Sammy Roth

The Desert Sun

Stephen Berberich can see the future. He has to.

On a Friday morning in December, Berberich sat in a conference room in Folsom, outside Sacramento, in front of a picture window offering a bird's-eye look at the high-tech control center for California's electric grid. Down below, staffers scheduled transactions between power plants and utilities, watched for outages and monitored the careful balance between supply and demand.

As president of the California Independent System Operator, it's Berberich's job to know how much electricity the state is going to need at any given moment and to make sure just the right amount of energy is flowing through the power lines. But in this moment, he was thinking past the end of the day, to a not-so-distant future where there's far more solar and wind power flooding the grid.

"One of the hallmarks, without question, is that you have more generation at times of the year than you need," Berberich said, referring to the fact that sunlight and wind can't be ramped up or down to match demand, like traditional power plants can. Increasingly, the California grid operator — CAISO for short — is forced to pay solar plants to stop generating when there isn't enough demand. "You see it in Europe, you see it in Germany, we see it. And turning off renewable energy, in my mind, is a tragedy."

Gov. Jerry Brown and investor Warren Buffett, the world's second-wealthiest person, think they have a partial solution to that problem: Find California a bigger grid.

Right now, CAISO oversees 80 percent of the California grid, including the wires owned by Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric. Under Brown and Buffett's plan, CAISO would expand to oversee PacifiCorp, a Buffett-owned utility that serves customers in Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming and a slice of Northern California.

If that happens, advocates say, California solar farms could operate more hours by selling excess energy to other states, rather than having to shut down when supply exceeds in-state demand. California could also tap wind power from places with especially strong gusts, like New Mexico and Wyoming. Some out-of-state wind farms already plan to sell electricity to California, including the massive Chokecherry and Sierra Madre project in Wyoming. But institutional and financial barriers make those kinds of projects the exception, not the rule, grid experts say.

A more integrated western grid would also bring financial benefits, according to supporters of CAISO expansion. If the grid operator expands to include utilities across the West, they say, California homes and businesses could save billions of dollars on their electricity bills, in part because it would be cheaper for the Golden State to meet its ambitious renewable energy goals.

"The elevator pitch is: It's good for customers and it's good for the environment," Berberich said.

Here's the catch: A lot of people don't think so.

In California, the grid expansion plan has divided environmentalists. While some green groups support the proposal, the Sierra Club is worried it could have unintended consequences, like giving coal-friendly Utah and Wyoming the power to force dirty electricity into California, undermining the state's environmental policies and leading to increased climate pollution across the West. Decision-makers in Utah and Wyoming have the opposite fear: They don't want to be subjected to climate policies they see as unnecessary and potentially damaging to their fossil fuel industries.

Those concerns are only the beginning. Some critics say California should focus on building renewable energy facilities within its borders, rather than sending high-quality jobs out of state. Others see grid expansion as a money-making venture for Buffett's PacifiCorp utility, which might be able to get California to pay for a massive, lucrative transmission project called Energy Gateway.

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Donald Trump's election has thrown another wrench in the works for supporters of CAISO expansion. Critics say Trump's administration could interfere with the grid expansion plan, giving Utah and Wyoming greater authority to dictate energy policy across the six-state grid. More broadly, Trump's presidency is expected to increase tensions between deep-red states like Utah and Wyoming, where politicians could be emboldened in their efforts to support fossil fuels, and dark-blue states like California, where lawmakers have pledged to double down on their progressive agenda.

For months, representatives from the six states have been negotiating an expansion agreement, which would need to be approved by the California Legislature and by public utilities commissions in the other five states. California lawmakers are expected to take up the proposal this year — if Brown thinks it still has a chance.

The continental United States is divided into three main electric grids: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection and independent-minded Texas, which runs its own grid. While much of the East is covered by five large "regional transmission organizations," which span multiple states, the West is divided into 35 "balancing authorities" — independent grid operators that are responsible for balancing supply and demand on their own systems, with limited help from the surrounding systems. CAISO is by far the largest balancing authority in the West.

