Planet of the Sleeping Giant: Film on the Pathways and Barriers from the Trenches of Climate Mobilization

A reader of my recent review of Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans said he wishes I would make a film with a more nuanced explanation of what is stopping climate mobilization and what to do? So I am putting up our 2018 short film on that very subject, directed by Yoni Goldstein and produced by another man from Flint, Local Power's own Charles Schultz (in four eight-minute segments). Enjoy!

Review of Planet of the Humans: What They Get Right and the Environmentalists Get Wrong

Planet of the Humans has stirred the resentment of many a climate crusader. Yesterday, the chair of the Sierra Club California Energy and Climate Committee instructed committee members (I am one) not to “watch or promote” Planet of the Humans. Today, climate scientists called for the film’s suppression. Enticed by such parental warnings, like an aroused teenager, I just had to watch it.

The film, produced by left-wing film idol Michael Moore, appears to expose and debunk current environmental initiatives for “100% renewable cities” in the United States. Sierra Club activists view the film as undermining climate action on Earth Day. But as the creator of Community Choice Aggregation, which accounts for 67 of 71 U.S. cities that have actually achieved 100% renewable electricity as of 2020, I feel compelled to speak up.

There is some truth to this film, hidden behind a multitude of glaring falsehoods. It is important to explore what the film gets right. As climate activists in the era of climate disruption, we must be clear about what our carbon reduction polices are actually going to achieve, as we push local communities around the world to implement Green New Deal programs, Paris Agreement targets, climate mobilizations, and renewable energy initiatives. Let us not get caught up, after all, in lies created not by environmentalists, but by utilities and governments that have propagated them. They are not our lies, and therefore we need not keep them, but renounce them when clearer, bolder, more concerted actions are required to meet the United Nations ten year horizon for “worldwide energy transformation to avert irreversible ecological damage to the planet.”

The main message of Planet of the Humans is that renewable energy and electric vehicles and other technologies cannot stop climate change, but merely introduce new forms of pollution and environmental destruction. The film’s sense of hopelessness is mesmerizing. Reviewing the progress of renewable energy in recent years, film director Jeff Gibbs sniffs out contradictions and presents them in a kind of cascading epiphany of juvenile disillusionment. Wind farms' intermittency requires massive natural gas power plants. Solar farms destroy the desert. Lithium ion batteries involve new forms of sea-bed mining for rare earth metals. Each solution to climate change creates a new problem, to the extent that it merely repowers the same economy, and the same civil society. Conclusion: humanity is destructive.

Yet, between these layers of accusation lie some very, very important and salient truths.  Planet of the Humans presents harsh realities about our world, mixing up cause and effect, technology and policy. We must unpack these conflations.

In doing so, we find dominant neoliberal currents, often unconscious, at the heart of the environmental movement that profoundly undermine its impactfulness. By continuing to gloss them over in the era of Trump, mainstream environmental organizations are in fact sowing the seeds of counterrevolution. I know this, because I come up against it every day in the very green energy movements I have started, led and in some cases lost to neoliberals who don’t even know they were neoliberals, whose approach to greenhouse gas reduction is to promote the technological fixes and market solutions that are the idols of capitalism, presenting the illusion that solving climate crisis is as simple as a new line of products to consume.

Gibbs and Moore’s critiques are real, but they oversimplify the problem they describe as an existential crisis with no exit. This delivers them into the pessimistic catch-basin of "overpopulation" theory: we simply have to die to solve climate change. This leathery insight is indeed the conclusion of Planet of the Humans.

However, if you look at infrared satellite images of global greenhouse gas emissions, you will quickly observe physical sources do not correspond to high population areas, but to modern economies: that is, machines. Automobiles, power plants and heating fuels cause climate change, not people. Let us look at China as an example. Before it was “opened” by the Clinton Administration to investment from the West, it had very low carbon emissions. In just a couple of decades, its industrial modernization has made it the epicenter of climate catastrophe. Constant driving, overconsumption, and parasitic capitalism have caused climate change. Therefore, to stop climate change, we must alter modernity, not blame people or wallow in misanthropy. Specifically, we must remove the growth imperative from energy. To do this, a climate mobilization strategy must wean itself from neoliberal dependency upon incumbent energy corporations and financiers who require consumption growth in their business models in order to profit from its development.

Oddly, Planet of the Humans reproduces the fictions of neoliberal environmentalism, failing to get to the truth by reifying technology as the problem. This is much as the environmental movement has reified technology as the solution. We must understand that the failures in renewable energy result from policy, regulation, and market design, not technology. By merely focusing on the unwanted attributes of the technological manufacture of solar panels, electric vehicles and wind farms, the film makers betray a naivety about the real reason we are failing.

Meanwhile, environmentalists criticize Planet of the Humans with a similar naivety, citing the film’s "lies" and "attacks" on what they consider to be promising progress. Where their critique fails is in seeing any progress made as close to remotely adequate relative to the scale of the climate crisis, and the hyper-speed by which we must attack it.

