The Green New Real

. 

I am gratified and honored by the inclusion of Community Choice Aggregation in Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal, drafted by UMASS Amherst economist Robert Pollin, under the third bullet list of actions that Bernie will undertake when elected: "We will end greed in our energy system:"

"The renewable energy generated by the Green New Deal will be publicly owned, managed by the Federal Power Marketing Administrations, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Tennessee Valley Authority and sold to distribution utilities with a preference for public power districts, municipally- and cooperatively-owned utilities with democratic, public ownership, and other existing utilities that demonstrate a commitment to the public interest. The Department of Energy will provide technical assistance to states and municipalities that would like to establish publicly owned distribution utilities or community choice aggregation (CCA) programs in their communities. Electricity will be sold at current rates to keep the cost of electricity stable during this transition" (emphasis and acronym added - source).

I am a fervent supporter of this policy, and believe the Green New Deal to be the federal concomitant of leadership at the local level in 1500 American cities and towns through Community Choice Aggregation. In order to answer the United Nation's recent eleven year time frame for a "profound transformation of energy," America's economy must transition to new ways of surviving, based on more local resource orientation, local resilience and new forms of economic development, top among them the way we use energy for power, heat and transportation. The rapidly expanding movement for climate action through CCA throughout the United States would be a natural administrators of contractors and program staff involved implementing local and regional "climate works" projects.

It is crucial to act locally while supporting global and national initiatives: not to be lulled to sleep into a political daydream, and recognize the urgency of the United Nation's March 2019 warning that the world has eleven years to undertake a profound transformation of the energy industry in order to avoid irreversible damage to our planet. It is important to place a shake of salt on the matter, which is the likelihood of federal leadership within the UN's eleven-year time frame.  

It is also crucial not to view the present in terms of recent decades, and place all your eggs in one political basket. We have been here before, after all. The Green New Deal is not new. That was 2005. I gave a speech calling for it in Marin County then (click on video to view), to get San Francisco, Marin and other Bay Area cities to launch energy plans to solve climate change in a single public works project, "the scale of a bridge," through decentralized local energy technologies. Then in 2008, when Obama was elected, I and others called for him to implement a Green New Deal to solve climate change. My proposal was called "Climate Works" using federal "Climate Bonds." Obama's staff didn't bother to reply (nor Waxman/Boxer). The political conditions of the New Deal (a radicalized Congress), were simply not there for doing important, huge, things. 

The proposal, through popular, didn't happen in Washington, first because of Bush's natural enmity, but then because Democratic Obama couldn't get his own party to prioritize it during the first two years of the administration while it had a Congressional majority. Meanwhile, from 2005 to 2009 and 2013, Marin Clean Energy and CleanPowerSF were launched, and the rest of the Bay Area and most of California soon followed, all focused on systemic carbon reduction. "Community Choice Aggregators" are now approaching half of California customers, and also across the Midwest and Northeast US. The US is a big ship to turn, but thousands of smaller ships turn more quickly, while appearing slow. As thousands of cities and towns change, the market changes, barriers are removed, costs are lowered, and more energy systems transformed. It is like the tale of the hare and tortoise. 

Today, we dreamily re-ruminate a dream of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but in reality the federal government has been good for little for many decades. Yet psychologically, the national ritual of federal debate and legislation creates the illusion of achieving something as if through gesture or catharsis (as if to reform public morals!). 

Local governments mostly do things, actually - unlike state politics, which "achieves" things in brief spectacles followed by national nap and a nice glass of amnesia. With local government, doing things takes time, but something actually happens: only the the tortoise can actually make it to the finish line. I'm glad Bernie's version of the Green New Deal recognizes the central role that CCAs and traditional municipal utilities and cooperatives play in designing and implementing projects that the federal government supports.  

A transformation of energy and other infrastructure requires planning, design, and purposeful coordination of local public agencies. The original New Deal, I said in my speech before Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-coal keynote at the Marin County Municipal Auditorium, was entirely based upon the municipal leadership of the Huey Longs of Winn Parish Louisiana, a Socialist/Populist Bastion; or the "power broker" Robert Moses who organized the planning of steel bridges in New York City, quickly copied by cities worldwide -  locally implementing a vision that had originated in the Populist, Progressive and Socialist movements of the late 19th century. Today, our Cold War mental image of public works is federal with Roosevelt's face on it, but in reality municipalities do this job. The New Deal was in this sense an emulation, co-optation or standardization of municipal public works that were already underway, asserting federal control over such projects, trading cooperation for federal funds: and postwar America was born. 

In this sense the New Deal was a watering down of a more radical municipal trend. On the one hand, the striking factor of the New Deal was its highly competent administration, scalability/impact, and cost-effectiveness in employing people during the crisis. It had to re-standardize the economy under a federal system, fundamentally marginalizing state and local governments. On the other hand, the system it created manufactured a yawning political complacency in American civil society. As America got rich with massive growth in the postwar years, many municipalities even granted their energy utilities "perpetual franchises" during these decades of corporate utopianism and the peaceful atom, reflecting the la-la land quality of political leadership concerning the energy sector, which was the focus of intense anti-communist propaganda campaigns of both the U.S. Cold War complex and Madison Avenue.   

The New Deal was thinkable and possible, because the broader civil discourse had moved so far left after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that a deal was needed to get socialists to compromise with millionaires, and a regulatory state (not socialism) was thus established and continued through the 20th century. It was, ultimately, a kicking-of-the-can down the dialectical sidewalk. A growing chorus of market fundamentalism between the Democratic and Republican party cabals since then has resulted in a toxic bipartisanship in recent decades, with a consistently inadequate commitment to addressing climate change or any other serious mega-threats, like mass extinction and endless wars.

So much of politics depends upon metaphor. When we think of public mobilizations to face a disaster, the War Production mobilization in WWII comes to mind, and the trip to the moon. "The Apollo Alliance" which most notably promoted the Green New Deal in the Obama era, and after failing was absorbed by the United Nations as the "Global Apollo Program,"  was fixated upon this Kennedy-era metaphor. Today, the Climate Mobilization calls for a Godzilla-style "WWII style mobilization" on climate change. We naturally look to the past (or to fictional archetypes), to grasp for a precedent, when in fact we need to do something new, and in a new way. 

It is no less imporant to recognize that transforming energy must (1) redevelop the private sector, which consumes 95% of energy, and (2) reduce dependency on grid resources, not merely add green power to the grid. In my 2005 Marin speech, the New Deal metaphors were steel bridges and water and sewer systems/plumbing: these are precedents for the kind of infrastructure change climate change demands. Bridges cross the municipal with scale, but the precedent of plumbing and sewer systems connects small private systems to large public systems, and is closer in this respect to the way in which carbon emissions can be reduced through an integrated powering down of grids and pipelines.  I joked to the audience about how controversial plumbing had been in the time of Cholera debate in the late 1800s, the fear government pipes crossing the lawn, and a residual public denial of the idea of contagion: that Cholera was spread through water contamination. "Today, everyone has a toilet. The idea was extreme at the time. Queen Victoria at one time owned the only Crapper in the world."