Supporters of growing CAISO's footprint see obvious economic benefits in a more integrated western grid, even without the potential to boost renewable energy. Those benefits, they say, include lower institutional barriers to energy flowing across state lines, less need for redundant backup power plants and fewer charges for sending electricity across another balancing authority's wires.

"By having a larger and better-coordinated grid, you can reduce costs (to electricity consumers) and make it more reliable and resilient," Jan Smutny-Jones, CEO of the Independent Energy Producers Association and former chair of CAISO's Board of Governors, said during an interview at his Sacramento office, down the street from the State Capitol, in December.

For Brown, the main reason California needs a bigger grid is the fight against climate change.

It's not hard to figure out what he's thinking: If you look at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's map of U.S. wind speeds, you'll see that the largest concentrations of top-tier winds in the West are in Wyoming and New Mexico. The winds in those states also tend to blow more consistently than winds in California, meaning projects can operate for more hours each day.

Stronger, more consistent winds mean cheaper electricity. California has several world-class wind hot spots of its own, including the San Gorgonio Pass in the Palm Springs area and the Altamont Pass east of the Bay Area. But apart from the Tehachapi Pass in Kern County, the best spots have been mostly developed for years. And development in the Tehachapis and other windy areas has been limited by stringent land-use rules designed to protect birds, including an Obama-administration plan that critics say effectively closes off most of the California desert to new wind projects.

Wyoming wind could also help prevent blackouts as California adds more and more intermittent renewable energy to its grid, experts say.

Fossil fuels can reliably generate electricity around the clock. But wind is inherently variable, and sunlight can be difficult to predict. Unexpected cloud cover, for instance, can cripple a solar farm. The greater the geographic diversity of the solar panels and wind turbines on the grid — some in California, some in other states — the less likely it is they'll all stop generating electricity at once.

Wyoming wind could be especially helpful to California, since it blows during convenient hours. A 2015 study from the University of Wyoming's Wind Energy Research Center, funded by the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority, found the two states' winds are "complementary": California winds blow the strongest at night, while Wyoming winds peak in the afternoon and stay strong through the early evening. That's when electricity generation from California's many solar plants drops off as the sun begins to set. It's also when electricity demand ramps up, as people get home from work.

"When the sun goes down in the Mojave Desert, the wind in Wyoming is probably ripping," said Doug Larson, former executive director of the Western Interstate Energy Board and now a consultant for the Energy Foundation, a nonprofit that has provided funding to groups supporting CAISO expansion.

Grid expansion could also create a new market for California solar farms.

Already, there are times when CAISO must turn away as much as 3,000 megawatts of solar because the electricity flooding the grid during the middle of the day exceeds demand, Berberich said. That would be equivalent to shutting down five and a half solar plants as big as Desert Sunlight in Riverside County, which was the world's largest solar farm when it opened in 2015. If California could more easily sell excess solar electricity across state lines, solar plants could run more often, reducing climate pollution and improving the economics of building solar farms in California.

"The future of the western grid is to integrate more," said Robert Godby, director of the Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy at the University of Wyoming. "It makes sense for companies, because now they can access generation more cheaply than developing it themselves. It makes sense from an environmental perspective, because you can incentivize cleaner generation. And it makes sense from an operational perspective, because a grid is more stable when it’s larger."

California utilities are required by law to get 50 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030, part of the state's aggressive plan to slash planet-warming carbon emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by that year. In 2016, 27 percent of the Golden State's electricity came from renewables, according to preliminary estimates from the California Energy Commission.

So far, California has added clean energy to the grid without significant impacts to electricity rates. But some experts worry that getting to 50 percent — and eventually 100 percent — will cause energy prices to rise dramatically.

New solar farms are cheaper than new natural gas plants across much of the state, and solar prices continue to fall. But because sunlight is intermittent, costly gas-fired "peaker" plants are often needed to accompany solar facilities. Natural gas accounted for 44 percent of California's total electricity mix in 2015, up from 35 percent in 2000.

