The Brief

California has nearly two million homes with rooftop solar — a major success. But that scale-up has largely left out nearly half of Californians who rent.

In Los Angeles, that number is even higher: more than 60% of people rent, according to 2021 data from the Southern California Association of Governments.

Now the California Public Utilities Commission is set to vote on Thursday on a proposal that could significantly cut current incentives for apartments, businesses and schools to put solar on their rooftops.

What does the proposal say?

The proposal changes the rules around “Virtual Net Energy Metering,” or VNEM, and “Net Energy Metering Aggregation,” or NEMA. The programs as they currently stand allow properties with multiple electric meters — such as apartments, schools, strip malls, etc. — to get paid back for the amount of excess electricity they generate on their properties and sell back to the utility grid, thus making solar more affordable for a wider array of people and businesses.

While the newly revised proposal still allows this credit for apartment residents, though at a lower compensation rate, it excludes energy use in apartment common spaces, such as shared laundry, outdoor lighting, gyms, and electric vehicle charging stations. Solar advocates and rental industry associations argue that makes apartment owners even less likely to install solar because the savings don’t pencil out.

Putting more solar panels on rooftops can help offset the need for utility-scale solar fields, but experts say both are necessary to generate the amount of electricity needed for a cleaner energy future.

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Patrick T. Fallon

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AFP via Getty Images

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For schools, the proposal not only reduces the compensation for the excess electricity they send back to the grid we all rely on, but also requires them to pay the full retail price for the electricity they consume, even during the day when using the power from their solar panels.

The proposed changes don't apply to qualifying low-income apartments.

“We need to sprint, and we're throwing up these barriers to actually building renewable energy, while at the same time patting ourselves on the back like we're climate change heroes,” said Bernadette del Chiaro, executive director of the solar trade organization the California Solar and Storage Association.

She said a similar cut to rooftop solar incentives for single-family homes last year has already led to a steep drop off in the solar market — 80% year over year by her organization’s calculations. The L.A. Times reported that the nation’s largest solar installer, Sunrun, laid off 1,000 people since the policy change.

Investor-owned utilities including Southern California Edison argue the change is needed to avoid what they call a “cost shift” — that apartment dwellers and businesses without solar are bearing the burden of higher electricity rates and fixed costs, while those with solar disproportionately save on those costs under the current rules. They also say the complexity of accurately crediting multifamily properties is another challenge and added cost because it’s difficult to understand who is using how much solar energy and when in a multi-family or multi-business building.

Last year, California cut incentives for installing solar on single-family homes. Now the state is proposing cutting incentives for buildings such as apartments and schools.

“At SCE, we want to make sure that customers are paying a fair price for power,” said Jeff Monford, a spokesperson for the utility. “We believe that the incentives for producers of energy via solar are no longer needed to establish that industry like they were in the past. As we move forward into the clean energy future, we think it's time to reduce those subsidies and not introduce more of them, especially because the cost of power has such a disproportionate effect on customers who are not able to participate in solar generation.”

A renter’s perspective

Sean Draper rents an apartment in Simi Valley and has worked in the solar industry for the last seven years. He’s kept a close eye on solar decisions made by the state. He wants to talk to his landlord about installing solar, but worries the proposed changes to current policy make it unrealistic.

“I feel like it is going to be, as I try to engage in that conversation with ownership here, a bit of an uphill battle,” Draper said.

While he said leaving the credit for residents is a step in the right direction, the lack of inclusion for similar credits in shared spaces in apartments, such as EV chargers, doesn’t make it cost-effective for apartment owners.

“Gas where I am is up to $5, $6 dollars a gallon and we're all feeling the pinch,” he said. “I'm currently contemplating purchasing an electric vehicle and without that access to low cost energy, it’s just becoming rapidly less and less practical.”

He also has concerns for his friends with small businesses, because the credit would only apply to residential tenants in rental properties, not commercial tenants.

“I think that the only thing that makes sense is to continue to allow onsite netting of power for all tenants, commercial and residential,” Draper said. “I think the proposed rule for residential strikes a really good balance between providing benefits to residential tenants who are – many of us – living paycheck to paycheck, but also provides a small amount of relief to the utilities in terms of them being able to provide less compensation for the [power] generation.”

More than that, he said more solar is needed for a healthier planet. He worries this rule change will set California further back on its clean energy goals.