Planet of the Humans states that the 100% clean energy movement led by Sierra Club with a $80M donation by Michael Bloomberg has created a renewable front for natural gas. This would seem to imply a nefarious conspiracy, but in fact it merely reflects the state of things, to which Sierra Club and other leading climate warriors have wearily adapted themselves: a state-sanctioned system of salutary fictions.  Because environmentalist leaders, facing limited political options, blur the lines between what is real, and what is symbolic with respect to “clean” energy, they leave themselves open to charges of falsehood. 

Indeed, the renewable energy industry is guilty of the propagation of convenient fictions. Since the 1990's, renewable energy policy has remained inside a neoliberal envelope, widely adopted by state governments and environmental champions of such policies. These policies are the holy grail of renewable energy in 2020, and they include: Renewable Energy Certificates, Carbon Credits, Greening the Grid, Net Energy Metering, and Feed-in Tariffs. Together, these fictions are a startup strategy to begin something new, not an end game strategy to transform energy.

The first fiction is embracing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) as real, when they are not. The 100% renewable movement is certainly guilty of this, because it does not distinguish between physical and symbolic actions. A Renewable Energy Certificate is a legal invention, not energy: yet the legal invention authorizes its purchaser to call it renewable energy. This is confusing because it is untrue. REC state laws in the most pro-renewables states allow a seller of coal-fired power to claim that his product is 100% renewable, because he purchases RECs from out-of-state wind farms such as in Texas. This is referred to as "mitigation" under state laws throughout the United States and blurred into legal definitions of "green power." This thinking follows a logic that the environmental movement has been trained to accept, from day one of electric industry restructuring in the early 1990's - a market logic. RECs are a financial, not a physical, transaction and so no, we are not building renewable energy, and yes, the power plants generating the power you are purchasing as 100% renewable are in fact coal-fired. The rationale is that the RECs we have purchased will create an "incentive" upstream in the market to become greener.

The fiction of Carbon Credits is that laws allow corporations causing massive amounts of carbon pollution to claim they are 100% carbon neutral by purchasing them. Again, the same claim is made that the purchase of such credits sends an "incentive" to the market to reduce carbon.

The use of “incentives” pervades renewable energy and carbon policy, and profoundly undermines the ability of people to be able to differentiate between the real and the unreal. Today, the environmentalist establishment is guilty of propagating unreal policies in order to galvanize public support of oversimplified, financialized, superficial paths to carbon reduction. Given the mounting urgency of bringing about dramatic carbon reductions to avoid passing the threshold of being able to avert climate catastrophe, movements for climate mobilization must take notice of decades-old incentive schemes that were never designed to do anything but stimulate infant green industries, not physically transform and decarbonize the energy system.

A third fiction is the notion that we can green the grid. The effect of this approach is the equivalent to pissing into the ocean, a growing ocean, of global demand. Adding wind farms and solar farms to the grid is caught in a permanent dilution where, as Planet of the Humans points out, grids require solar farms and wind farms that generate power 20-30% of the time backfill with gas plants to generate 70-80% of the time. This gives the lie to “economies of scale.” As long as renewable energy is not local, meaning sited at the location of use, and indeed smaller, this intermittency will continue to require significant fossil fuel in tandem, and - as the film rightly points out - natural gas is not clean energy: quite the contrary, it is as harmful to the climate as coal.

This brings us to the final, least understood fiction of all. Virtually all on-grid solar systems in the world today are wired, used and paid for on the same fictional principle as RECs, Carbon Credits and the green grid: not to reduce the need for grid power in a building, but to sell power back to the grid. Net Energy Metering (NEM) and Feed-in Tariffs (FIT) are guilty of deliberately avoiding reductions in grid energy demand, and in maximizing energy transactions and grid use, rather than reducing demand and grid use. NEM and FIT render the carbon benefits of solar superficial, and drive up the need for more grid investment, resulting in more fossil fuel use.

These failings of renewable energy are not the result of solar or wind technology and its waste: but of how they are designed, how owned, and controlled. Planet of the Humans makes the fatal mistake of correctly identifying some of the cracks in the edifice of carbon reduction, but widely misses the mark of causality. Their insistence on a kind of sentimental asceticism, for example that solar panel manufacturing requires energy and metals, is a silly, millimeter-deep insight. That windmills are made of steel and concrete is an utterly foolish objection, reflecting an absence of perspective or proportionality, and an eco-Manichean view of all economic activity as dirty and evil. It is critical to parse the fact from the fiction here in order to avoid the existentialist, misanthropic malaise into which this film, in the end, settles, while also agreeing that the alarm raised - that conventional, incrementalist solutions are not adequate - is certainly heard. Planet of the Humans’ successful sniffing out of ironies concealed behind legal platitudes is limited by a resignation and pessimism of the death instinct that is antithetical to our survival and sustainability. We must navigate through the Valley of Subtleties that distinguish hypocrisy from irony. 

