LA Net Zero 2035: The Key Decisions That Will Determine Whether the City's Climate Plan Lives or Dies

Los Angeles has roughly 3,300 days to eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions from a metro area of 10 million people. The LA Department of Water and Power's own internal tracking, reviewed by city council staff this spring, shows the city is running behind on three of its five major decarbonization benchmarks — and the decisions made between now and the end of 2026 will largely determine whether the 2035 target survives as policy or quietly gets rewritten into something more forgiving.

This matters now because the window for course correction is closing fast. Capital projects take years to permit and build. The city is simultaneously absorbing the financial shock of the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, managing Karen Bass's ongoing housing emergency, and trying to retrofit an aging transit grid before the 2028 Olympics open at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Every dollar is already spoken for twice over, and emissions policy competes directly with all of it.

Where the Numbers Actually Stand

LADWP supplied roughly 36 percent of its electricity from renewable sources in 2025, against a statutory requirement to hit 60 percent by 2030 under California's SB 100. That 24-point gap is the single biggest structural problem. The utility's Intermountain Power Project in Utah — which is converting from coal to green hydrogen — is years behind schedule and hundreds of millions over its original budget. Meanwhile, the city's building sector accounts for approximately 43 percent of total local greenhouse gas emissions, according to the LA City Climate Emergency Mobilization Office's 2024 annual report. Almost none of those buildings are being electrified fast enough to matter by 2035.

The LA Green New Deal, adopted in 2019, laid out the architecture: zero-emissions buses on every Metro line by 2030, net-zero new construction by 2023 (already achieved on paper), and a ban on new gas appliances in residential buildings. That gas appliance ban, which took effect in 2023 for new construction in unincorporated county areas, still has not been extended to the existing building stock — the roughly 900,000 older residential units in neighborhoods from Boyle Heights to Reseda to Leimert Park that still rely on gas furnaces and water heaters.

The cost to retrofit a single-family home from gas to all-electric runs between $15,000 and $40,000 depending on panel upgrades, according to estimates from the nonprofit Grid Alternatives, which operates a low-income solar program with offices near the intersection of Venice Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. Federal Inflation Reduction Act rebates have cushioned some of that cost, but the IRA's clean energy provisions are under active threat in Congress, and city planners are quietly modeling scenarios in which those rebates disappear entirely after 2026.

The Decisions That Cannot Wait

Three specific choices land on the city's desk before December 31. First, the Los Angeles City Council must decide whether to extend the existing reach of the Building Electrification Ordinance to pre-2023 commercial properties — a move that would trigger retrofits across roughly 85,000 buildings but would also generate immediate opposition from the Building Industry Association of Southern California. Second, LADWP's board needs to approve or reject a long-term power purchase agreement with a utility-scale battery storage project proposed for the Mojave Desert near Kramer Junction; without that storage, the renewable percentage gains of the next four years cannot be reliably dispatched to the grid. Third, the Mayor's office must publish an updated Climate Action Plan incorporating post-fire infrastructure realities — a document that was due in March and has not appeared.

Metro's zero-emissions bus transition offers the clearest near-term proof point. The agency had 130 battery-electric buses in service as of June 2026 out of a fleet of roughly 2,200. It has contracts for 942 more, with deliveries scheduled through 2028. That rollout, centered on the new Division 8 facility in Sun Valley, is the one piece of the plan unambiguously on track. Everything else is subject to revision — and the revision season starts now.