Today, though this great hulk of the New Deal was designed to terminate, and did terminate, the 20th century federalized the entire country, converting a formerly local political culture based on newspapers and actual political communities in cities to a national/imperial audience based in T.V., in an era of mass suburbanization, which is is obsessed with the Presidency/Emperor, while neglecting all other forms of democratic participation.

Starting in the late 1970's and rising to a crescendo in the 1990's, industries were deregulated and off-shored, welfare "reformed," millions of drug addicts incarcerated, and unions bypassed. Globalization, or foreign investment-oriented trade agreements  have replaced the regulatory state - a replacement that in energy and other heavy industries, failed in  terms of delivering innovation in energy or transportation. Federal regulatory agencies have long systematically failed to protect the food supply from pesticides and GMOs, which aren't even labeled and hardly regulated, with even point-of-origin labeling efforts under a ban. Under this system, America got the McHorrible food system we have.

It's important to remember the downside of war mobilization and the command-and-control economy. During the regulatory state, the American population was exposed to radiation and minorities sterilized. Socialists,  communists, anarchists and libertarians (anybody with their own ideas) were hounded out of universities and important jobs (and off Hollywood and TV), a fact that persists today in America. The regulatory state was Pax Americana to the world in the postwar decades: America, Inc.. By the time of energy industry deregulation in the 1990's, it was an undeniable fact that the depression-era Wall Street solution called utility regulation had amounted to a manifest failure, and that deregulation was necessary to break the mold and start over. The postwar party was over, growth slowed down to a snail's pace in the early 1970's, and the industry itself began to talk about restructuring.

Changing the basic structure of the economy is routinely achieved by big business but is ultimately the natural province of the municipality. The restructuring of the energy industry since Jimmy Carter is the reason why we have done so little about climate change. We cannot go back, or we'll just get the sorry handmaidens - the California Public Utilities Commissions of the world - which are empty husks of their former selves, and serve as blank check machines for the energy mafia.

When you propose to transform energy, this is what you are trying to transform. It is a political force that has controlled the policy discussion for thirty years. Achieving transformation of this industry requires a specific, leveraged direction of approach, with known mechanisms, so that decisions may be made, partners signed and projects built in a timely manner.

We believe, with Schumacher, that Small is Beautiful, and propose, not a federal model of action, but the only reason Green New Deal is increasingly thinkable, pursuant to the last election: a nation-wide movement of local municipalities to implement energy localizations through Community Energy platforms known as Community Choice Aggregation or "CCA." Alongside the growing list of American cities committing to 100% renewable energy (implying intent to aggregate), these are achieving massive carbon reductions at no cost to taxpayers, building their Climate Works programs locally in their communities, as mutual associations, under city council management. 

These cities developing regional renewable facilities, numbering in the hundreds, join over a thousand nationwide that have already taken local control of their energy decision making. They are led by dozens that are well beyond this and into transforming the energy business model through localization and demand reduction.  I am working with several to focus development behind-the-meter in people's homes and businesses, de-growing the grid load from the bottom up.

De-growth is an urban re-development strategy! Giant wind farms and Megagrids ain't!

It is replacing a power plant with a thousand small facilities and building retrofits. In terms of cost center, it replaces fuel with labor and logistics. We are working with cities to help them hire local residents and employ local businesses. 

This is Green Public Works, Green Private Works too, being primarily customer-owned.

De-growth of power replaces the Green-the-Grid model of the Green New Deal and the status quo generally, with a strategy of downsizing the Grid through localization. Technologies are off-the-shelf, and already competitive in price with conventional resources. Microgrid-enabled, solar/onsite renewables, appliance and heating automation, shared Vehicle-to-Building (V2B) Electric Vehicles, and other onsite power and heating technologies embody a strategy not only to localize technology, but localize ownerhsip. Urban areas and  rural areas would follow slightly different models, but, depending on local conditions, you should be able to to provide most of your energy from within 20 miles of City Hall, much of it within 10 miles, based on adaption of efficiency, renewables, and flexible EV storage.

Moreover, unlike the New Deal, Green Public Works is not just about government ownership, but rather customer ownership and community economic benefits.

Rather than building a national grid for wind power, cities make investments to cool down utility substations throughout their jurisdictions, while offering residents a universal equity path, based on the proceeds: a kind of solar retirement fund. Economic benefits would be localized, not off-shored to Wall Street. Rather than raising taxes to pay for more federal workers and enrich the bankers, we would pay for more local workers, working for municipal contractors, and enrich ourselves. These new services, which municipalities manage, provide the funding to run the programs, so you don't oppress the people with unnecessary taxes to pay for it all.

I know we need important election issues, and the Green New Deal is attempting to address the most pressing threat to Americans and all people everywhere. But the how of it matters. The idea of a Green New Deal is to do something big and different. However, the gigantism of it makes Green New Deal somewhat stuffy, standard-issue federal gruel.   It is the classic error of leftists to forget that the state sucks, too. Disruption is more effective than planning. A bit of anarchy can be a good thing in a world of cartels and monopolies presiding over a captive institution: municipal anarchism, not central planning, is the responsible path to Climate Action.

Top-down policy platforms have inherent flaws: as Schumacher said, of gigantism.  In localizations, the city councils give orders to the town administrator, who directs staff managing town contractors. This simple, local democratic milieu presents the millions of  concerned Americans, who support Green New Deal because it is at least on the menu in Plato's cave, with a practical, achievable, scalable local path to a Climate Solution.

And without needing to lob an improbable pass over the U.S. Senate and President, nor resort once again to the passion play for endless marches and public vomiting of cultural outrage. What demonstrations, these? Occupists? It carries the other-worldly scent of religion. We need real demonstrations of Green Public Works to spread nationwide. If we need federal support to do this, it is targeted support we need: backstopping for Solar Bond financing and credit/collateral assistance on power contracts to have better control. We would ask that it actually be adapted to existing municipal activities, not sprayed down from above. There is real work to be done here, not just bragging about how much public money you will spend or threatening draconian measures like travel bans. It didn't work for Syriza in Greece, nor Podemos in Spain, and it won't work in the U.S. What will work is municipal public works.

The 2005 speech introduced California's new Community Choice Law, and the Solar Bond authority that I had recently written and passed in the state legislature and by voters to San Francisco's City Charter (the world's first Green Bond). These two new local powers would be combined, repurposing the kinds of revenue bond investment in toll bridge authorities and public infrastructure, to build wholly new, modular, diverse miniature technologies in the basements and rooftops of the City: the private sector, which consumes 95% of energy. 