RELATED: California renewable energy mandate far from perfect

California's average retail electricity rate is about 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration — already one of the highest rates in the nation.

"What happens when our retail rates go to 50 cents, to 60 cents, to 70 cents?" Berberich asked. "Is there a potential that we would actually have a backlash against our environmental agenda? I would submit, very possible."

California has already taken baby steps toward integrating the western grid. Those steps have led to cost savings and reduced climate pollution, state officials say.

In 2014, CAISO launched an "energy imbalance market." The program allows out-of-state utilities to participate in California's real-time market, where utilities can buy electricity in five- or 15-minute increments to fill in last-minute gaps between supply and demand. So far seven utilities, serving 7.2 million customers across eight western states, have joined or are in the process of joining.

California has hailed the imbalance market as a success. CAISO's most recent quarterly report shows the program saved its participants $142.62 million over its first two-plus years of operation, with the benefits growing as more utilities joined. (California has accrued nearly 30 percent of those savings; about 55 percent have gone to Buffett's PacifiCorp.) By allowing solar farms to operate more than they otherwise would have, the program has averted nearly 154,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, CAISO says — equivalent to taking 32,000 cars off the road for a year.

PacifiCorp was the first utility to sign up. (The utility operates as Rocky Mountain Power in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming, and as Pacific Power in California, Oregon and Washington.)

PacifiCorp has since been joined in the imbalance market by NV Energy (also owned by Buffett), Arizona Public Service and Puget Sound Energy. Idaho Power, Portland General Electric and Seattle City Light have agreed to join, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District is moving in that direction. Mexico's grid operator, the Comisión Federal de Electricidad, is exploring whether its Baja California Norte region should join, too.

"It's one of these things that’s a no-brainer, the efficiency and economic balance that you get," said Don Furman, a former PacifiCorp executive who now advocates for CAISO expansion through a coalition of environmental groups and energy companies called Fix the Grid West. "Once PacifiCorp broke the ice and got it going, people are lining up to join it."

California could reap even greater benefits by fully incorporating other utilities, as is currently proposed with PacifiCorp, grid experts say. Under Brown and Buffett's plan, PacifiCorp would give the California grid operator full control of its wires and become a participant in the market CAISO oversees, just like Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.

That means PacifiCorp would be able to participate in CAISO's day-ahead energy market, where the vast majority of electricity is moved, rather than just the real-time market. The same would be true for any other utility that later joins CAISO.

As part of the day-ahead market, CAISO decides every morning which power plants will and won't be turned on the next day, based on factors like expected demand, operating cost and environmental impacts. While there's room for adjustments during the day — that's where the real-time market comes into play — many fossil fuel plants need to be committed in advance.

Right now, those day-ahead commitments are made independently in each of the 35 western balancing authorities. Every day, utilities across the West are firing up climate-polluting coal or natural gas plants even when cheaper, cleaner resources might be available elsewhere in the region, like excess solar generation in California or untapped wind in Wyoming.

"There are real benefits here," said Carl Zichella, director of western transmission for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the country's largest and most influential environmental groups. "Regardless of where you sit on the scale of 'I’m a coal state,' or 'not a coal state,' you have the ability to get reduced-cost energy."

CAISO and PacifiCorp announced they would explore the utility joining the California system in April 2015, a few months after the imbalance market got started. Later that year, California lawmakers passed SB 350, which raised the state's renewable energy mandate to 50 percent. The bill also required CAISO to study the economic and environmental impacts of expanding across the West.

The grid operator released that study, conducted by private-sector consultants, in July. The findings were striking: By 2020, California ratepayers would save $55 million per year, just by virtue of PacifiCorp joining CAISO. If most of the other western balancing authorities were to follow PacifiCorp's lead, the California ratepayer benefits could grow to $1.5 billion per year by 2030.

To the consternation of some environmentalists, the study's authors also found that PacifiCorp joining CAISO would lead to a 0.2 percent increase in western carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, because of a greater ability for coal plants to sell electricity into the California market. But they also found that a wider CAISO expansion, encompassing most of the western balancing authorities, would lead to a 3-4 percent decrease in regional carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, compared to continuing current practices.

