California Aims To Store More Solar Power and Wind Power To Boost Its Electricity Supply And Broaden Supply Base

California hopes to increase its solar and wind storage capabilities in order to integrate renewable power into its electricity grid, Reuters reports Monday.

"We can't just rely on sunlight," California Gov. Jerry Brown recently told the Intersolar conference in San Francisco. "We've got to bottle the sunlight."

The movement toward storing solar and wind power comes as the Golden State aims to make renewable energy one-third of the state’s electricity supply by 2020. California wants to store as much as 1.3 gigawatts by 2020, which is enough to power more than 1 million homes.

A report published by Environment America Research and Policy Center last month, titled “Lighting the Way, What We Can Learn from America’s Top 12 Solar States,” highlighted California as one of the top 12 states that are leading the U.S. in solar power.

The report emphasized that it is not direct sunlight that makes California a solar leader, but it is the state's and local government's policies toward the development of solar power.

The push to store the renewable energy has fired up a technological race that has already attracted venture capitalists Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, LG Chem Ltd. (KRX:051915), General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) and even Bill Gates, Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq:MSFT) founder.

Lux Research, a market research firm, said that California’s proposal is the first state legislation that will have an immediate impact on the grid storage market, which the company says will soar to installations worth $10.4 billion in 2017 from $200 million from 2012.