It is hard to awaken the Eternal Ones of the Dream from their sleep of a national glory. In the speech I reminded the (very enviro-) Marinites that Germany's celebrated solar program was also created by one city, spread by osmosis to neighboring cities, and to the local state, and only much much later to the catchment of national government. This is how real things happen.  One single city, Aachen (home of Charlemagne, mind you) imagined and created the example that inspired 27 surrounding municipalities, then the state legislature of Schleswig Holstein, then several other legislature solar buyback programs. 

People often forget the upward impact of a municipal policy on officials representing those municipalities at the state level. Here is a principle of cooperation more powerful than the human will. No federal law would have been possible, and would not have happened at all, without the initiative of Aachen's local government with no state support whatever. This dynamic outlines the thinkable and politically feasible where city councils have been enlisted to do battle. Those who said think globally act locally missed an important opportunity to think locally: and to act, not from begging change from the emperor, but articulating and demanding it at home, in City Hall, built from the ground up. 

(The ironic thing is, some Green New Dealers will think me an opponent, and probably say I am too idealistic, or that it will take too long and we need a global solution to bring it to scale! Yawn. Welcome to climate politics, Rip Van Winkle....) 

                                                           (updated October 1, 2019)

Sign up for Local Power's News Updates

The past year has seen a lot of action on Community Choice Aggregation, and Local Power Inc. continues to rake in good press on our leadership. Next month I will join the manager of California's largest PACE program Renewables LLC and SolarCity at NorCal Solar to talk about the emergence of CCA as a revolutionary platform for solar development. In California, some ten counties are now actively preparing CCA programs for implementation as San Francisco's Local Agency Formation Commission completes a peer review of the business case and program design that LPI completed for the City last year. Meanwhile, Sonoma Clean Power, which is the state's second CCA to come online, just announced that it has doubled the amount of solar photovoltaics online countywide in a single stroke of the pen, signing a contract to install seventy megawatts. Nationally, I just returned from a speaking tour of New York State and Montana, where CCA has attracted the attention of both activists and policymakers. In New York, where last year's hurricane devastated the state with flooding, power disruptions and a doubling of Winter rates, Governor Cuomo has installed new leadership at the New York Public Service Commission with orders to find the best ways to implement distributed energy resources - the so-called Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) proceeding. Prompted by local activist group Citizens for Local Power, LPI prepared CCA legislation for New York state earlier this year, and the PSC appears to be interested in CCA as a platform for distributed energy resources to  enhance local energy resiliency. Finally, CCA continues to grow at a record pace throughout New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois and Ohio, promising yet another year of dramatic growth, with growing recognition of its radical potential to open the market for distributed generation, energy efficiency, storage, and microgrids. Today, some five percent of Americans receive their service from Community Choice Aggregation: it is thinkable that this figure will reach ten percent in the near future, making CCA a significant and permanent element in the American energy system. To review recent articles, sign up for updates or twitter feeds, check out Local Power's news page.  If you prefer facebook, connect with me here.

San Francisco Turns the Corner as CleanPowerSF In-City Buildout Strategy Takes Hold

San Francisco – August 1.  I am pleased to report that CleanPowerSF has achieved an important new program realignment for the City's Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) program, which became evident when the City's new CCA Director presented an updated CleanPowerSF business model and strategy to members of San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission and Local Agency Formation Commission -  re-centering CleanPowerSF's focus on building local renewable power generation and efficiency in the City to serve local demand, using the CCA's ability to augment revenue bonds to finance the new infrastructure based on CCA ratesetting authority and substantial annual revenues. While there remain improvements to be made, and important weigh-in from the Board of Supervisors on the amount of revenue bonds to be issued, this is major news for Local Power, and we want to register this judgement publicly.

At a July 9 joint hearing of the two key Commissions governing and operating CleanPowerSF, including several city supervisors, CCA Director Kim Malcolm outlined a return to the original concept of CCA as a means to build distributed local renewables at scale, reducing consumption to repay solar bonds from the surplus. “Unlike Marin, San Francisco was conceived as a build-out program as well as a procurement service to customers.” explained Ms. Malcolm in the televised meeting. “So it is a little bit different business model and they have different circumstances.”

California’s first CCA, the Marin Energy Authority, is primarily focused on greener power procurement, or the purchase of greener electricity from suppliers the grid. But the City's CCA Director confirmed that San Francisco will focus the City's competitive electricity program on building local renewable power in San Francisco neighborhoods, in effect adopting Local Power's strategy and program design including numerous related recommendations Local Power made to SFPUC staff and Commissioners earlier this year.

Fortunately, Local Power's business model is starting to take hold in California. A similar focus on localization is being pursued north of Marin in Sonoma County's CCA, where a newly formed county/city-led joint powers agency, Sonoma Clean Power, has already been formed and held its first meeting last week, already including 2/3 of the countywide energy demand eligible to receive the service. Local Power Inc. also had a major role in helping the County and its water agency define the feasibility and strategy of energy localization, collecting and analyzing PG&E data for the county, and defining the economic feasibility of localization in Sonoma County, as a partner with the county water agency and data collector/manager for all of Sonoma's local governments.

In San Francisco, the July 9 joint hearing of SFPUC and SFLAFCO commissioners is a significant shift from previous staff’s earlier focus on procurement, a strategy that can give the City more control of energy it buys as to its GHG content, but would have been too expensive to afford investment in local resources that are needed to make the leap-of-business-plan, from a supply-based to a demand-based financial structure for the City - critical to delivering on the potential of Community Choice. CCA Director Malcolm's change is an important indication that CleanPowerSF will stay on track to meet the neighborhood solar innovation by San Francisco supporters and activists for more than a decade - and will finally answer the mandate of San Francisco voters when they approved the City’s solar finance authority, Proposition H - the "Neighborhood Solar Initiative" which has remained a key component of CleanPowerSF's "build-it approach," in 2001.

Local Power Inc. pioneered the CCA model, writing both the original state laws in California and Massachusetts, and San Francisco's unique local revenue bond charter authority that LPI conceived and drafted as an upgrade to our original CCA model - allowing purchasing aggregations to build and purchase power from their own local renewable facilities. We draft a plethora of ordinances, plans, studies, program design, and specifications in many hundreds of pages, since the original CCA ordinance was adopted and signed by Mayor Newsom in 2004. All along we have asserted that a substantial localization is economically feasible with competitive rates. We are glad to have won a contract to prove this mathematically to SFPUC, so that our change of business model - CCA 2.0 - can replicate and transform the energy industry. Local Power Inc. has proven in our deliverables to SFPUC that a $1B investment will deliver a $600M return in investment to the City, at rate parity. Were we allowed to complete a final draft of this model, we anticipated based on our many runs of the data that even greater localization at rate parity is economically feasible. With all the conjectural journalism, PR wars and straight propaganda surrounding CleanPowerSF, it is hard for people to know what is really going on. The answer is: pretty damn good, and I don't say that casually.

