SLECC Key Challenges and State and Local Solutions Database
Challenge/Local/State
Fragmented, complex, and unstable incentive programs, with inconsistent messaging and rigid rules, make it difficult for homeowners, renters, and contractors to plan, stack benefits, or move projects forward, leading to missed opportunities and abandoned retrofits.
Challenge/Local/State
Fragmented, non-standardized, and overly complex grant processes disproportionately drain the limited capacity of small, rural, tribal, and under-resourced organizations, leaving less time for actual planning and implementation.
Challenge/Local/State
Rising Electricity Rates Undermine the Household Electrification Value Proposition. High and rising electricity costs discourage households from switching from gas to electric systems, slowing a key pathway for emissions reductions. Despite available incentives, electricity rates remain high relative to gas, leading many households to delay electrification and limiting the value of energy efficiency measures that could otherwise reduce demand and bills.
Challenge/Local/State
Climate-driven hazards such as extreme heat, wildfire, flooding, and severe storms increasingly disrupt California’s power system, triggering prolonged outages and PSPS events that endanger vulnerable residents and strain local response capacity. These disruptions are escalating—with documented week-long blackouts, wildfire-exposed transmission corridors, and projected 20% grid-capacity losses from heat and flooding—highlighting the urgent need for greater local resilience and system redundancy.
Challenge/Local/State
Chronic Staff Capacity Constraints. Small, rural, and under-resourced jurisdictions often rely on one planner to manage CEQA, General Plan updates, grant applications, and GHG inventories and CAPs, leaving little capacity for sustained climate planning or implementation. Climate work is added onto existing roles, and complex, non-user-friendly state guidance further exacerbates inequities with better-resourced jurisdictions that have dedicated climate staff.
Challenge/Local/State
Performative engagement and the illusion of inclusion. Climate planning processes routinely invite community participation while keeping real decision-making power with entrenched institutional actors; collecting input that is rarely acted upon, eroding trust, and making meaningful engagement progressively harder to sustain.
Challenge/Local/State
Practical barriers (including lack of compensation, childcare, transportation, and digital access) make sustained participation structurally inaccessible for frontline and under-resourced community members even when formal invitations exist.
Challenge/Local/State
Regional climate hubs, shared staffing models, and COG/REN-led technical assistance networks that pool expertise, standardize methods, align state–local requirements, and provide sustained planning and implementation support for under-resourced jurisdictions.
Challenge/Local/State
Streamline and modernize state grant applications through a common application, longer timelines, simplified requirements, and upgraded digital platforms. A unified, equity-centered grant system would reduce administrative burden, improve transparency, and expand access for under-resourced applicants.
Challenge/Local/State
Design climate planning processes so that community-identified needs drive funding priorities rather than the reverse. Local and regional agencies should build sustained partnerships with CBO networks and ongoing advisory structures that enable continuous involvement, reducing engagement fatigue and ensuring underrepresented communities have lasting influence rather than episodic, grant-driven access.
Challenge/Local/State
Structural barriers systematically exclude tribal nations, farmworker communities, smaller local governments, and other marginalized groups from climate planning; leaving well-resourced actors to dominate processes and producing plans that fail to reflect the priorities of those most impacted.
Challenge/Local/State
Deliver outreach about retrofit and electrification programs through trusted CBOs, CCAs, RENs, and local intermediaries who provide unified, culturally grounded messaging that rebuilds trust and reduces confusion. Effective navigator models include language access and equity supports (translation, interpretation, childcare, and food) to reach low-income, rural, Tribal, and linguistically diverse communities where they are.
Challenge/Local/State
Offer concierge-style technical assistance to help households and small businesses move from interest to completion (explaining retrofit options, navigating requirements, stacking incentives, completing applications, and coordinating next steps) reducing drop-off from program complexity and improving equitable access to electrification and resilience upgrades.
Challenge/Local/State
Local governments should work through counties, COGs, and regional climate authorities to jointly implement programs, aggregate projects, and coordinate procurement and delivery, enabling shared staffing and systematically documenting successful practices as replicable toolkits so jurisdictions are not solving the same problems independently.
Challenge/Local/State
Partner with higher-capacity organizations and regional conveners to distribute grant writing, administration, and reporting burdens, allowing CBOs and smaller jurisdictions to focus on community-facing delivery while partners with greater administrative capacity handle compliance, fiscal management, and reporting, reducing redundancy and expanding equitable access to competitive funding.
Challenge/Local/State
Build citizen oversight structures with real decision-making authority into climate planning projects, treating lived experience and grassroots leadership as equal to technical expertise. Local agencies should include CBOs, tribal partners, and frontline residents as co-designers of plans and projects rather than advisors, strengthening community ownership, trust, and implementation outcomes.
Challenge/Local/State
Older housing stock creates major barriers to electrification and resilience upgrades. Many homes require costly pre-work such as electrical panel upgrades, insulation improvements, and appliance replacement before zero-emission systems can be installed, making retrofits difficult to scale and disproportionately burdening low- and moderate-income households without affordability-first program design.
Challenge/Local/State
Regulatory and utility incentive structures block distributed clean energy. CPUC policies, IOU rules, tariffs, and utility business incentives prioritize centralized infrastructure over distributed solutions, discouraging microgrids, community solar, CCAs, and third-party partnerships, slowing decentralized clean energy even when aligned with state goals.
Challenge/Local/State
Distribution and transmission systems are aging and undersized. They cannot support the rapid increase in load from EVs, heat pumps and electrification and are increasingly stressed by climate-driven disruptions such as extreme heat, wildfires, and storms.
Challenge/Local/State
State-funded, regionally delivered technical assistance and staffing support—through LCI, SGC, COGs, RENs, and partners—that provides sustained training, templates, shared staff positions, and grant-embedded capacity funding to reduce reliance on consultants and enable implementation.
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