Turning away from technological fetishism, negative or positive, we must turn to politics. Why do all of these neoliberal policies have in common the quality of changing individual human behavior (choosing green) without changing the system (actually decarbonizing)? Because deals were made, and "necessary illusions" endorsed. The energy industry, and state governments under their undue influence adopting renewable energy laws, created them to work that way. Electric utilities did not, and do not, want their profits reduced, their revenue requirements changed, and their business models threatened. State mandates can force consumers to pay money toward a good cause, but not force utilities to reduce corporate profits. So it was therefore arranged to measure progress in ("other people's") dollars spent rather than carbon cut. It is a classic study in making progress while not rocking the proverbial boat: incrementalism hidden in a message of moral sacrifice.

The good news is that movements are currently underway to change all of these things, but these are not technological movements. They are not led by billionaire geniuses, big foundations nor even most of the “big” environmental NGOs, but by municipal governments and the activists who support them. Importantly, the centralization of renewable energy development, the obsession with maximizing transactions rather than demand reduction (the growth imperative) and its ineffectiveness as a carbon reduction strategy, are valid insights that mainstream environmental leaders and their campaign messages continue to miss.

Decentralization is a critical pathway, with major movement underway across the nation and world, that the film also simply fails to acknowledge at all, as if it didn’t exist. In fact, the community energy movement is underway, led by a different breed of environmentalists. Local installation, pairing local generation with local use, with local investment, neighbor-level sharing and cooperatives, and interoperable use and storage of onsite energy, present widely replicable, proven strategies to actually, physically, and enduringly slash carbon emissions.  In fact, of the 100% renewable US cities today, many of them, known as Community Choice Aggregations, are taking just this approach.

The film’s snapshot of green energy is a little old, but so is the propaganda of mainstream environmentalists now (idiotically) calling for Planet of the Humans to be censored from the internet. Community energy programs are focusing on deployments of renewable energy technology to not purchase Renewable Energy Certificates, build green megaprojects or implement Net Energy Metering programs, but to finance and build new local renewable, demand-reducing facilities in the urban core. They are physically building renewable energy, microgrids, urban heat loops, and energy efficiency automation in a way that reduces grid demand rather than merely selling back power to the grid. Not only that: they are focusing on climate equity, customer ownership and sharing, and local job creation, so that the majority, not the select few, can participate in and benefit economically from local renewable energy. These movements, which represent the cutting edge of climate action, are finding ways not merely to add green power to a brown grid, but to physically reduce the need for fossil fuel combustion, and to displace demand for heating and transportation fuels.

None of this is on the radar of Moore’s film, but neither is it clearly distinguished in the minds of mainstream environmental groups that promote 100% clean energy cities.  Environmentalists and lawmakers need to learn to get real about carbon reduction if we are to meet the urgent 2030 deadline recently set by the United Nations. We need to get out of startup mode and into endgame mode, that means a radical physical transformation in three years, not ten, to even come anywhere close to reaching the UN targets by 2030. We need clearer paths to radical decarbonization that overcome the glaring contradictions caused by bogus strategies to green the grid, sell renewable energy and carbon credits, and net meter solar. This is a shift from greening to weaning ourselves from the grid: from additionality to subtractionality of carbon, from carbon taxes and fees to energy equity.  Planet of the Humans may be wrong on the details, but environmental activists would be remiss to ignore its message and maintain the useless fictions of neoliberal environmental policy in the era of climate crisis. In the final analysis, this film is a needed call to arms for the environmental movement to embrace an End Game scenario for climate action, effective immediately. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

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Paul Fenn is the author of CCA 3.0: Achieving Greenhouse Gas Reduction (2020), co-director of the Local Green New Deal (localgreennewdeal.org), president of Local Power LLC (localpower.com) and co-author of Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction (2018). He lives in Massachusetts.

100% Renewable Cities are Almost All CCAs!

UCLA Luskin School's December 2019 report on U.S. cities and counties with 100% clean & renewable energy "achieved" show that nearly all of them are California CCAs!   Sixty-seven (67) of Seventy-two (72) U.S. cities (yellow dots below in UCLA study) with "achieved" 100% clean/renewable energy supplies are new CCA 2.0 programs in California.  The other five are municipally-owned utilities in five different states.  Local Power LLC can legitimately say that the CCA 2.0 model we established in California starting in 2004 literally accounts for 95% of the 100% clean/renewable cities movement in America. Just wait until CCA 3.0, which is specifically designed for greenhouse gas reduction, takes root across the country!

Click on the maps for a closer view.  You can download the UCLA Report Here.

 

The Green New Real

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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)

PG&E's Bankruptcy and CCA

The bankruptcy of utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric should be understood in the context of decades of

More Zilla, less God

 regulatory bailouts and giveaways suffered by California ratepayers, which taken together already exceed the book value of the utility. Todays "emergency" is more of the same routine. Moreover, its cause, and its solution, should be viewed in context not of climate change (as Washington Post recently did), but of electricity industry restructuring, starting in the late 1990s.

The bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric was not caused by climate change. While this notion is catchy and trending, California has been in a drought for half a century: PG&E's power transmission and gas transportation systems have been causing explosions and fires in more recent years, because its corporate leadership has neglected what should be the core of its business (wires), failing to conduct standard simple activity of trimming trees around power lines, and maintaining their pipes. Why? Because it was distracted by an irresistible opportunity to take advantage of political conditions to capture regulators, and build a new and illegal retail electricity monopoly: a strategy that backfired with bankruptcy after successfully subverting competition in 2001, and today backfires with another bankruptcy after having failed to subvert Community Choice Aggregation (CCA).

PG&E's fox needs removing the CPUC's energy henhouse. Hopefully, California's new Governor will take the lesson from Gray Davis, who was recalled for mismanaging the state's energy crisis by giving in to, and simply bailing out, the utilities in 2003, and make a point of finding opportunity in this crisis. The opportunity would be to get rid of the cause of this bankruptcy and the 2001 bankruptcy, for which the California Public Utilities Commission approved a $9B ratepayer bailout at that time. 

The cause of PG&E's distraction was politicization of its corporate leadership, based on an opportunity to subvert the legislature and corrupt state regulators. Since California's bipartisan legislature deregulated its electricity industry in 1997 and opened the state to competition in 1998, PG&E's brass, having won an equally large bailout of "uncompetitive assets" for endorsing the end of its power monopoly, nevertheless became obsessed with blocking competition, first by new suppliers entering the market, which they successfully blocked, causing a diaspora of would-be suppliers out of competing for customers. Having driven the Enrons and Reliants of the world into selling their power into  spot markets servicing utility "default service" customers, i.e. customers still "owned" by PG&E, PG&E has had a consistent strategy of rebuilding an economic, if not legal, monopoly over retail service. 

Customer ownership has been the strategic football of deregulation from the start. Subverting retail competition also resulted in the manipulation of spot markets, causing the energy crisis and the bankruptcy. At the time, one Nation writer called in an "Energy War." And, once the legislature found a new path out of the energy crisis by creating Community Choice Aggregation (Assembly Bill 117) in 2002, PG&E regarded municipalities, again, as mere competitors to body-block.  Building up to 2010, PG&E spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying, lawsuits and astroturf campaigns to block early CCAs, starting in the Central Valley where it successfully killed the first CCA, and attempting to block Bay Area CCA startups, building up to Proposition 16 in 2010, which failed despite $46M in PG&E campaign spending.

Moreover, the attorneys and board of PG&E learned they could use the state regulators of a permanently weakened CPUC to subvert competition for electric supply, and made the CPUC its handmaiden. PG&E won approvals to resume monopoly-like activities as if CCA didn't exist, such as building new power plants that it would own, self-dealing and gas-for-power swaps with merchant generators, long-term power contract procurement undertaken with rubber stamp approval of contracts that are not even reviewed by commissioners, and multi-billion dollar regulatory reallocations of generation costs to transmission charges in the 2010 General Rate Case. In many of these decisions, CPUC regulators admitted that they were acting in violation of longstanding CPUC policy, and promised not to allow it again. This is widely known as bad parenting. The CPUC was training its corporate dog, Pavlovian style, that it could win by failing. Every high-cost contract would erect a new barrier to CCA. 

Today, PG&E plays victim, claiming that its renewable energy contracts have lowered the cost of renewables for CCAs, who have an unfair advantage now that renewables prices are lower. This is Mickey Mouse economics: PG&E didn't lower the price of renewables; China did. Moreover, CPUC regulators acknowledged that PG&E's contracts were extremely high at the time it approved them, and repeated this acknowledgement when it approved massive increases on the PCIA charge to CCA customers to pay the resulting premium. PG&E is no victim. It is a repeat offender. 

The pattern is clear, from 2004-5 during the CCA proceeding, which focused on the conflicts of interest of PG&E and the utilities in "cooperating" with CCA as required by the CCA law, while also having to maximize returns to Wall Street investors. All in all, CPUC dropped the ball. All of these monopolistic activities increased PG&E's desire to control retail energy, and made it neglect its core business of maintaining the wires and pipelines. Northern California has paid the price. 

It is indeed Groundhog day, 18 years later, and nothing has changed. So if Gavin Newsom is smart and wants to be re-elected, he will make it a point to avoid repeating Gray Davis' mistakes, by using this opportunity get PG&E out of the power business entirely, and to refocus it on its core mission: the grid. Moreover, he will move to strengthen the role of CCAs as the dominant retail power providers that they already are in California. Bailout or no bailout, this should be the "win" for California. Otherwise bailing out PG&E yet again will be merely another repeat-rinse, and California is likely to have another Republican governor in a few years.

For CCAs, CCA activists, and CCA suppliers, however, the question is, what will happen to the economics of CCA if yet another ratepayer bailout is approved by the CPUC? CCA has already been hit hard by CPUC approvals of extremely high cost PG&E power contracts (admitting at the time that they were too high, but approving them anyway), then increasing surcharges on CCAs to pay for them: the dreaded PCIA charge. We just got done paying for the last bankruptcy. All of these shrink the power portion of the bill and thus depress the competitiveness of retail supply.    

