Et Tu, Jerry?

There have been some positive developments on the energy front recently. The California CCA Crimes Bill, AB976, was delayed for another year in the California legislature following vocal opposition from California municipalities and Community Choice activists at the legislative hearing. This is good news - no dirty tricks got through this year. Germany and Japan are learning the lesson of Fukushima even if President Obama cannot - that is a consolation anyway. And Jerry Brown has recently indicated that his administration will now focus its efforts on implementation of the new Governor's energy policy to bring an historic amount of renewable distributed generation to California's communities.

This is also good news. But Governor Brown III is going to need some new help, and some better advice than he has received recently based on his public remarks, if he is to pull anything off. He told the New York Times that "(W)hen local communities try to block installation of solar like they did in San Luis Obispo, we act to overcome the opposition." Jerry mischaracterizes the true opponents of renewable distributed generation - PG&E and the would-be power monopolies of California who appear to be advising him that environmentalists are actually the problem.

Sound new and smart to you? I remain concerned. Meanwhile, Governor Brown has remained studiously silent on Community Choice programs in Marin, San Francisco, and Sonoma, where real efforts are underway to bring real, scaled renewable distributed generation to California in a big way. There is much of Northern California looking to implement energy localization with CCA but Jerry's silence is reminiscent of former Governor Schwarzenegger, who liked to get along and go along with the big boys, make a nice speech, hang out with celebrities and super-rich, while having all the right opinions. It is political fence-sitting. Unfortunately, the governor appears to be taking a "Lite Green" approach reminiscent of former Governor (and Brown aide) Gray Davis, with an Obamasque absence of coherence that distinctly smells of PG&E, dissembling, and misdirected hubris.

Bad news started shortly after Brown's election when he hired former Number 2 at PG&E Nancy McFadden as the Number 3 in his new administration (Former PG&E Number One Peter Darbee then shortly thereafter resigned from PG&E in disgrace - largely for what he did with Ms. McFadden on Prop 16). Considering that Ms. McFadden's $46M corporate anti-CCA missile was the ultimate threat to renewable distributed generation in California last year, I could not help feel provoked by this apparent indifference to the actual outcome in California's infamous, prolonged energy policy crisis. It reeks of America's chronic political problems with corporate domination of government, and  I cannot help but think that a contradiction has begun to appear putting Brown at variance with his ambitious campaign materials on energy policy.

Having written Jerry's mayoral platform when he first ran for mayor of Oakland in 1998, I am familiar with the dynamics of forgetting campaign promises, and the Governor's saber-rattling talk about crushing environmentalists like those on the Mexican border who opposed the Sunrise Powerlink, or San Luis Obispo, where activists opposed a huge solar power plant but are actively proposing local distributed renewable generation to actually serve San Luis Obispo communities, which my company Local Power is now in fact helping San Luis Obispo County to analyze. To discuss NIMBYism out of context is dangerously misleading, because Jerry is blaming environmentalists for blocking green power when in fact his friends at PG&E are blocking it with everything they've got. This behavior is not good news for solar in California.

PG&E crushed and marginalized energy efficiency and blocked greener competition ruthlessly while Brown was Attorney General in recent years. The governor knows all about PG&E's corporate governance problem, deregulation, utility gaming and market manipulation, the bankruptcy bailouts, Prop 16 and abuse of the political process, San Bruno, and the rest. But today he shows not a sign of genuflection. He should know how to judge whether to place hope in California's mega-utilities to deliver energy decentralization in California - or to focus his mental laser beam attack on actual market barriers like PG&E that sling multi-million dollar budgets like a six-shooter, not Sierra Club volunteers defending their land.

There is scent of a bully here - and inside every bully is the heart of a coward.  If Jerry chickens out and pretends he can patsy-cake PG&E, Edison and Sempra into doing the right thing, while being tough on environmentalists! Alas, he is sadly mistaken. Gray Davis failed and was recalled because he was bullied by PG&E and the utilities, and didn't have the courage to confront bad actors and use the power he had to force real change on an industry that has totally succeeded in blocking change for decades. Instead Governor Davis tried to do a deal and fake it to the public, and got wiped off the map - will Jerry learn from Gray's Christmas Past?

AB 976: RoboCorp Attack on Local Power Inc.?

California’s statewide International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) has found a Los Angeles-based junior Assembly Member to file legislation, to be heard in the California Assembly this month, that would create a new crime in California – a crime that regulates what I do for a living. My small California-based company, Local Power Inc., is a longtime consultant to the city of San Francisco as well as Sonoma County helping prepare these communities to implement Community Choice (CCA). After a dozen unpaid years pushing for CCA in Marin County, we opted not to try to be a consultant, and instead bid to actually provide power and localize energy production. With broad stroke language, AB976 would appear make it illegal for my company to help these cities implement their CCA programs.