Even if everyone could agree those benefits exist, tricky inter-state politics could get in the way, especially with Trump in the White House.

Right now, California's governor appoints the five members of CAISO's governing board, subject to confirmation by the state Senate. But before PacifiCorp can join CAISO, it needs approval from the five other states it serves. And governors in those states won't put their electric grids in the hands of five individuals who answer to the California governor, over whom they have no sway.

"There's not going to be any scenario where I would agree to a situation where the California Legislature is dictating policy to the state of Wyoming," Matt Mead, Wyoming's Republican governor, said in an interview. "Clearly, Wyoming is the No. 1 coal-producing state. It probably has a different perspective than California does."

The mistrust cuts both ways. Officials in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming — deep-red states that rely on coal and other fossil fuels and don't see climate action as a priority — don't want to give coastal liberals too much power to decide which types of energy they use. Lawmakers in California, Oregon and Washington, but especially California, have the same concern about the red states.

Brown tried to get the California Legislature to sign off on grid expansion last year, but he was forced to back down after pushback from top lawmakers. In a letter addressed to Brown, Senate leader Kevin de León, Assembly leader Anthony Rendon and four committee chairs wrote that "significant unanswered questions remain to be resolved."

"California is a world leader in climate and energy policy," they wrote. "The proposed regionalization must not undermine state sovereignty or cede authority of our state's cutting edge clean energy and climate policies."

Through a spokesperson, de León declined an interview request. So did state Sen. Ben Hueso, D-San Diego and chair of the Senate's energy and utilities committee, who signed the letter.

Another signatory, then-Assemblymember Mike Gatto, said he's concerned California's climate and energy policies are at risk. Gatto, a Glendale Democrat who chaired the Assembly's utilities and commerce committee before he was termed out last year, said he's worried Californians will be forced to pay for expensive out-of-state transmission lines they may not need.

"There's this very nice-looking swimming pool beneath us, and there are a lot of people who want to dive in head-first," Gatto said in an interview. "But we don't know if there are sharks in the water, if it's freezing or boiling hot. There are a lot of questions we have to answer before we dive in."

RELATED: Why the world looks to California on climate

Berberich and other expansion proponents have dismissed those concerns as overblown, saying it wouldn't be easy for the other states to undermine California policy, even if they want to.

"People need to understand what we do. We’re an independent system operator," Berberich said. "We simply run the markets and run the transmission system. We do not make procurement policy."

Those kinds of assurances haven't assuaged critics in the California Legislature or the environmental community.

Several major environmental organizations and renewable energy trade groups support western grid regionalization, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Solar Energy Industries Association and the American Wind Energy Association. But the Sierra Club is more skeptical and has opposed Brown's proposal for PacifiCorp to join CAISO.

Sierra Club staff attorney Travis Ritchie said it would be dangerous to give PacifiCorp's six coal plants in Utah and Wyoming access to the California market, pointing to the CAISO study's prediction of an increase in regional carbon emissions. While that increase would be small, Ritchie said several of the coal plants are on the verge of closure, because stricter pollution laws have made them unprofitable. He's worried that even a small bump in revenue would tip the scale toward profitability, inducing PacifiCorp to invest in expensive pollution controls and keep the plants open longer.

"We've recognized more and more that there are in fact benefits, in terms of being able to share renewable generation across the West. We support that goal," Ritchie said. "The concern has always been, what's the flip side of that? If you create a method to share renewables, are you also creating a method to share coal?"

If California is going to try expanding its grid across the West, Ritchie added, it should start with some other utility. About 60 percent of PacifiCorp's electricity comes from burning coal.

"There is very much a trust issue with PacifiCorp. They have the largest coal fleet in the western United States by far, and they've spent billions of dollars keeping it open," Ritchie said.