(Download summary version of Local Power Inc.'s work for CleanPowerSF - publicly released by SFPUC here in PDF format).

SFPUC’s response to Local Power's input is a significant starting point with the agreement to start building at launch. The question is obviously how large - we said $1B over 10 years. A substantial local build-out component as part of the program launch – $200M is a substantial amount for the first few years of startup based on limited initial participating customers, but the annual revenue bond issuance schedule for planning a decade of development, $1B is not so outrageously large an amount. The number of $200M should therefore rise if we are implementing a citywide program - not just a permanent startup.

Moreover, the decision to actually issue bonds must be the Board of Supes and Mayor, says the Charter (9.107.8). Therefore, it is appropriate that the Board of Supervisors and Mayor deliberate and hold hearings on an ordinance authorizing H bonds in coming months.  If Supervisors are uncomfortable with $1B of local investment, other supplemental public investments might be considered from Pension Funds currently being divested from fossil investments, and other supplemental options exist to get CleanPowerSF's In-City Buildout to the scale that is both possible and called for by the citizens of the City when they approved the H Bond "neighborhood solar" authority.

In its work for SFPUC completed in March, LPI recommended $1B in investment for extensive solar roofs, wind, extensive efficiency measures, and co-generation.  SFPUC staff claims a debt capacity of $200M for localization even at year 2.5. In our view, this is a policy matter - it just a question of how much city leaders will authorize in H Bonds to deliver on the true promise of CCA to accelerate localization.

I responded to the news by saying that while staff mentioned a lesser investment capacity of $200M, this is a start. Now the Board of Supervisors and SFPUC Commission may consider providing guidance to accelerate offering service citywide to any eligible resident or business, in order to raise more revenue and increase debt-carrying capacity.  Mentioning $200M  of H Bond carrying capacity and starting Buildout at launch indicates staff have internalized the need to make localization the integral focus of CleanPowerSF - unlike in Marin and other CCAs, where the focus was more on Renewable Energy Credits, with the supplier (Shell) more in control. Getting it right from the start – which is launching the In-City Buildout from day one – is the key to achieving real, scaled change with CleanPowerSF. From Local Power’s perspective, this is a welcome shift on part of CCA Director Malcolm, and vindicates the work my company did for the City even though our recommendations may have seemed controversial to some staff members when we submitted and presented to the SFPUC Commission and Rate Fairness Board, but not yet at the Board of Supervisors, which under the Charter must authorize H Bonds by ordinance.

The City's renewed focus on the in-city build-out from day one, is an auspicious starting point on the scale that is needed for CCA to be realized.  Locally generated clean power on a City-wide scale is a new kind of power which departs from the highly centralized model of traditional utilities. Energy localization - local ownership, local renewable generation and energy efficiency, means that CleanPowerSF will take a behind-the-meter approach to energy service, and this is the essential leap required to stop imitating conventional supply side utilities.  The model also establishes local control, community energy security and permanent energy independence – unlike strictly green supply products that “monetize” benefits to other parties but do not change physical supply.

Community Choice Aggregation has exploded around the country over the past two years, now resulting in some 1200 cities across the country pursuing the aggregation strategy as a means to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions with little to no impact on rates.  Local Power Inc. started this movement and has worked tirelessly for two decades to realize its potential as a game-changer to mainstream decentralized, customer-owned renewable technologies.

SFPUC staff and commissioners’ statements include the following related changes:

• Most importantly, the In-City Buildout will begin at program launch rather than waiting until later. SFPUC predicts the CCA revenue alone will provide a $200M bonding capacity over 2.5 years. Staff are preparing an In-City Buildout map. 
• Accordingly, SFPUC announced that the GoSolar program to be integrated as a component of CleanPowerSF, bringing financing for customers into the service’s business model. SFPUC assures that In-City Buildout funds are assured, and that the program has headroom for reducing the rates further.
• As Local Power strongly recommended, SFPUC also changed its procurement strategy, both in terms of Renewable Portfolio definition and in terms of getting lower prices from Shell so that surpluses are created for H Bond financing of localization. 
• SFPUC took our advice to renegotiate lower prices with Shell and use lower cost RECs to reduce cost while focusing investment on In-City Buildout. SFPUC renegotiated with Shell and reduced “not-to-exceed” rates to 11.5 cents, but expects it could set rate comfortable under 11 cents. With PG&E at nine cents CleanPowerSF is within striking distance of a competitive rate. Expected CleanPowerSF bills are now within a couple of dollars of PG&E’s proposed all-REC tariff, and some are calling on the Commission to meet-or-beat the tariff. 
• SFPUC staff have finally taken LPI's recommendations that SFPUC use city-owned hydroelectric power at Hetch Hetchy to reduce costs and fossil power dependence in the community’s power portfolio. They agreed that to accomplish this they need to build up the agency's transmission scheduling capability internally. LPI also recommended that the SFPUC create new in-house expertise in Behind-the-Meter renewable generation projects, demand response and energy efficiency applications, presently seeking a full-time manager to advance the critical behind-the-meter opportunities identified by LPI in our work for the SFPUC - the very opportunities that unlock decentralized energy as "baseload-quality" infrastructure.  

California CCA Count Rises to 3 Counties in Bay Area - 10 Counties Statewide

Sonoma County has formed the third Community Choice Aggregation in California, joining some 1200 municipalities nationwide now under CCA service. Sonoma Clean Power, whose local towns have already joined 2/3 of countywide electricity demand, will be larger than Marin Clean Energy to the south, and rival San Francisco's CleanPowerSF program in scale. Like San Francisco, Sonoma is strongly focused on energy localization in addition to greener power - on local green jobs, local business benefits, and augmenting local solar finance.

Now there is a new generation of counties all over California, from Del Norte to San Diego, that are in varying stages of public hearings on CCA. The infographic representation of California counties above is based on actual population size. As you can see, Community Choice has already changed energy in California (and already has nationwide), but is about to become a major part of our electricity system.

We at Local Power are committed to making this movement Real - really focused on a demand-side approach, a change of business model from monopoly supply-centered to demand-centered and customer ownership-centered. With the emergence of localization-focused CCAs, we have achieved a huge leap from the green supply paradigm of the 1990's. This is the unique strategic opportunity of CCA in the U.S. - specifically of demand aggregation as a distinctively demand-centric. San Francisco and Sonoma recognize this opportunity, and we hope you understand how profound and unique an opportunity it is for those who want decisive, meaningful action on climate change, and want it now.

Local Power is proud to have played the part we have in shaping the progressive vision of the CCAs in Sonoma and San Francisco, and look forward to working with local officials in California, Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, and New Jersey - states where CCAs already serve 5% of the U.S. population. We feel that Community Choice has now earned the title of a national movement, and offers activists, communities, and policymakers in all states an unprecedented chance to achieve the kind of concerted effort and policy alignment that American was once known for - and the power of local government, more than any other public or private, to transform markets and build publicly needed infrastructure.