One question is how they are bailed out. This will have different impacts, obviously, but either way the overall trend is the same: competition shifting from energy rates to net utility bills: from energy to capacity. The worst case question is, assuming they are bailed out at customer expense, what is the net impact on markets and CCA. Or Assuming they are rescued, is there a different future?

Questions about impacts of the bankruptcy tend to focus on the bailout outcome, but in some ways the competitive landscape outcome is the same either way, based on the fact that bailouts have formed so much of the PG&E bill for the past two decades. One key question is will PG&E's insanely expensive power purchase agreements with renewable generators be invalidated by the bankruptcy, decreasing the extant and oppressive PCIA charge that Jerry Brown's CPUC imposed on CCAs? This is a big one, and would be appropriate, because it is the only upside we see other than getting PG&E out of the power business. However, it is not controlled by state regulators. This is a question of FERC jurisdiction vs. the bankruptcy court: and FERC recently said it can protect the holders of PG&E's high cost contracts: so don't count on it. 

All in all, the question is, if there is a bailout and a new bailout surcharge, will CCAs fold, or will they adapt? On that question, rest assured: CCAs are proven resilient public agencies, so they will adapt. There are over 1500 CCAs out there across the nation with a 20 year history, with few terminations in constantly fluctuating market conditions. CCAs in California have an unusually high level of control and resources that they have only begun to use. 

In some ways, the question is not whether CCAs will go away, but how this second crisis will influence CCA procurement activities and how it will impact California's energy markets. PG&E will either collect bailout costs from customers for the next decade or longer, or will not. Either way there will be strong pressure to get them out of the generation business entirely, and PG&E itself has made statements about some sort of "restructuring." Based on the last bankruptcy, a large surcharge will be added to already oppressive PCIA charge increases of recent years. But considering the likelihood of PG&E's days as a energy generating and procuring company will mean a drop in natural gas sales and a shift of wholesale energy markets to CCAs. Moreover, CCAs should use this opportunity to win more support from the state in their new role, such as backstopping Solar Bonds to invest in California renewables and energy efficiency.

When considering impacts of another bailout, it is important to remember that surcharges are volumetric charges on delivered grid power. Therefore, there are nonlinear benefits from PG&E's ever increasing "surchargization" of the power bill (in which paying a bill will be primarily to pay for surcharges, not energy). The more of the bill is a volumetric surcharge and not cost of energy, the better will look the economics of distributed energy resources that reduce the customer's use of grid power.  Increasing T&D charges will encourage CCAs to undertake a stronger adoption of a customer-ownership-of-energy model, promising an increasing turn to Community Solar, Cooperatives, Community Microgrids, and financed efficiency projects. A "CCA 2.0" focus on consumer electronics such as home area networks and IP thermostats, targeted V2B electric vehicle sharing, and generally the integration of residential and small and medium sized business customer investment in storage, onsite PV, boiler heat capture and other kilowatt-scale distributed power with onsite IP and system level networks, will prove more cost effective, being exempt (as non-consumed grid power) from volumetric surcharges, than surcharge-encumbered conventional supply with Renewable Energy Certificates, which otherwise (stupidly) remains the dominant CCA model.  

How will the utilities focus their strategy? 

PG&E is a very poorly trained dog that is fond of dragging its bottom on the Persian carpet. They have learned that they can win through over-procurement and above-cost procurement, ratepayer bailouts, and surcharge increases on departing customers. They appear to be considering an exit from the power business, speaking of "restructuring." The state and CCAs should support this move. Either way, they will seek to increase transmission and distribution charges. PG&E will continue to consolidate its position as a wires company, and a big part of this will be to get the CPUC to authorize a huge new investment and thus rate increases. One way or another it will seek increases, whether to repay a bailout or to make new customer rate-basing of  their transmission infrastructure, or both. 

How the CCAs will focus

--Turn away from increasingly expensive business model of conventional power with Renewable Energy Certificates, and toward resources that reduce consumption

--Move from in the current approach of in-state RECs and long-term PPAS with regional renewable developers to customer-owned, behind-meter, integrated Distributed Energy Resources

--Take an increasingly flexible approach to grid power procurement, shifting program emphasis towards a long-term focus on integrated DER and onsite integrated renewables development: Solar plus storage, EVs, in-city PV, and other technologies
--Deliver demand response and dispatch, load reform and peak shaving, avoided capacity charges, and lower non-supply savings to the cost of power.  

--Move into non-rate customer savings through focus on load management, and marginalization of procurement as the competitive part of the business model.