Government consulting is a competitive business with much stricter fairness and transparency than a monopoly like PG&E offers. We competed against Shell and lost for Marin’s business - Local Power Works lost, and Shell got to eat PG&E’s lunch. That is American competition no? I raised the money to pay for organizing our consortium of local companies and spent $150K to write Local Power Works' bid. AB976 would police my clients for doing business with us and prevent us from working if our programs are successfully implemented. Hm?

Local Power Inc. is not criminal for creating CCA and forcing competition on PG&E. To PG&E or the IBEW or the bill's sponsor, competition is criminal - and small companies like Local Power Inc. are sleazy consultants trying to fleece local governments in California. PG&E is free to write bills like AB976 or Prop 16 and pay to get them passed - like proposing a constitutional amendment to preempt local governments doing CCA, or a law to criminalize PG&E's competitors. It is PG&E that should be policed, not local governments or Local Power Inc..

LPI is not criminal for writing San Francisco’s solar bond authority and seeding the solar finance movement in America. PG&E does have issues that call for policing – it runs a political machine that is hostile to the green power efforts of communities in Northern California.  Enron was no better, but PG&E has become comparable in its banality - its use of the 'good government' ruse to harm the public. Peter Darbee didn’t resign last month for nothing. But does America have a political memory? Now with Assembly Member Hall's bill, the IBEW would banish memory itself  – making it illegal to work for a decade or more for a government to design and implement CCA. This bill would amount to criminalizing the CCA movement in California.

AB976 would invent a new crime just for us.  I live in the Bay Area living in Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, San Francisco, and Marin. I work for these local governments because this is where I live - part of our true interest in localism. Is this a crime? Local Power has spent thirteen years in San Francisco preparing its H Bond and CCA Program, Marin County thirteen years too, and Sonoma County six years. Funny that the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers would come for my job!  Would they like similar restrictions on PG&E, a mega-corporation? Unions – against local governments and for monopolies? Our medieval fathers would weep.

I am not accustomed to playing the special interest, so I suppose the IBEW, (was PG&E behind this? I do not know) is teaching me a lesson for being such as high-handed activist: it appears that my small business, extant for 15 years but still very small, is being branded as a potential criminal. Goliath calls David bully – when in fact the real bully has a black eye for being playing RoboCorp with California governments less than a year ago.

The bill is now in third reading after passing unanimously out of committee. Assembly Member Hall is sponsor, and it has passed the Assembly Appropriations committee.  The bill would make it a crime for Local Power Inc. (localpower.com) to help cities implement the plans we are helping them make for large-scale energy localization – through “CCA” – Community Choice Aggregation. PG&E has been fighting the right of communities to purchase their power from competitive suppliers. They have spent hundreds of millions on Public Relations to fight Community Choice in the Bay Area ($46M on Prop 16 in 2010), as much on lawyering and lobbying, and have lost at the voting booths. Whereas Prop 16 required supermajority support for a municipality to even investigate CCA, AB976 would now propose to criminalize the companies that work for CCAs: in effect, to police local governments, which are already subject to Brown Act and Sunshine Act laws.

The bill says any consultant performing work for a CCA in preparation for implementation of a local energy service, would be classified as criminal for helping the same government implement that program.

Last year PG&E failed in its floating of Proposition 16.  They put it forward as a good government bill to prevent government abuse, but it was recognized for what it was: corporate attack on the government’s ability to govern where it has any impact on PG&E’s quasi-monopoly revenues. The voters rejected Prop 16. Assembly member Hall’s bill, AB 976, is a test of the legislature’s stupidity – would it accept the proposal of a corporate market abuser (CEO Peter Darbee just got fired for what he did on Prop 16) as if to prevent CCAs from being criminal? Failing to win public approval of the state to police local governments who dare implement the 2002 CCA law, PG&E’s handlers now shuffle forward a bill and ask the legislature to criminalize the firms that work with local governments

PG&E has no such requirements -  energy monopolies are quietly left out of AB976. PG&E can continue to consult the local governments in its service territory on any energy of energy efficiency programs they have or want to have (witness PG&E’s foray into Zero Energy Cities)  but also control the electricity services that are physically provided for all of Northern California: and have controlled them for a century.

What is worse, unlike municipalities, which are elected and transparent, California’s electricity monopolies have closed meetings and are Wall Street oriented. Who is policing whom?  Corporations over local government. Sounds like globalization to you?