“I've got kids,” he said. “The world they live in hinges on us making the right decisions now.”

What schools say 

With already extremely tight margins, school districts across the state have raised alarm bells about the effects of the proposed decision. They’re particularly concerned about the changes that would require them to pay the full retail price for electricity, even when using their own energy generated onsite.

Solar panels on the top of Playa Vista Elementary School.

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Courtesy of LAUSD

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“These unfair practices help utility companies and hurt students,” L.A. Unified School District wrote in a statement posted to X, formerly known as Twitter. “Rising energy costs will make it harder for Los Angeles Unified [to] reach its climate goals, and these costs will come out of our classroom, hurting our ability to reduce emissions, electrify our schools, and invest [in] safe and healthy learning environments for our children.”

Schools are being mandated by state law to electrify school buses and add solar panels, among other things. Solar installation costs come out of their facilities budgets, but the state doesn’t have an ongoing funding source for school bonds that power those budgets — that’s why we see school bond measures on our ballots every few years.

Solar panels in a parking lot outside South East High School, an L.A. Unified School District campus in South Gate. (Photo courtesy of LAUSD)

At the same time, to receive financial benefits under the new proposal, schools would need to install battery storage for each meter — batteries are still expensive and new technology that would require modernizing meters on their campuses. But the state only provides funding for modernization every 25 years, said Nancy Chaires Espinoza, executive director of advocacy group the School Energy Coalition.

“California’s over 10,000 schools are critical to the state’s ability to meet its clean energy goals,” Espinoza wrote in an email to LAist. “We are excited to be a part of this transition. We simply ask that new mandates be feasible for us to implement and adequately financed to avoid further depleting our resources for educating students.”

The Long Beach Unified School District is looking for a new operator to handle a major after-school program following the city of Long Beach’s decision not to participate in an attempt to save money.

Since 2002, the city’s Parks Department has helped anchor the initiative, known to families as WRAP. It provides free programming for hundreds of transitional-kindergarten through eighth-grade students across seven local campuses: Garfield, Edison, King, Grant, Lafayette, Burbank and Herrera.

Long Beach Unified officials stress that the vital student services will continue under a new operator this fall. It’s not clear yet who it will be and what, if any, changes they’ll make.

The city’s quiet retreat from the program has sparked deep anxiety among three full-time and 80 part-time municipal workers who now face potential layoffs.

Workers say they were first notified of the decision during a June 15 staff meeting with a city superintendent, where they were told their employment with the program would conclude on Aug. 15.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” said one 13-year city employee based at an elementary school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her position. “I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for 13 years; we had people there that had been doing it over 20 years that had never moved sites.”

Today, the before- and after-school services are paid for primarily through the state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), a combination of California’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) grant and specific ELOP apportionments.

Historically, the city was granted this funding by the school district without a formal bidding process, typically receiving roughly $15 per student plus administrative fees, which it supplemented with allocations from its own general fund.

This year, however, the school district was forced to overhaul its grant-funding process and consider bids to meet tightening state mandates for the program’s ELOP funding.

Shortly after, the city informed the school district it would not bid on the program.

City spokesperson Jennifer De Prez said the decision “was made so that the department can focus its limited financial resources” on other programs it runs.

The city is facing an estimated $61 million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year — a deficit that top administrators warn makes citywide reductions inevitable.

The city could not immediately provide numbers on how much money it expected to save by ending its participation in the WRAP program. Last year, the city provided $193,254 of in-kind-services at its own expense on top of the program’s grant-funded budget, according to documents provided by De Prez.

Meanwhile, the school district went ahead with a bid application for a replacement operator on May 22. Proposals were due June 12 and are scheduled to go before the Board of Education for consideration at its July 15 meeting.

District officials emphasized that the state funding remains fully intact and that student services will continue without interruption.

The district and the city are also working on a joint letter to families detailing the transition, which is scheduled to be sent out soon.

But for the frontline staff, the transition has been destabilizing and abrupt.

These part-time employees, who work between 20 and 30 hours per week depending on the season, rotate through campuses where individual site enrollment ranges from 85 to 160 students.

The employee who spoke with the Post said that despite directives from supervisors to keep the changes quiet until future plans solidified, she chose to notify parents so they would have time to prepare.

“As a parent, I would want to know if it’s not the same people that I’ve trusted my kids with for years,” she said.