With San Francisco, a Whole New Environment in California Energy

The past two years have yielded a huge expansion of Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) from just a handful of CCAs in a couple of states into a national phenomenon including major cities like Cincinnati, Chicagoland, and  800 U.S. municipalities now under CCA service. The movement Local Power started has received a profound shot in the arm by recent approval to launch San Francisco's green power program, CleanPowerSF, in which Local Power has been deeply involved for over a decade and prepared many of the elements of the program. This is a long-awaited launch of a program that will have a profound impact on not just the growing California CCA movement but at the national energy policy level. San Francisco will provide intellectual leadership for a growing number of cities that see the logic not just of aggregation, but solar & efficiency finance, and green jobs.

San Francisco's ordinance to launch CleanPowerSF power service in Spring of 2013 also provides for the issuance of Requests for Proposals or RFPs - solicitations to developers of solar, wind, other renewable energy, energy efficiency, and other green technologies for rollout in San Francisco in the near-term (small footprint, easy to permit), medium-term larger projects, and long-term major projects requiring exhaustive state environmental permits. The In City RE/EE rollout will install a portfolio each year based on a financial model, deployment report and solicitation documents Local Power is now preparing for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which operates CleanPowerSF.

An already vibrant movement for greener, more local power in states constituting 25% of the U.S. electricity market is now underway not only in Marin County, but also San Francisco, with dozens of local governments not far behind. Focused on scaled energy localization to make their community not just renewable but locally powered and customer-owned, CleanPowerSF starts with a small amount of power from a global conventional power provider. Our task is to advise the City on how the SFPUC may operate and control wholesale power procurement planned with decentralized demand reduction, in order to achieve a smooth citywide transition to local green power.

CleanPowerSF starts with a 100% renewable power service for a small initial group of early adopters (all residential 30 MW - less than 10% of the aggregated private sector), which will be followed by construction of a new, local, renewable infrastructure to power the CCA, while phasing in commercial customers and remaining residential customers citywide over the next couple of years.

Part of this focus is carbon. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission's General Manager Ed Harrington spoke eloquently when he remarked to Supervisors that just Phase I of the CCA program (less than 10% of customers enrolled) will provide ten times the greenhouse gas reductions of all City policies of the past ten years combined, at a tiny fraction of the cost. But another rising criterion for municipalities is how to deliver green jobs today - the opportunity to get local jobs because the power generation is being brought to smaller local renewable developments. Localization creates local jobs because smaller companies can win this work, and local labor can be trained and prepared to work for these companies building here in the community.

Many other California communities are seeing green when they consider energy localization - not just global carbon reductions like CleanPowerSF or Marin Clean Energy on the other side of the Golden Gate. It is the green of monthly utility bill dollars not leaving the city or county. PG&E has claimed it is a "local company" compared to Shell North America. But it cannot compare itself to the city of San Francisco, which controls this program and intends to localize its energy supply using its solar "H" bond authority, both to build city-owned plants and to offer financing so San Francisco residents and businesses. This is localism in the true sense - not greenness defined by the logo or corporate identity of a wholesale power supplier like Green Mountain Energy, but greenness defined by  municipal financing, localization, and reducing our dependence on these companies through fundamental change.

PG&E's New Strategy to Stop CCA - Goldfinger Comes to Cali

Call it PG&E's "Goldfinger" strategy. Last week, Pacific Gas & Electric's manager of local government partnerships was sworn in as chairwoman of San Francisco's Democratic Party Central Committee (SFDCCC). Her name is Mary Jung. Read that again.

Indeed, PG&E's person in charge of dealing with the City of San Francisco on its energy partnership is now officially in charge of the SFDCCC. Thus, understand that as San Francisco approaches its final action to bypass PG&E under the City's longstanding Community Choice energy program known as CleanPowerSF, Ms. Jung is now in charge of the single committee that endorses San Francisco Democrats' local and state candidates for political office, and allocates SF Democratic Party campaign funds to those candidates.

The Community Choice (CCA) movement in Northern California appears to have caused energy giant PG&E to form an unprecedented new kind of political machine. Failing in its 2010 campaign for a corporate plebiscite to pre-empt the legislature's CCA law allowing California communities (half in PG&E service territory) to choose their energy supplies, the energy corporation is now systematically infiltrating key local and state political positions - positions that give it a disturbing new level of control in state and city politics. Caught ordering highest level staff to spy on energy activists, PG&E has recently asked a California Public Utilities Commission Administrative Law Judge for a protective order attempting to seal details of how the top management of PG&E infiltrated and spied on activists in the months following its failed 2010 proposition to block Community Choice in California.

Mary Jung's appointment signals more than just a new, more virulent PG&E machine, but also appears to outline a more insidious corporate strategy. The story of Jung's election reeks of political manipulation. Replacing the progressive former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, a leader for city progressives, who had retired from the post and did not seek re-election, a mysterious thing happened at the DCCC election meeting last week - a classic kind "accident by design": while many members of DCCC claim to be progressive Democrats, somehow nobody ran against Ms. Jung. An expected progressive challenger to the PG&E government partnership manager's campaign to chair the central committee somehow failed to formally announce candidacy at this meeting - and so, as if by mistake or some hard to imagine consensus, PG&E's government relations person has been unanimously voted chairwoman of San Francisco's Democratic Party Central Committee.

The San Francisco Examiner spinned the story of a takeover of the notoriously progressive committee by a "Moderate," and said nothing about the spectacle of badboy energy corporation PG&E's coup over San Francisco politics. The election of Mary Jung as SF Democratic Party chair would be merely disturbing were it not for the fact that California Jerry Brown's number two and shadow, Nancy McFadden, was hired away from PG&E as Senior Vice President of PG&E, and a woman personally in charge of blocking a major movement by its customers to win energy independence from PG&E under Community Choice Aggregation. Today both Sacramento and San Francisco appear to be under this corporation's political control.

The move signals what the new PG&E CEO calls "finding our way" again after the energy corporation's failed $60M 2010 campaign to block the Bay Area Community Choice movement's efforts (Proposition 16). Community Choice (CCA) is now active in cities and counties throughout PG&E's service territory - to depart from PG&E power to competitive suppliers, and to localize communities' power supplies through renewable energy and customer-owned efficiency measures. Assembly Member Jerry Hill wrote recently in the San Jose Mercury News that Californians should not be fooled by incoming CEO Anthony Earley's brand-new $10 M public relations campaign to make Californians think well again of PG&E, whose political attacks on CCA led to the early retirement of former CEO Peter Darbee after voters rejected Prop 16 by 300,000 votes.  PG&E had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying against and litigating against Community Choice Aggregations in San Francisco and Marin, not to mention Sonoma County and San Joaquin County, since the CCA law was adopted in 2002. Prop 16 masterminds Darbee and McFadden decided to roll the campaign donation dice and spent $60M to fool California voters into blocking CCAs with a two-thirds supermajority requirement before municipalities could implement - all across the state. It would have turned a decade-long state process to make CCA possible, and impose a Prop-13 style handcuffs on municipal energy in the state. After losing PG&E's record spending initiative against a hardly funded grassroots campaign of CCA activists at powergrab.info, CEO Peter Darbee wrote a concession letter to the public comparing himself to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, claimed to be working on high principles, and said PG&E would "respect the wishes of  voters." Is this what the new PG&E CEO meant in his new PR campaign claiming PG&E hat "lost its way"?

