Author: Edward Ring

Edward Ring is the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. The California Policy Center is an educational non-profit focused on public policies that aim to improve California’s democracy and economy. He is also a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. Ring is the author of two books: "Fixing California - Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism" (2021), and "The Abundance Choice - Our Fight for More Water in California" (2022).

Ringside: Without Sediment Removal in the Delta, Catastrophic Flooding is Coming to California

August 27, 2026 8:14 amAugust 27, 2026 8:14 am

In the cities and farms immediately south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the worst flooding of the 20th century happened in 1997. Several days of unrelenting rain pummeled the slopes of the Sierras, and with the snow line unusually high at...

Ringside: Iron Air Batteries – Niche, or Next Big Thing?

August 19, 2026 2:52 pmAugust 19, 2026 2:52 pm

Iron air batteries appear poised to play, at the least, an important niche role in the emerging electric age. A very recent example of this is the $750 million equity financing that Form Energy secured this week, raising the total investment in...

Is Covering California’s Aqueducts and Canals with Solar Panels Economical?

August 13, 2026 6:30 amAugust 13, 2026 8:15 am

Earlier this week, a respected YouTube channel covering the future of technology and energy released a video exploring the viability of solar panels covering California’s canals and aqueducts. The videos are hosted by Ricky Roy, a California-based mechanical engineer whose channel is...

Ringside: Debunking the Allegedly Prohibitive Cost of Desalination

August 5, 2026 12:00 pmAugust 5, 2026 12:00 pm

Earlier this summer a guest op-ed appeared in the Orange County Register, “Learning the right lesson from San Diego’s desal water surplus.” But the “lesson” presented was only partly accurate. What the authors, both affiliated with the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC),...

Ringside: A Fact-Based Appraisal of California’s ‘Net Zero’ Strategy

July 30, 2026 6:00 amJuly 30, 2026 6:01 am

The Statistical Review of World Energy is arguably the most authoritative and comprehensive source publicly available for national and global energy statistics. And a funny thing happened between the report issued in 2024 and the report issued in 2025. “Renewables” as a...

Ringside: Dredging the Delta Can Prevent a Catastrophe

July 22, 2026 3:00 pmJuly 22, 2026 3:01 pm

It’s January 2027, and for the last few months, a super El Nino has already delivered torrential rains to the Pacific Coast of North America. California’s reservoirs have been releasing record quantities of water to preserve space for the next round...

Ringside: Commercializing Hydrocarbon Production from Air and Water

July 16, 2026 8:30 amJuly 16, 2026 8:31 am

Whenever evaluating a new energy technology, caution is warranted. During what was arguably the first big clean tech boom around 2009, schemes were sold to angel investors thrilled to find a hot sector in the wake of the recent financial...