The Sierra Club's greatest success this century has been an aggressive campaign against coal, which has a much stronger warming effect on the planet than other fossil fuels. The group's Beyond Coal campaign blocked a reported 170 coal plants proposed during the George W. Bush era, and has played a major role in the announced retirements of 250 existing plants since then.

In that context, the Sierra Club sees PacifiCorp as a bad actor.

PacifiCorp has fought the Environmental Protection Agency's regional haze rule, which is designed to limit coal pollution that muddies the air in national parks. While PacifiCorp recently outfitted half of its Jim Bridger coal plant in Wyoming with pollution controls to reduce the emission of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, the utility sued the EPA last year over a requirement to take similar steps at its Hunter and Huntington coal plants in Utah.

At the same time, PacifiCorp has spent untold millions of dollars to comply with other pollution rules and keep its coal plants alive, even when the economics are questionable.

Take the nitrogen oxide controls the utility installed on two coal units at Jim Bridger to comply with the haze rule. Utah and Wyoming allowed PacifiCorp to profit from those investments by raising electricity rates, as is common practice for a regulated utility. But when PacifiCorp sought to raise electricity rates in Washington state as well, regulators there cried foul, saying the utility hadn't analyzed whether it would have been cheaper to shut down those coal units, or perhaps convert them to natural gas. The state ultimately gave PacifiCorp permission to recover its costs from Washington ratepayers, but not to profit.

"It was pretty clear that that coal plant was not economic, and that installing those controls was going to lose ratepayers money," Ritchie said.

RELATED: Climate advocates say most fossil fuels must stay in ground

Other environmental groups don't think grid expansion would help the coal industry, which continues to face pressure from cheap natural gas. Zichella, from the Natural Resources Defense Council, said regional markets in other parts of the country have actually increased the economic pressure on coal plants, by forcing them to compete more directly with low-cost solar and wind energy.

"We have a built-in disadvantage for any industry that has to buy fuel, because the wind is free and the sun is free," Zichella said.

PacifiCorp officials touted the utility's track record on clean energy. While coal supplies 60 percent of PacifiCorp's electricity today, the company plans to shut down 10 coal-fired generators between now and 2034, and it expects coal to account for just 24 percent of its electricity supply by 2035. Already, the utility has more than 3,000 megawatts of solar and wind online, capable of supplying nearly a third of its peak demand under favorable sun and wind conditions.

"A bigger regional market, with a more diverse and broad footprint, has an ability to integrate renewables...in a way that we simply do not have the capability to do today," said Sarah Edmonds, vice president and general counsel for PacifiCorp's transmission business. "The other side seems to believe that a regional (grid operator) is a place for carbon-emitting plants to live longer lives. But we fundamentally disagree with that viewpoint."

The utility also defended its decision to install nitrogen oxide controls at Jim Bridger. Ry Schwark, a spokesperson for PacifiCorp's Pacific Power subsidiary, compared the power plant to a car needs to pass emissions tests even though you know it won't last forever.

"Investing some money in environmental controls...is the only way to keep the plant operating in compliance as the long term transition plans are finalized over the next several years," Schwark said in an emailed statement. "The alternative, immediate closure, would be extremely costly to customers as they would be paying for a plant no longer operating and to replace the power generated previously, a double whammy we do not want to lay on our customers."

Brown knows the other states won't join CAISO if it's still controlled entirely by the California governor and Legislature. So for the last year, CAISO has been developing a new governance structure, with input from governor's offices, public and investor-owned utilities, consumer advocates, energy companies, unions, environmentalists and other stakeholders across the six states.

The most contentious issue, by far: how much power California would have.

Under CAISO's most recent proposal, the grid operator's five-member board would be expanded to nine members, who would continue to be independent industry professionals or public interest advocates with no financial stake in the markets they oversee. New board members would be floated by a Nominating Committee composed of industry stakeholders and public interest advocates, who themselves would be appointed by a powerful Transitional Committee comprising state officials, industry representatives and public interest advocates.

