to provide sufficient market signals that incentivize “energy only” clean projects used to charge existing battery storage infrastructure.
- The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Sacramento Municipal Utility District and irrigation districts to explore options to focus new clean energy development in areas outside of the CAISO-operated transmission network where interconnection queues may be less congested.
- The CPUC to increase the value of community solar projects by more quickly incorporating their expected electricity contributions at various times of the day and year into load forecasts (CEC) and consider adopting a distributed energy resource incentive in the integrated resource planning proceeding to support the timely deployment of community solar projects.
The letter also recommended the governor and state legislature to reallocate, where possible, the Strategic Reliability Reserve funding from being used to extend once-through-cooling fossil plant contracts to instead fund other established reliability programs that reduce peak demand through zero-emissions alternatives and promote clean, distributed electricity deployment while achieving the same reliability.
According to the letter, California is behind many other states in developing smaller scale solar-plus-storage projects that are interconnected to the distribution system and may not be deliverable to the bulk power system. Earlier efforts at promoting community solar projects focused on having investor-owned utilities contract for the projects, the letter said.
To overcome this, the letter recommended Newsom task the California Energy Commission with making timely changes to load-serving entities’ (such as utilities and co-ops) load profiles based on the expected output of community solar-plus-storage projects as they come online. These adjustments, the letter said, would be made in a timelier manner to lower the resource adequacy requirements for load-serving entities.
The letter also said there is uncertainty about the magnitude of new resources needed to assure reliability is met between 2028 to 2032, a period when transportation, building electrification and datacenter demand are expected to rapidly grow. The coalition recommended the CPUC focus on determining reliability needs with stakeholder input for this period, with the goal of issuing a procurement order before the end of 2025 that reflects this need.
“While Trump and Republicans want to bring back the days of dirty coal powering our homes, polluting our air and increasing our electric bills, California will continue our decades of progress building our affordable, clean, reliable energy future,” Newsom said.
A June 2025 report from Energy Innovation said the OBBBA would cost California’s workforce 70,100 jobs in 2030. Annual GDP in California would shrink by $14 billion in 2030, and cumulative GDP would shrink by $130 billion in California between 2025 and 2034. Additionally, the report said the OBBBA would increase emissions in California by over 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The estimates, which strictly relate to the OBBBA, may lead to 20 additional premature deaths in California every year by 2030 due to the increase in local air pollution.
California added nearly 7 GW of clean energy capacity to the grid in 2024, which was the largest single-year increase in clean energy capacity added to the grid in California history, the executive order said. Nearly 4.9 GW of this capacity came from solar, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
Newsom said since he took office, “battery storage is up to over 15,000 megawatts – a 1,900%+ increase, and over 25,000 megawatts of new resources have been added to the electric grid.”
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also recently directed state agencies to prioritize solar, storage and wind projects so they may qualify in time for expiring federal incentives. In a letter, Polis instructed state agencies to investigate and eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies in deploying solar, battery storage and wind resources to the electric grid.
(Also read: What utility-scale solar project developers should know about One Big Beautiful Bill & How the One Big Beautiful Bill impacts community solar)
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