The long-term fate of the workforce remains unresolved, forcing many to look for employment elsewhere.

“As far as employment opportunities, they didn’t lay us off, they didn’t fire us, they just basically told us the contract with the schools will be done August 15,” the anonymous employee said. “Past that, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

City officials say they will soon meet with representatives of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union to discuss the workers’ future.

“We are committed to ensuring this process is transparent, informed by complete information, and focused on protecting both employees and the quality and continuity of the vital services the WRAP program provides to the Long Beach community,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a spokesperson with IAM 947.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with more information about the program’s cost to the city.

A community organization in Los Angeles is criticizing how the FBI enforced a strict no-drone policy around World Cup venues after federal agents disrupted a community gardening event in South L.A.

The incident took place the first Sunday of the tournament, while crowds were watching matches at the FIFA Fan Festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Nearby, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site.

Then someone flew a drone to photograph the moment. Minutes later, Department of Homeland Security agents and Los Angeles police officers were on the scene, according to Bz Zhang, a project manager who was helping run the event. Soon the FBI arrived. They confiscated the drone and fined the person operating it.

The Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site when authorities arrived.

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Wendy Salvador

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" We were unknowingly in violation of federal airspace, and we were told that we were a threat to national security," said Zhang, who witnessed the encounter.

The drone had violated temporary flight restrictions implemented for the World Cup. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned unauthorized drones within "3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level" around stadiums on match days and also prohibited them around certain fan events, like the one at the Coliseum.

Since the tournament started in L.A., federal authorities have seized dozens of drones near SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, according to the FBI. In total, more than 600 drones have been confiscated across the country.

The crackdown is part of an effort across all 11 U.S. host cities to identify and remove unauthorized drones from the skies around World Cup venues and fan events. Ahead of the tournament, FEMA awarded host cities $250 million specifically to combat drone usage.

"We knew we needed to act quickly to keep the World Cup safe from the rising threat of unmanned aircraft systems and that’s exactly what we did,” said Karen Evans, FEMA's acting cdministrator, in a statement announcing those funds.

But Zhang said that the incident at the garden represented the unintended consequences of hosting mega-events like the World Cup for ordinary community members.

" It's one thing to be aware of construction. … It's another to be expected as residents to know, to the 10th of a mile, that I'm in a particular zone and that, to the hour, I need to be in compliance," Zhang said.

Laura Eimiller, FBI spokesperson, disagreed. She said drone operators are responsible for knowing the rules and that every person in L.A. who had a drone confiscated during the World Cup also received a fine.

"There's been a zero-tolerance approach," Eimiller said.

Hiding out among the luxury beachfront condos in the Newport Beach neighborhood of Corona Del Mar is an outpost where scientists have been conducting important marine research for nearly a century.

And you can go check the place out for yourself.

A ‘magical’ marine station 

With its Spanish style architecture that includes a central tower and red-tiled roof, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory looks like it’s been teleported in from another time and place.

Originally built as a boat and club house, it was purchased by Caltech in 1929 for use as a beachfront science outpost.

Victoria Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science at Caltech and director of the Kerckhoff Marine Lab, said the place is one of the oldest running marine labs on the West Coast.

“There’s something just really magical about marine stations. They’re rustic, so it’s not like you’re going into a fully polished clean room. But that’s part of the charm and you really feel the history,” Orphan said.

One of her favorite spots? The tower. That’s where Orphan said some famous papers were written.

“Sometimes when I have writer’s block, I’ll go and sit in the tower and try to channel the scientists of old,” she told LAist.

That would include the work of Wheeler North, one of Orphan’s heroes. From 1962 to 2002, he conducted pioneering research on the ecology of kelp forests. Orphan said North’s work was instrumental for learning how an imbalance in the sea urchin population can decimate kelp forests.

These days that important research continues, with scientists at the lab looking at how microbes can capture carbon dioxide, mitigating global warming. They even have a 4-foot, bright yellow autonomous vehicle that scans the seafloor so scientists can learn more about seagrasses, which are important for oxygen creation and carbon capture, serve as fish nurseries and help protect the coastline from storm surge.

Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar

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Courtesy Caltech photo archive

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“In areas where you have seagrass, you get less sediment erosion [and] a little more protection of the property on land, which people who live on the coast care about,” Orphan explained.

