California leading the pack?

California Poised to Act On Its Own on Global Warming

California has had an immense impact on environmental issues, and is poised to have more.

[One] bill would bar California utilities from buying electricity from out-of-state power plants that generate large quantities of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. That would force more than two dozen coal-fired plants under development in the West to adopt non-polluting technologies or lose a piece of the California market.

This ties directly into some of the research I've been doing this summer. The electricity networks of the United States are divided into East and West. (The line runs down the country, with Montana on one side and the Dakotas on the other at its top, and squiggles around to finally cut through the eastern portion of New Mexico. It is neither straight, nor does it follow state boundaries exactly.) California is the dominant electricity market in the "Western Interconnection", so every energy exporter (and every state that wants to be an energy exporter) as well as B.C. and other Canadian provinces in the Interconnection, want to sell to it. And that's just electricity, not petroleum products that are actually delivered as petroleum.

Purely from an economic standpoint, when California shifts, its suppliers must listen. Other members of the Western Interconnection seem to be doing so. Most of the resource-rich states (coal and wind) in the upper Midwest have taken strides in the past three years or so to establish state-level bodies to help grow their electricity transmission capacity (these tend to be sparse states, and a sparsely populated state doesn't grow a lot of transmission lines), and to promote the development of "zero-emission" clean-coal plants. Caveat: I'm a little down on the plants, myself, but that may be a) b/c I know full well that wishing for a technological advancement ("zero-emission") *now* isn't enough to trigger one actually happening, and b) all this research I've done this summer on this subject has been for an organization promoting wind energy.