Market advice

From an investment point of view, PG&E's bankruptcy underscores the need for CCAs to get operational control over their power. Unconsumed energy cannot be surcharged. Whether a bailout follows or not, this is yet another hint for Community-scaled integrated DER to CCAs in California. Smart investors and CCA suppliers should focus on iDERs integration rather than traditional renewable PPAs, specifically automation, microgrids and flexible storage integrated with onsite renewable power generation and conservation technologies. Expansion of CCA service to heating systems and dynamic EV chargers are also highly recommended. Moreover, more innovative CCA service entities are needed that are responsible for both power and development of iDERs.

As CCA transforms California's energy system, the state's top regulator mistakes the solution for the problem

San Francisco Chronicle, May 27, 2018

Bureaucrats cannot distinguish between their own power and the public's: yet they are totally different in fact and law. In the case of Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), public power over energy has been shifted, by the law of the  legislature and ordinances of California's local governments, from one creature of the state - the CPUC - to another: municipalities.

The CPUC's recently published "Green Book," while threatening that CCA could cause another energy crisis like the one in 2000-1, appears to forget that the CPUC itself caused the last one. Moreover, the CPUC's dysfunctional, co-dependent relationship with the utilities continues to cause many of the problems its President now blames on California communities that are now getting out from under the CPUC's control.

Instead, President Michael Picker repeats the fictional mantra that "shortages" were primarily to blame for California's energy crisis, when it was conclusively proven that these shortages were illusory. 

But Picker says CCAs will cause more shortages.  The CPUC forgets that what caused the last energy crisis was CPUC-tolerated market manipulation, starting with the state's investor-owned utilities,  PG&E, Edison and SDG&E, using their market power to block competitors from accessing the retail market in spite of legally mandated competition, and keeping all their customers captive under utility "default service," which forced competitors to sell power through manipulation-prone centralized spot markets. It was a failure to create retail competition that forced all selling through centralized utility channels and created the conditions for fake "shortages" and blackouts that were later blamed on the likes of Enron.

CCA has now created real retail competition.  President Picker was not professionally involved in energy during the energy crisis, so maybe he just doesn't remember that utility obstruction of competitive supply was primarily to blame. His new CPUC Green book is thus full of revisionism about the energy crisis, and appears oblivious to the continuing role of his own agency acting as handmaiden to the utilities, and causing the very crises he blames on CCAs.

For example, the CPUC report asserts over and over again that the utilities are the "Providers of Last Resort" in law, implying that they need to be guaranteed revenues in order to act as traditional monopolies, when the energy crisis proved this designation a myth in fact: that when the proverbial shit hit the fan during the crisis, the utilities unloaded this role on the state of California, under duress of blackouts. It was, and remains a fact of life that the State of California is the Provider of Last Resort, not the utilities, which are but wires companies. In 2000, California's investor-owned utilities abrogated their legal obligation to serve customers - breaking the legal foundation of the "Regulatory Compact" underlying their monopolies - reflected in the fact that the State (CA Dept. of Water Resources) lost $57B when it took over that responsibility to buy power, and ratepayers were ultimately forced to underwrite this loss.

CPUC's "Green Book" is boldly revisionist, also falsely claiming that the state "re-regulated" after the energy crisis and made the utilities into monopolies again in 2001. This is directly contradicted by the fact that the legislature and governor approved the CCA law (AB117) in 2002 as an answer to the crisis. In fact, the utilities have fielded several bills to re-establish monopoly regulation since 2002, all of which failed to pass the legislature. The CPUC's revisionism under Picker is a blatant and dangerous falsehood, and a betrayal of California ratepayers, who were after all required by the legislature and CPUC to pay PG&E, Edison and SDG&E $28.5B in utility bill surcharge ("Competition Transition Charge") payments in addition to the DWR contract surcharges, in return for giving up their monopolies, and with which these former monopolies formed unregulated holding companies and purchased unregulated utility assets all around the U.S., China and South America. Again, this is in addition to not only the $57B lost by California taxpayers in DWR contracts and the subsequent CPUC-approved bankruptcy bailouts (about $12B for PG&E) that were also born by ratepayers.

As the "Competition Transition Surcharge" bailout funds collected from ratepayers according to California's deregulation law AB1890 were after all received by the utilities, and obviously were never returned to ratepayers, the utilities cannot claim to be legal monopolies, cannot claim the right to be treated as such by the CPUC: ratepayers paid for the right to choice, specifically Community Choice, and are guaranteed this right specifically by the CCA law, AB117. The CPUC has neither the right to steal this back for the utilities through a bogus history lesson, nor the power to do so.

Moreover, while the CPUC "Green Book" admits that virtually the entire state is departing CPUC-regulated utility service to CCAs, it neglects to mention that they do so in part because of the discredit and disgrace under which the CPUC now operates, following multiple ethics violations and widespread evidence of continuing corruption, from illegal backchannel communications to cost-shifting, affiliate transactions, self-dealing, and gold-plated renewable energy contracts that the utilities signed and now wave before CCAs as if it were their problem. Since the CCA law was passed, the utilities have in fact used over-procurement of power to deliberately create new stranded costs that effectively erect new economic barriers to CCAs - a fact that we anticipated and attempted to head off at the CPUC's CCA rules proceeding over a decade ago.