Because PG&E's "local government partnerships" provide its bastion against CCA programs (PG&E has made partnership funding dependent on not implementing CCA), Mary Jung's role in fighting CCA cannot be overstated, and her election to this post is deeply disturbing. As many other California counties (ironically awakened to CCA by Prop 16) are now moving to implement energy localizations (such as the counties of Alameda, Humboldt, Yolo, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Cruz), PG&E's strategy has in fact shifted to poisoning the regulatory environment for retail competition through state-sanctioned cost-shifting between generation costs and distribution costs to make CCA customers pay for generation costs even if they find new power suppliers.

That is not all. PG&E quietly won major reversals of state policy in the first months of the Brown administration. The company has persuaded Jerry Brown's CPUC Commissioners to undermine longstanding basic principles against cost shifting between customers, and California's only great achievement in conservation policy in the past quarter century - "smashing" the state's landmark conservation incentive system of block tier pricing early last year in the PG&E General Rate Case.  After orchestrating the 1996 deregulation bailout, 2000 energy crisis and subsequent bankruptcy bailout, bullying the CCA movement like a monolythic industrial nightmare, and leading the global nuclear industry revival, this energy corporation has infiltrated the highest levels of political power in Sacramento and San Francisco, even beyond the wildest dreams of Willie Brown. Meanwhile, the CCA Crimes Act, AB976, introduced by a PG&E affinity union, just passed the Senate Appropriations Committee, would create a special new crime in state law that only applies to CCA consultants (like Local Power Inc., my company, which created CCA), who work for a CCA in preparation for implementation of a local energy service, would be classified as criminal if it helped the same government implement that CCA program.

In short, PG&E's "new way" is to take it underground - not to play politics publicly, but secretively, as if to imitate not Tony Blair, but James Bond, or Goldfinger. Given PG&E's claims to have taken a new turn and reformed itself, following the assault it has already conducted against local and state government in recent years to block Community Choice, clearly there is a strong case here for illegal anti-competitive behavior under federal anti-trust laws, as well as evidence of the need to prevent this kind of political corruption from continuing to threaten the sovereignty of California's state and municipal democratic institutions.

800 Cities

I find my blog being reduced to the usual CEO announcements of exciting new evidence of a big new thing, but I must acknowledge being overwhelmed by events as Community Choice Aggregation lifts off into a major component of the United States electricity system. Last week, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced his support of a CCA measure to be placed on the November 2012 ballot, just after the City of Cincinnati signed a 100% renewable mix (using RECs, but hey, wow) a couple of months before. San Francisco surges forth - a CCA in which Local Power Inc. is intimately involved - with a plan to go green not just with Renewable Energy Credit trading, but with rapid and major physical energy localization using the City's Charter Revenue Bond Authority to finance city-owned and customer-owned In City renewables. After so many years promoting this vision and outcome of CCA, its time appears to have arrived, with such a proliferation of CCAs nationwide that it has become challenging to announce each new CCA, or to even track their progress.

800 cities and growing  means that the CCA structure has taken off - broken green power records overnight, again and again. With the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency, which has given awards to two green CCAs in recent months (Marin Energy Authority, California and Evanston, Illinois), and the state of California, which will celebrate San Francisco as the first large scale implementation of Governor Brown's decentralist energy policy, CCA now looks likely to go statewide, with the Bay Area becoming a group of several large CCAs (Marin County, San Francisco, East Bay Municipal Utility District, and Sonoma County), and San Diego and countywide municipalities forming one or two CCAs down South. In Central California, three contiguous counties (San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, Monterey) will likely implement one or more CCAs regionally, and in Edison's service territory Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert look to be preparing with other area municipalities to form CCAs. I am told the combined annual revenues of the list of startup California CCAs alone is $35 Billion.

Achieving lift-off also means there is a need for CCAs to focus on energy localization. Too many CCAs have chosen to start programs the "easy way" by starting their programs just with power generation, and promising to get around to developing local renewable energy later. CCA governing boards need to realize that the opportunity window for planning local solar, efficiency, and other innovate small footprint green technologies is at the outset of the program, when the structure of the contracts with suppliers are put into place. CCA is only a means to an end, not an end in itself - for suppliers, getting the deal may spell success, but the communities supporting CCA want the REAL thing, not just the usual rhetoric. Big votes to approve an agency or going out to bid are the times when smart thinking can be put into agreements to get the energy localization put right up in the start of the service, showing results in just a few years that you will notice. Getting clear framing established and shovels in the ground during the start-up is essential for shaping the power deal.  A lot of people out there like to talk the talk of localization as a way of winning public support: CCAs must honor the trust that has been given them.

CCA Goes National With Cincinnati

Greenpeace's blimp over Cincinnati was a rallying flag; Community Choice has finally reached a nation-wide audience. With the City of Cincinnati mobilizing to implement a 100% renewable power service Citywide to all customers using Ohio's decade-old CCA law, the profile of a new idea, now over a decade in the making, has assumed the mantle of an achieved new reality. With dozens of new CCAs being implemented, 150 cities and counties moving to implement CCA in Illinois, and San Francisco now moving joining Marin and other California cities and counties to implement this vision of a new kind of power, Community Choice Aggregation has finally become a palpable national movement.

In past years, CCA in one state was considered separate from CCA in another. Today, California's CCA movement, determinedly focused on greening the power supply, changing the business model, and implementing local green power projects, has gripped the imagination of American cities facing de-funded state budgets, collapsed property tax-based revenues, and a stagnant economy. The idea of a  dramatically more renewable power supply at competitive prices with monopoly power is now shared between Cape Cod, Cincinnati and San Francisco Cities, large and small, rich and poor, rural and urban. Perceiving the power of aggregate purchasing, solar finance and local control, are turning to CCA for the true opportunity it was meant to provide from the start. Check out the Local Power News page or my daily news aggregator, Power Grab News.

Ground Dog Day, Again - And a Day Late

Nancy McFadden, author of PG&E's Proposition 16, is now going to become the Executive Secretary to the State's new Governor - for policy, appointments and scheduling. Having fought off Proposition 16 against the $50 Million that PG&E put down to block Community Choice (CCA) in California just six months ago, and having worked closely with Jerry when he ran for Mayor of Oakland and created a strong mayor system there, I could not help be feel a sense of paranoid alarm that Jerry had hired this PARTICULAR woman into his fold. This particular elf for past failed Democratic Presidential and Governorship candidates? What would make you want this? Friend of a friend? Is this another case of inviting the U.S. Military to practice invasions in East Oakland after being elected mayor - suiting the Governor's contrarian humor, a desire to outrage his old base for a good chuckle?