Engineers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory are also interested in using autonomous vehicles in cooperation with the lab to see how they can help study the deep ocean right outside the harbor.

You can visit the lab to learn about all of the science going on there, with free open houses on Tuesdays and monthly ‘Science and Sunsets’ events that include dinner and cocktails at the historic outpost.

A pop-up book that’s seeking to break the world record for size has unfolded at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

The art piece is 31 feet wide, more than 11 feet tall, and weighs in at 1,800 pounds.

Luceros y Penumbras, which roughly translates to “starlight and shadows,” is rooted in L.A. artist Daniel González’s experience visiting the library and his family in Mexico as a child.

“It's a knowledge tree that's been shaped by all these different things that I've learned at the library, about myself, about the city I grew up in, [and] about the town where my family's from,” González said.

The nonprofit Library Foundation of Los Angeles collaborated with the library to commission the piece as part of the Central Library’s centennial celebration.

The project is inspired, in part, by the library’s Toy Movable collection, an archive of more than 2,000 pop-up books.

“Normal pop-up books … they seem so simple, but something amazing pops out when you open the page,” said Todd Lerew, the foundation’s director of special projects. “That sort of childlike wonder that you feel that's persistent, even as an adult, is something that was really important to capture and dial up to 11 with this project.”

The origin of 'Luceros'

The foundation asked González in June 2025 to create a book that told the story of his personal relationship with the library. As González pondered questions including  ”What did the library do for me as a young person?" and "Why was I so attracted to it?" he thought about how knowledge was passed down in his family through the generations.

His grandmother told him stories about the stars above her farm near Teúl, Zacatecas, in Mexico. She said those that emerged at dawn — luceros — were among the most special because they signaled the start of a new day.

“ I looked at those stars … and the histories that my grandparents were sharing with me as these guiding lights,” González said. “Just like the library is a guiding light for many people.”

Daniel González's maternal grandmother, Isabel Gómez, told him stories about the creatures that lived near her farm, including owls, that could teach healing.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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González grew up blocks away from the Benjamin Franklin Library in Boyle Heights.

“ I spent summers there because it was literally the coolest place to be,” González said. “It just gave me the opportunity to explore anything that I had an interest in.”

Daniel González, as a child, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a kite after a trip to the library.  "My dad's like, 'I'm gonna take a picture of you so you can see what you look like when you get grumpy,'" he said.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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Later, he’d visit the Central Library during a middle school field trip and return on the bus to wander the stacks and ask the staff questions.

“ I'm really lucky that I met the people that nurtured that curiosity,” González said.

From sketches to ‘paper engineering’

First, González sketched the images, carved them into linoleum, printed them with ink and digitized them to add color and other details.

A few of Daniel González's tools. In the future, he plans to sell prints related to "Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Matthew Reinhart, children’s book author, illustrator and “paper engineer,” was tasked with translating the images into three dimensions.

“ My job is really making mistakes,” Reinhart said. “Making mistakes, figuring out where they are and solving them and — of course — making them look good.”

The construction and the fabrication of the book took the work of more than 30 people over a series of months. At least a dozen people using giant poles capped with cushions turn the pages.

Luceros y Penumbras is four pages that open to create two scenes — one of the Central Library building and another of a sprawling tree with an I Spy-like collection of creatures and images throughout. The featured pages will change throughout the exhibition, which is open until mid-November.

There are at least a dozen different symbols throughout “Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The sea turtle at the base of the tree is a reference both to the creatures that live in the San Gabriel River and to the original inhabitants of the L.A. basin. The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe tells a story that connects the region’s earthquakes to the turtles.

“When we think of sea turtles, we think of these faraway places where they live, like tropical places,” González said. “But they exist here and they've had to adapt to a changing climate, a changing environment, and find places to call home, just as people do.”

Other images include:

• A star resting in an outstretched hand in honor of Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer who also spent time in the library. 
•  Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent Aztec deity and a frequent motif in East L.A.’s murals. 
• An owl, a symbol of knowledge associated with the Greek goddess Athena and the Roman goddess Minerva. 

González said the goal is for viewers to create their own narrative about what they see.

“ I just hope that people carry with them a sense of curiosity to further explore the things that I present, but also maybe something within them,” González said.

Visit the pop-up book

Central Library Centennial Festival

On display