The CPUC paper indicates that the state needs CCAs to fulfill their self-declared mission of building local renewables, behind-meter customer-owned solar, and expanding energy efficiency, and I agree with these statements - but they must be achieved by eliminating CPUC and utility barriers, not by backtracking or erecting novel protection rackets for would-be energy monopolies.

The CPUC paper fails to mention that CCAs have achieved record high renewable energy levels at rates below the utilities, and have revolutionary energy localization goals in their mission statements and charters. That being said, in their launch phases, CCAs have indeed depended too much on Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) for their renewable content, and need to focus on rebuilding their programs to use renewable energy and energy efficiency finance in the private sector to change the utility business model, create local power and eliminate the need for the mega-facilities and associated transmission lines that the utilities have always preferred.   

But again, the CPUC has a significant role in delaying the ability of CCAs to implement energy efficiency and finance renewables. It took eight years for the state's first CCA to receive an investment-grade credit rating from Moody's in large part because of perceived risk created by fierce and well-funded utility subversion of CCAs that has been largely tolerated by CPUC. Moreover, while the state's CCA law AB117 allows CCAs to administer substantial funds that their ratepayers pay every month for energy efficiency programs, the CPUC's obsolete program evaluation criteria have effectively blocked CCAs from innovating by forcing them to imitate utility programs, driving most of state's CCAs away for over a decade.

The CPUC should examine its own role in discouraging innovations by CCAs rather than flirt with an illegal and dangerous dream of re-establishing its discredited empire. It should abandon command and control and adapt its practices to allow local municipal innovation: the core mission of virtually all of California's CCAs.

It is critical that regulators and legislators recognize that CCA legitimately includes not merely a transfer of customers from monopoly service to competitive supply, but also a transfer from CPUC planning to regional planning. Picker complains that there is "No Plan," as if his own inability to plan CCA meant that no plans exist. This remark reflects a fundamental bureaucratic blind spot; there is central planning and regional planning - the former by one subdivision of the state of California (CPUC) and the latter by another (municipalities). AB117 enshrined a legislative decision and created a state-local process to make this transition, in which municipalities must comply with state requirements, but are as California subdivisions not regulated by the CPUC.  The CPUC doesn't because the legislature and people of California opted out of that system and into another. It is the CPUC's responsibility to use the limited powers it has under law to provide municipalities with appropriate guidance and support as they usher in a regional, more democratic, and greener energy system for the Golden State.

New York CCA 2.0 Working Group Report Released!

New York State's "CCA Policy Recommendations Report" has recently been completed.

New York State created a special working group a year ago to prepare a detailed report assessing the opportunities, barriers and limitations to CCA 2.0 for the New York Public Service Commission's (PSC) Clean Energy Advisory Council (CEAC). You can read the report in full by clicking the link below.

New York State is a major opportunity for energy localization because, unlike other states with CCA, New York's leadership has recognized CCA, from day one and the highest level, the opportunity for Distributed Energy Resource development (CCA 2.0). Unlike other states, New York State has focused material resources to its implementation, such as the CCA Toolkit, which Local Power helped prepare. While New York's already deregulated electricity and gas markets present certain challenges to CCA 2.0, and the PSC's regulations added some restrictions to the "California" (wholesale) approach to local development, nevertheless New York is fertile ground for a CCA 2.0 model, which moreover can be replicated in other U.S. states with active deregulated markets having "retail" market structures. This, above all else, is the reason why Local Power worked with Citizens for Local Power to draft CCA legislation in 2014, and became actively involved with the PSC and NYSERDA since then: having gotten CCA 2.0 on its feet in California, we want to prepare a nationally replicable model that will work in states that (unlike California) have retail market structures.

The New York "CCA Policy Recommendations Report" is yet another systematic effort to make DER happen on a meaningful scale here. Local Power Inc. was honored (as the only outsider) to work with New York-based NGOs and market participants to make these recommendations to the PSC and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) for policy and program changes to augment a transition of CCAs to locally-based renewable energy systems. The final report was presented to the CEAC and submitted to the Public Service Commission at the end of January, and could potentially expand CCA program opportunities if its recommendations are implemented by the PSC and NYSERDA.

The working group was chaired by Brad Tito, NYSERDA's Communities & Local Government Program Manager. As Citizens for Local Power reported, "a wide range of interests and perspectives were represented in the working group, including utilities, which did not agree with some of the report's recommendations." However the report provides valuable insight into current pathways and obstacles to CCA 2.0 in New York, as well as recommendations to the State of New York on how to further simplify and support ongoing efforts of CCAs such as Westchester to use CCA as a platform for Distributed Energy Resource (DER) development.

Apart from Local Power Inc., the report authors include the Association for Energy Affordability,  Citizens for Local Power, Constellation, Consolidated Edison, Croton Energy Group Inc., Joule Assets, Municipal Electric and Gas Alliance (MEGA), Office of Clean Energy, New York State Department of Public Service, New York State Electric and Gas Corporation (NYSEG) and Rochester Gas and Electric (RG&E), National Grid, Orange and Rockland Utilities,  Pace Energy and Climate Center, Renewable Highlands, Sustainable Westchester, and Tompkins County Council of Governments.

