Paul Fenn's Local Power Blog - localpower.com

How 10 CCAs Were Bigger than China in 2024

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 15:40:00 +0000

A dozen years of work with San Francisco, Marin, and Sonoma County, including partnerships with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the California Energy Commission, spawned a Revolution in Power that has replicated massively ever since. We could not be more pleased.

CCA 2.0, which combines the aggregation of energy demand with Green Bonds, is already out-investing China and Canada in the massive Green Bonds realm since Local Power, creator of California's CCA 2.0 model, wrote the landmark Green Bond Authority as part of this new model in 2001.

The California Community Choice Financing Authority has issued $6 billion in 2024, with a significant uptick in the past 12 weeks, cementing its place as the 10th biggest green bond issuer in the world—larger than either the governments of China or Canada, as reported last week in Bloomberg. helping green bond sales approach previous records. That made US the largest issuer, too!

Local Power developed the CCA 2.0 model as a way to scale and accelerate climate action while avoiding rate increases for consumers. California CCAs have maintained competitive rates while issueing $15B in Green Bonds and leveraging $20-25B in private financing, approaching $40B in investment in renewables in California and the West and creating over 25,000 jobs.

By inventing this model, Local Power LLC has proven right: a scaled, accelerated demonstration of the power of municipalities, independent of federal politics, to implement climate action on a global scale, without increasing costs to consumers, through local power and local action. CCA 2.0 is now record-smashing.

In California, the California Community Choice financing Authority (CCCFA) has implement Local Power's CCA 2.0 program design, copying Local Power LLC's groundbreaking work for San Francisco (CleanPowerSF), Marin County (Marin Clean Energy) and Sonoma County (Sonoma Clean Power) from 2001 to 2014 to use CCA to leverage Green Bond financing of new renewable energy facilities to the tune of $15 billion dollars. In California CCAs procure power for more than 14 million customers—over a third of the state's population. Two hundred cities and and counties throughout the state have amassed a total of 346 long-term power purchase agreements adding about 18 MW of new-build renewable energy resources, including over 10,000 MW in renewable energy and over 7500 MW of energy storage. PPAs range from 10 to 27 years in length and average 16 years across all agreements. CCAs tax-exempt status to lower interest rates and energy costs.

The California Community Choice Financing Authority (CCCFA), a public agency formed to help CCAs finance clean energy purchases, uses “green bond” prepayment transactions. This approach can reduce CCA PPA costs by 10 percent or more.

CCCFA has ten CCAs as members - under half of the two dozen CCAs in the California. CCCFA has issued $16 billion in prepayment bonds, equating to savings of approximately $100 million per year for community choice customers or nearly $3 billion over the lifetime of the contracts. according to CCCFA. For reliability, in the past year CCAs invested in both stand-alone and co-located energy storage with various technologies including lithium-ion batteries, vanadium redox flow batteries, and compressed air energy storage. CCA providers have also procured 617 MW of long duration storage with an eight-hour discharge capability to help stabilize the grid.

Interest is growing in our latest, newer business model under development for the past decade and now coming to market outside California: CCA 3.0: Climate Mobilization. This is CCA for decarbonizing all addressable carbon sources, and based not only on Green Bonds and third party financing, but on direct investment by customers based on local finance, cooperation and sharing. This is a new level of energy transition beyond even California's great leap beyond even the gargantuan scale of China! Its secret weapon is: an ownership model based on the energy user.

To learn more about Local Power's Green Bond work, click here

To learn more about Local Power's creation of CCA 2.0 in California, click here

The Biggest Green Power Thing in America

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 20:57:00 +0000

2023 will one day be known that a major new model for renewable energy blew past the pack. No one knows exactly what is up, but everyone is talking about it. True, it took a quarter century of preparation to make this happen, but we at Local Power LLC are nothing if not patient.

Every one of our community energy aggregation models, from Municipal Aggregation in Massachusetts to Community Choice Aggregation (2.0) in California, has taken years to show results. Local Power's Green Bond model took 15 years for San Francisco to start using CCA 2.0, our second generation CCA model, took from 1998 to 2014 to complete! But within the next ten years, something bigger and faster than anything so far has...actually...happened. CCA 3.0 in New York, which we started developing in 2014 after finishing 2.0, to create a more replicable, less bureaucratic model for all major forms of carbon, has already taken a decade to come to market. Everybody asks, can you speed things up?

And indeed, the records that CCA broke last year were based on models first approved by various governments 20 years ago. But it is the fastest gun in the West as far as transforming energy overnight.

You don't know about it because your eyes are fixed upon the hare. But look at the results! CCA is bigger in scale of climate impact than the largest players in renewable energy. Apart from inventing them, CCA 2.0 programs in California were the largest issuer of Green Bonds in America last year, building $10B of $30B in new renewables, while maintaining competitive rates for tens of millions of Californians. Not only that, California CCAs took nine of the top ten spots of all US utilities, on a list that includes megautilities like PG&E, National Grid, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, for renewable energy customers above regulatory minimums. In fact, California CCAs got more than ten times the customers of the next ten on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's list to switch to renewables above state minimums. An energy transition without economic pain? hmm.

You don't know this because it was not achieved by billionaires or Wall Street darlings. The media is less excited about municipalities than billionaires. But CCA 2.0 municipalities in California have blown the entire renewable energy establishment out of the window on real, actual results.