Here's where it gets controversial: CAISO board nominees would need to be voted on by a separate Approval Committee, composed of one representative from each of the six states. Nominees would need support from five of the six state representatives, meaning Utah and Wyoming — or any other two states — could band together to block a nominee they don't like.

But even five votes might not be enough; nominees would also need support from states representing at least 75 percent of the electricity consumed across the region. In practice, that means California's representative would be able to veto any board nominee, because the Golden State accounts for 80 percent of the electricity load across CAISO and PacifiCorp's service territories.

The same voting rules would apply to the separate Western States Committee, charged with making decisions on two hotly debated topics: who pays for transmission lines, and how much backup power capacity is needed across the region. Each state would get one voting member on the committee. Again, California could veto any decision, but so could Utah and Wyoming.

The voting rules need to strike a delicate balance. On the one hand, California lawmakers believe they deserve veto power, because their state would make up most of the population and electricity demand of CAISO's expanded territory. On the other hand, if California has too much power, officials in the other states aren't likely to sign off.

CAISO's leaders think their proposal threads the needle.

"Yeah, California would have a veto, but if those other states decided to get together, they would too," Berberich said. "Which would drive consensus, which is what we're trying to do."

So far, few parties are satisfied with the governance proposal.

"Generally, we think one state, one vote should be a premise for consideration," said Laura Nelson, executive director of the Utah Governor's Office of Energy Development. "We think it needs to be fair and not give any one state the ability to either stop or advance projects."

California's northwestern neighbors aren't as concerned. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, wrote Brown a letter last year endorsing the expansion plan and urging him to seek authorization from the California Legislature quickly. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, also a Democrat, wrote a letter expressing cautious optimism, saying a well-designed CAISO expansion "could deliver substantial benefits."

But officials in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming aren't yet convinced they'd see economic benefits from linking up with the California grid. Mead, Wyoming's Republican governor, said he's still waiting for PacifiCorp to do a study showing the costs and benefits to his state. John Chatburn, who runs the Idaho Governor's Office of Energy and Mineral Resources, made the same point.

"If there aren't any benefits that are going to flow to the customers in Idaho, then why would we waste time and energy addressing any other issues?" Chatburn asked. "Until those questions are answered, all the other questions are kind of moot from an Idaho perspective."

Another key question is how California would be able to discriminate between clean and dirty electricity coming in from out of state.

CAISO plans to penalize out-of-state coal and gas plants by making it more expensive for in-state utilities to buy energy from them. The goal would be to put out-of-state coal and gas on a level playing field with out-of-state renewables that don't affect the climate — and in-state fossil fuels that comply with California's expensive pollution-reduction mandates.

But in California, some critics think that proposal doesn't go far enough. While CAISO's strategy would account for an energy source's climate impacts, they say, it wouldn't reflect the other costs of doing business in California, including high real estate and labor costs, and environmental regulations designed to save water or reduce traditional air pollution.

"You're now going to compete in a broader generation market," said Randy Howard, general manager of the Northern California Power Agency, whose members include more than a dozen cities and utilities. "All of these other environmental factors that we consider very important from a social perspective in California aren't the same in these other states."

RELATED: How climate change is already harming human health, the economy and national security

It's not clear how much more CAISO will tweak its governance proposal before Brown brings it to the Legislature. Phil Jones — a Washington utilities commissioner who has helped lead informal governance discussions between stakeholders across the six states — said he thinks the latest version is in "pretty good shape." He believes voting rules are the biggest remaining disagreement.

"It's time for the governors to engage directly on this," he said.

Furman, from Fix the Grid West, has found himself developing a new messaging strategy lately. He realizes California lawmakers are going to be more difficult to convince than he expected, and nothing else matters if they can't be swayed. He thinks they should carefully figure out a governance structure that would work for California, then let the other states to take it or leave it.

"How are we going to do this right, as opposed to just getting wrapped up in Wyoming politics?" Furman asked. "This is all about creating the backbone grid for the clean energy economy. That's what the discussion needs to be about, instead of Wyoming coal plants."

And then there's Trump.