There is something postmodern, even decadent, about McFadden's move from PG&E Headquarters to the Governor's front office. It is like being in a vaguely bad dream. On the one hand, the Governor promised that base that he would revolutionize California with local power - the very kind of change we have always championed - with some 20 GigaWatts (GW) of renewable distributed generation throughout California. California is collapsing back to the counties, "devolving" power by default. On (or with) the other he hires a woman more responsible than any other person (alleges PG&E CEO Peter Darbee) for PG&E's most notorious strategem to block any such effort by San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma County, San Luis Obispo.

For the author of perhaps the most reviled attack on local government in California in recent memory to be hired by the same Governor who will devolve power to local government, how is this ostensibly praetorian secretary to be regarded by those who would approach the Governor concerning policy, appointments or the Governor's schedule? I know how powerful a "scheduler" can be for a politician - even for a gifted one like Jerry Brown. His decision to give McFadden the keys to his office is indeed troubling, even haunting.

So what is Governor Brown 3.0 thinking? I can only guess. Jerry has a scholarly mind that is not well adapted to the platitudes of State of the State speeches. He can make a campaign interesting, and managed to not kill a few good ideas in his first round as governor, but is not a natural executive in character, ability or disposition. So in other words, it matters who his head staffers are and what they are up to. Having McFadden in there is frightening.

Some people put hope in Brown's appointments of Mike Florio, formerly the head attorney at The Utility Reform Network, one of the major pro-consumer law firms at the CPUC.  I have known Mike for many years and think him a very smart, able attorney who is well-intentioned. But what is the program? Does anyone have any ideas what to do in California's energy market, other than blocking PG&E from destroying Community Choice, or otherwise mis-investing in the ongoing overbuilding of PG&E and the other utilities (e.g. PG&E's new Oakley Power Plant) or shift costs onto transmission ratemaking as in the current CPUC proceeding, so as to erect a wall of ratepayer debt, penalties, charges and other shenanigans, and thus kill all that local power stands for? Platitudes or lofty goals aside, where is there sign of a determination like Franklin Roosevelt's when he defied the utility industry players in the region like Duke Power and built the Tennessee Valley Authority? Clear lines must be drawn between aggressive incumbents that have prevented any real change for half a century, and those individuals who are determined that change must come in this administration. This is leadership in a crisis - not revolving-door opportunists.

The Collapse phenomenon is highlighted by the the decadent actions of powerful people, who display their contempt for the public. It is a kind of epiphany, the boredom of Caligula as he destroyed Rome. Sustaining this attack but damaged by Chevron's "Copycat" Prop 26 (which did pass) the local governments of California swoon before the spectre of Brown's devolution in unprecedented mega-deficits brought about by an economy that has substantially collapsed at the real level of small businesses, which employ most people - and President Obama announces in his State of the Union that the economy is coming back because of the Stock Market. Financialization has reduced national debate to cheerleading when a serious rethinking of the American economy is desperately needed. It is a time for clear leadership to force change on an industry that has not merely resisted but subverted California's mandates for years, reducing its global reputation from leader to loser. Can Brown do better?

I was called yesterday by a journalist who said there were rumors that Nancy McFadden is an "environmentalist." I said this was funny, or alarming, considering who she is - undeniably the "idea person" beyond Proposition 16. Peter Darbee hired her to do it just after failed Governor Gray Davis had hired her to handle his disaster of an administration during the energy crisis...that PG&E more than any other caused. To me this sounds like a classic power player, this circassian horsewoman jumping from Governor to energy megacorp to Governor. Were will she jump next? Moreover, what was the Governor thinking?

The reduction of Obama from leader to cheerleader has illustrated the importance of having actual ideas, not just brilliantly crafted slogans and winning smiles. You cannot stop the Great Recession by announcing that the economy is coming back. That was Herbert Hoover, not Roosevelt. You cannot bring the change that America needs by waxing poetic (however polished, thank you Geroge Lakoff) while ignoring basic matters of trade policy or actual infrastructure. The Shuck and Jive has got to stop, and Revolving Door Blues ain't the way to start either, Mr. Governor.

Carbon War - California Regulators Threaten PG&E with Fines, Superior Court Reviews Prop 16 as Marin County Launches 78% Carbon-Free Power Service

San Francisco, California.  A "hornet's nest" surrounds PG&E's $35M political war to block California cities from following Marin County and San Francisco's lead in breaking away from PG&E's utility power service to buy greener, cheaper power. With Marin physically starting its new power service on Friday and PG&E's Prop 16 facing voters on June 8, (and a copycat Texas Oilman-funded initiative to kill California's carbon law now on the November ballot), the state appears to be ground zero for a new brand of political aggression by energy companies against the very governments that allow them to do business at all - a Carbon War. California's energy regulator "slammed" PG&E yesterday for what it called illegal efforts by the former monopoly to stifle competition, warning the energy giant that it may face fines for attempting to block two Bay Area counties, Marin and San Francisco, from implementing greener, lower carbon electricity service at rates that meet or beat what PG&E's charges. On Monday, Michael Peevey, President of the California Public Utilities Commission, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying Prop. 16 embodied a "blatant misuse" of the election process. "Imagine a single company trying to seek protection for its monopoly status in a state constitution," he said. "It's offensive."

Meanwhile, the Marin Clean Energy Authority, which aims to replace Pacific Gas & Electric Co. as the primary electricity supplier in Marin County, says 78 percent of the electricity it is supplying to the county this year will be from sources that don't produce greenhouse gas emissions, and include no nuclear power, but will meet or beat PG&E's prices. The deal has finally proven the case that Community Choice can deliver much greener power much faster at competitive prices than monopolies or deregulated markets can deliver, and this fact, now official, has PG&E very worried about the future of its business. The Marin Energy Authority has invited the general public to attend the  "historic launch" of its service this Friday at 1 pm to mark the day for the launch of its revolutionary new power service, which PG&E appears determined to nip in the bud with Prop 16.

As both San Francisco and Marin move forward with Community Choice programs to green their power supply with competitive suppliers, PG&E has already spent over $35M of ratepayer bailout funds to advertise, write and place on California's June ballot a constitutional amendment that would block any other communities from pursuing Community Choice by requiring any local government to first persuade a supermajority of voters to vote for it first. A 2/3 voter approval requirement would allow just 1/3 of voters to block any Community Choice programs. Regulators and governments have come forward to block a deep-pocketed corporate attack on local governments that are prohibited by law from spending any money on ballot campaigns like PG&E's fully funded "astro-turf" campaigns, "Taxpayer's Right to Vote" for Prop 16 and the "Common Sense Coalition" in Marin and San Francisco.  In contrast, PG&E has unlimited political capital based on captive ratepayer revenues. PG&E spent over $10 million fighting San Francisco in 2008 and even more fighting Yolo County public power campaign in 2007. Apart from its public power battles, Prop 16, PG&E has already spent tens of millions in marketing locally against Community Choice programs for several years.