Read the Full Report Here.

CCA Reaching Critical Mass

GTM Research - The "Total Addressable (PV) Market for
 California Community Choice Aggregators" - Oct 2, 2017

Even though Community Choice Aggregations (CCAs) still serve a small minority of communities in the United States, the scale of going green regionally is already registering in national green power industry statistics.  It's about to get a lot bigger.

CCA is already 4% of the national PV project pipeline based on a “green CCA” market that is just getting started and about to expand rapidly in both California and New York. Given the fact that CCA is just now hitting a major growth curve in some of America's largest energy using states, and most new adopters are motivated by a focus on energy localization, this percentage is certain to grow significantly in 2018. 

CCA is finally getting the attention of national industry and media as a major and revolutionary new force in American energy. In October, GreenTech Media announced that CCA has taken over the solar market in California, and the impact is being felt across the country.  “Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs) are positioned to represent up to 45 percent of California’s utility PV demand over the next five years. The total addressable market for CCAs is set to reach 3.9 gigawatts by 2022, but it is also expected to grow beyond that projection, as eight more (county-scale) CCAs are slated to launch in the immediate future."

 Green CCA is not new, and was in fact the original concept, but has taken years to make into the rule rather than the exception among CCA implementors. While the initial growth curve of CCA in Ohio and Illinois was focused on discounts and/or higher renewable energy content using Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), more recent, and even much dramatic growth curve has been largely motivated by the benefits that can only be achieved by localization: local jobs, climate action, and local economic development. 

In California, truly a revolution in power is already underway, with 85% of all customers of investor-owned utilities expected to be served by CCAs in the next few years. Virtually all of these CCAs are focused on development of local renewables, energy efficiency and meaningful greenhouse gas reductions in addition to greener power: 150,000 GHh switching to CCA could leverage an unprecedented wave of DER development, and cause an historical greenhouse gas reduction.   

New York is the exciting new CCA 2.0 kid on the block. After the State of New York approved CCA as a platform for Distributed Energy Resource (DER) development in 2014, the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA) has taken the lead role in helping municipalities pursue a DER-centric "CCA 2.0" strategy, creating a "CCA Toolkit" with Local Power's assistance, and forming a special workgroup to advise the state on how to augment energy localization and remove any outstanding barriers in state law and regulation. I am proud to have participated in these processes.

The trend towards green power has even spread back to early CCA states whose early adopters were initially focused on achieving discounted rates for customers, inspired by widespread successes of CCAs to achieve greener power at discounted rates, and also new local benefits associated with local renewables.

In Massachusetts, about 130 municipalities out of the Commonwealth's 351 total are already under CCA service, with the City of Boston recently joining the pack, focused on achieving greenhouse gas reductions. 

More than 250 communities in Ohio are under CCA service, including the nation’s first “green CCA” in Northeast Ohio. Today, NOPEC has 850K customers in 218 communities in 14 counties statewide, all being served 50% renewable power at a discount below utility rates - something that was unthinkable even in California only half a decade ago, but becoming widespread under CCAs, which have been proven able to deliver greener power much cheaper than utilities and deregulated suppliers. This kind of scale creates substantial environmental benefits. In Southeast Ohio, SOPEC has been focused not merely on greener power but on energy localization for the past couple of years, providing the state with a ramming rod for CCA 2.0.

About 600 communities in Illinois are under CCA service. Between 2011 and 2014, 91 Illinois municipalities representing 1.7 million consumers switched their communities to 100% Renewable Energy using CCA. 91 medium sized cities and towns containing 1.7M customers have chosen 100% renewable energy (using RECs), which is a six TWh annual renewable demand boost - the carbon reduction equal to eliminating one million cars! While Illinois' CCA law needs changing to eliminate barriers to CCA investment in local renewables and efficiency, these accomplishments demonstrate both the power of CCA and the political will for significant action in green power.

With the numbers starting to show, national policy groups are beginning to recognize the true potential that CCA has to create significant local benefits like customer equity, community wealth retention, local jobs and economic development, and local pollution reduction, as well as global benefits like greenhouse gas reductions.  NAACP's just featured CCA in its Environmental and Climate Justice Program's Just Energy Policies and Practices Action Toolkit. 

 Watch for some major new leaps in 2018, with emerging CCAs shifting their focus further towards the local, and even behind the meter. As CCAs continue to prove new services like EVs and solar plus storage, solar bonds/green bonds continue to go mainstream, and increasing levels of DER integration prove themselves in the form of community microgrids, and community solar, EV sharing and dynamic charging, CCAs will revolutionize demand-side technologies and customer-ownership the way the have already transformed retail energy. Mark my words: what was a luxury will soon prove cheaper than status quo power, and what was a fantasy utopia will soon become reality.