If Hillary Clinton had been elected, it may have been easier for Brown to convince skeptics not to worry about grid governance. He could have pointed to continued federal support for renewable energy, and increasingly stringent regulation of fossil fuels, as an impediment to potential efforts by Utah and Wyoming to bolster their coal industries and send dirty electricity to California.

But Trump is president, after a campaign during which he called climate change a "hoax" (it isn't) and promised to "unleash" America's untapped coal, oil and gas. His Cabinet nominees seem tailor-made to act on that promise. His pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency is Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a staunch fossil fuel advocate who has long rejected the overwhelming scientific consensus that humanity is heating the planet. Trump's choice for energy secretary, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, once described global warming science as a "contrived, phony mess."

Critics say Trump could threaten California's climate and energy policies if the state moves forward with grid regionalization. That's because any CAISO expansion would need to be approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which regulates interstate electricity markets. Trump can fill three open seats on the five-member commission immediately and a fourth seat in July, after an Obama appointee's term comes to an end. Trump will control all five seats by mid-2019.

Matthew Freedman, a staff attorney at the Utility Reform Network, a California ratepayer watchdog, said Trump's FERC appointees could create several problems for California. They could reject the voting structure of the Western States Committee, for instance, or deny California the ability to take carbon pollution into account when deciding which energy sources to import from other states. FERC could also hear challenges to California's renewable energy mandate, if a coal generator in Wyoming, for example, were to argue the mandate infringes on interstate commerce.

Labor union attorney Marc Joseph, who has represented the Coalition of California Utility Employees and the State Building & Construction Trades Council of California in regional grid discussions, said he "can't imagine why California would turn over writing the rules for its energy markets to Donald Trump."

"Since he would be able to set the rules and the Koch brothers and the coal companies will be in charge, there’s no scenario under which regionalization makes sense," Joseph said.

Expansion proponents aren't too worried. They point to a legal opinion that four respected law professors, including one from UCLA and two from UC Berkeley, drafted for CAISO last year. The legal scholars found that while there's already some risk of the federal government interfering with California's climate laws, bringing PacifiCorp into the fold would do nothing to increase that risk.

"We haven't heard any pushback on our legal conclusions, in part because we didn't think this was controversial," said Ann Carlson, co-director of UCLA's Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and one of the legal opinion's authors.

Still, critics point out that Trump was an unconventional candidate who ran an unpredictable campaign. In his first few days in office, he's already made a habit of shattering political norms.

"How craven will these folks be in attempting to use their power to undermine California's policies? It's an open question, and we don't know the answer," Freedman said. "But people are really on edge about this, and for good reason."

RELATED: Why fighting climate change won't destroy the economy

Trump is also expected to eliminate or stop enforcing many of former President Barack Obama's climate policies, include the Clean Power Plan, an EPA regulation designed to shift electricity generation from coal to cleaner energy sources. Ritchie, from the Sierra Club, said proponents of grid expansion had described the Clean Power Plan as a "backstop" that would push coal plants in Utah and Wyoming toward retirement, regardless of any attempts by those states to tilt CAISO decision-making in coal's favor. Now, that backstop is gone.

More broadly, Trump's presidency could heighten the pre-existing tensions between California and some of its western neighbors, emboldening red-state politicians to fight to protect their fossil fuel industries and making Golden State lawmakers more wary of compromise.

"California has started to assert itself, and really sees itself as a bulwark against a lot of anticipated anti-environmental Trump policies," Ritchie said. "I think they’re going to be very hesitant now to sacrifice any of their oversight or authority over the grid, particularly if that sharing of power or regionalization is with red coal states like Wyoming and Utah."

READ PART 3: Who will profit if PacifiCorp joins the California grid?

Sammy Roth writes about energy and the environment for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.

(Editor's note: Travel to Wyoming and Sacramento for this series was funded by the Society of Environmental Journalists, as part of its Fund for Environmental Journalism, through a grant provided by the Energy Foundation. The Energy Foundation played no role in deciding which stories the Society of Environmental Journalists chose to fund.)