Yesterday, the California Public Utilities Commission called the anti-Community Choice brochures the company has been mailing all Marin residents and businesses "misleading" -and ordered the company to stop sending them. The CPUC also said that PG&E can not use its own phone banks to call customers (at ratepayer expense) and then transfer them to customer service to opt-out of the Marin Clean Energy public power effort. PG&E has been in effect imitating a government by "processing" opt-out calls for its competitors - which the CPUC officially declared illegal.

The energy giant's aggressive political strategy to permanently diminish local control over energy and reclaim its liquidated monopoly through a new kind of corporate plebiscite, has caused a "hornet's nest" of opposition from local leaders already stuck in a debt crisis that another infamous 2/3 majority requirement - Prop 13 - has largely caused.  Public voter approval requirements already exist in local government charters and state law, but Prop 16 would place a 2/3 majority requirement on all local government retail energy programs whether or not taxpayers would be impacted by a program. 

A case in point is San Francisco. Because its city charter required it to get a majority of votes to authorize the revenue bond it will use, San Francisco voters approved a revenue bond authority, Proposition H, in 2001, but the 55% majority of voters that approved the use of H Bonds to finance renewable energy facilities would not be enough voter approval to authorize a Community Choice program under Prop 16.

Today, a Superior Court in Sacramento, California, will hear oral arguments from California municipalities in the case on whether PG&E's Proposition 16 should be removed outright from the California June 8, 2010 primary ballot. Judge Allen H. Sumner will hear from a long list of local governments, including Marin and San Francisco, suing to disqualify the PG&E-sponsored Proposition 16 from the June 8 statewide ballot. In their written arguments, attorneys for over a dozen cities used PG&E's own chief executive’s public statements as evidence that the utility's proposed measure is false and misleading, according to San Francisco’s City Attorney, who has helped lead the lawsuit. The Sacramento Bee reported that, according to the petitioners' reply brief filed in Sacramento County Superior Court, a public exchange between PG&E Corporation Chairman, CEO and President Peter A. Darbee and a stockholder at the company's March investor conference revealed that the purportedly pro-vote measure actually aims to greatly diminish voting, discourage elections, having to spend millions and millions of shareholder dollars to campaign against competing energy programs, according to a release from San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera. The coalition of locally-owned public utilities from throughout California, including the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission, filed civil lawsuit on March 18, 2010. 

While Marin and San Francisco have implemented Community Choice in parallel, only Marin will initiate service prior to June 8 when, if passed, Prop 16 will go into effect. Thus San Francisco and all other cities pursuing Community Choice would be blocked. The Marin Energy Authority signed a five-year agreement with Shell Energy North America to provide power to the county from at least 25 percent renewable sources. In contrast, PG&E today sources about 14 percent of its electricity from renewable sources though it has signed contracts with independent power producers including Oakland-based BrightSource and Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar that would deliver more than 20 percent once the new projects are built. Not included in PG&E's renewable tally is an additional 51 percent of PG&E's power that comes from a large hydroelectric dam. State law doesn't recognize large hydropower as a renewable resource even though it is emissions-free power.

The Marin Clean Energy Authority recently added to the agreement with Shell a commitment that the power mix will include at least 53 percent emissions-free sources.The Authority aims to give Marin residents more options for using power from "non-polluting renewable sources" and will offer Marin's 7,500 largest electricity users an option to buy electricity from more renewable sources than they get from PG&E at no additional cost, or customers can get 100 percent renewable power for a $5 premium. The Authority's power mix will include 37 percent hydropower from the Tri-Dam Power Authority in San Joaquin, 9 percent landfill gas in Oregon, and 8 percent windpower and 5 percent biomass from Washington. An additional 9 percent will come from a variety of smaller sources, according to the Marin Independent Journal.

The San Francisco Examiner recently reported that San Francisco's Community Choice program is still behind closed doors, but the City is working feverishly to complete negotiations from a December Request for Proposals that selected a consortium backed by Silicon Valley leaders. "What is known about the company is that there are at least three key members at the helm. W. Kent Palmerton has more than 31 years of experience in both the private and public electric industry and has worked at companies that include Williams Energy Services. Samuel Enoka, along with working for Power Choice, is the president and chief financial officer of VIASYN, also a power company. Glen Casanova helps head the company, and he has worked in global energy and infrastructure industries.“Power Choice Inc. is a joint venture of top-tier energy services firms with decades of experience in developing electricity projects and in generating and delivering electricity,” Power Choice spokesman Trevor Curwin said. The consortium touts members as Oracle Corp., real estate firm Grubb & Ellis Co., independent power producer RealEnergy and GE Energy, one of the world’s leading power suppliers. Power Choice wound up in the negotiating seat after undergoing a competitive bidding process. “Power Choice LLC was the highest-scoring and most complete out of the five bids submitted by various vendors,” Jue said. “Their collective experience on power scheduling and pooling energy resources vaulted them to the top of the list for the [request for proposal] process.”

In Marin, however, a major success has already been achieved: 78% greenhouse gas free power without resorting to nuclear power as PG&E does. I will myself be present at the Marin Energy Authrity's event this Friday because I view this plain fact as a major proof of concept for Community Choice that breaks some of the old myths from the Market Fundamentalists who insist greener power must be more expensive than brown power. This is what PG&E is really trying to stop: a breakthrough that changes everything. “Some people have been skeptical that Marin Clean Energy could achieve its renewable energy and greenhouse gas reduction goals and keep rates the same or lower, but the proof is in the power," said Marin County Supervisor Charles McGlashan, chairman of Marin Clean Energy, in a press release.

On Friday, May 7 at 1 pm on the Island at the Lagoon off Avenue of the Flags at the San Rafael Civic Center. State Senator Mark Leno, State Assembly member Jared Huffman, other dignitaries, and hundreds of local businesses, clean energy advocates and other community supporters will celebrate the first day of service by Marin Clean Energy (MCE)."  May 7th is MCE's first day of service to the ratepayers of Marin. The general public is invited to attend this historic event hosted by Supervisor Charles McGlashan, Marin County Supervisor, 3rd District Chair, Marin Energy Authority This event is a co-production of Marin Energy Authority and Marin Green Leadership, a nonprofit partner that supplements and supports MEA's educational outreach. Friday, May 7, 2010 1:00 - 3:00 pm Marin Center, 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael For more information, call 473.6624. Park in the main parking lot at Marin Center and proceed to the right of the theater to the lagoon area. Signs will direct you to the event.