As the creators of CCA in California, we have bragging rights, if not billions of dollars in our pockets. With us, municipalities have the victory, if not the prize, in climate action and energy transformation in the U.S. CCA 2.0 is not just the record breaker for building and buying renewable energy, but it blew past every U.S. utility out there, all of which have had many decades to get there but have never done so. CCAs have done so in remarkably little time! It is the tortoise, not the hare, who is fastest. Communities organized democratically, not corporations, regulated or not, serving isolated consumers, take the gold on transforming energy. And they have done it in a way that can be copied around the country and around the world.

And you ain't seen nothing yet. CCA 3.0, Local Power LLC's new third generation aggregation model, has in our estimation thirty to fifty times the climate punch of CCA 2.0. America has both a proven, replicable proof of how to get green energy without rate increases or taxes, and a mature business model, developed step by step over thirty years demonstrations, that will prove CCA 3.0 to be even bigger, better stronger and faster than California municipalities' great achievement last year.

Local Power's CCA Green Bonds Model Delivers The Largest Issuance of Green Bonds in the U.S.

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 15:11:00 +0000

CCA added to Green Bonds delivers a whole new level of CCA climate fire power. We estimate that CCA 2.0, which is defined by the combination of renewable wholesale CCA and Green Bonds, is 20-50x more powerful a climate impactful model than CCA 1.0 in Massachusetts, site of the first aggregation to use state energy efficiency funds. But the scale and per capita reach of CCA 2.0 in California is an exponential leap, delivering over $30B of investment in local and mostly in-state renewables compared to CCA in Massachusetts, where the focus has been Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) and pilot projects. While we have received less acclaim for creating Green Bonds than we have for creating CCA, we consider it just as prideworthy and important - not just Green Bonds in general, but the specific kind of Green Bond we articulated and/or won approval for in San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma County, East Bay and dozens of other CCAs during their formation between 2000 and 2010. Most of them held back, for over a decade. Until now, and the impact is needless to say, epic.

Thanks are due to Howard Golub and bond counsel of Nixon Peabody for providing revenue bond expertise to Local Power's work on the H Bond model to augment the CCA program in 2005; also to Bradley Turner and his team at Booz Allen Hamilton, and Local Power first employee Robert Freehling's early work with Local Power, David Erickson, Chris Kiriakou, Charles Schultz and Sam Golding, who all contributed important work in various stages of its articulation to H Bond integration with California's formative CCAs.

Local Power authored the landmark CCA H Bond program with San Francisco voter approval of the bond in 2001 and San Francisco Board of Supervisor approval of the authority to issue CCA bonds in 2004, and the Community Choice Aggregation, H Bond Action Plan in 2007, the “In City Buildout Plan” including bond counsel in 2009, and “In City Buildout Business Case” in 2013, including a full profits and loss sheet for a ten year operation, and including the use of the Green Bond or "H Bond" Authority.

The voter approved revenue bond authority in 2001 in the form of a city charter amendment (Section 9.107.8), known as the "solar bonds," authorized the City of San Francisco to finance renewable energy and energy conservation measures on homes, businesses and government buildings. The campaign for solar bonds, Proposition H, was motivated by the need for the city to take meaningful action on climate change beyond financial instruments like RECs, by building and installing renewable generation and efficiency. We proposed the same structure to Main Clean Energy in 2009 and Sonoma County in 2013. The solar bond authority was used as part of the city's renewable energy program, administered by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, CleanPowerSF, with bonds first issued in 2012.

The California Community Choice Financing Authority, which helped organize a group of California CCAs in California to issue Green Bonds through their platform, is responsible for the largest issuance of Green Bonds in the United States!

Community Choice Aggregation is allowed in half of the US energy market, dominates the electricity industry in several states and serves one in ten Americans. Most of California is served by CCAs, its CCA 2.0 is being absorbed by the 1.0 programs across the rest of the country, and New York State is on the verge of another Big Leap in climate impactfulness beyond even CCA and Green Bonds, by engaging neighbors in shared systems, CCA 3.0. We anticipate that CCAs in California will ultimately go even further and beyond the supply side paradigm so many still follow, into a new territory of customer ownership, cooperation, local job creation and local economic development.

National Rankings: California CCA 2.0 is America's Only Proven Renewable Energy Business Model

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 22:15:00 +0000

We received the latest news on green power achievement by California CCA 2.0 programs and
Massachusetts Green Municipal Aggregations (CCA 1.0) and wanted to provide an illuminating comparison between the firing power of CCA 1.0 and 2.0 when it comes to producing results for renewable energy and climate action.

In Massachusetts, the first state to introduce CCA as a part of electricity restructuring legislation passed in 1997, principally produced the Cape Light Compact, a group of 21 towns on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, forming the state’s first aggregation program in 2000. The idea was slow to catch on, however, until electricity prices started rising and news of CCA 2.0 from California in 2013 and 2014 showed how CCA could actually build renewables, not just buy certificates, prompting more climate-minded Massachusetts municipalities to follow suit. Today, there are 168 municipal aggregation plans active in the state, saving consumers more than $200 million annually, according to a report from the nonprofit Green Energy Consumers Alliance. Seventy-six of Massachusetts’ aggregation programs included extra renewable content in 2022, or about half of the CCAs, which comprise about half of Massachusetts communities. Among these, 40 communities didn't set minimums but instead let individual residents opt-in to higher levels of renewable energy, but this option achieves very little in terms of volume, with typically low participation rates. In 2022, Massachusetts’ green energy aggregation programs increased demand for renewable energy in the state by more than 1 million megawatt-hours, the Green Energy Consumers Alliance calculated. While there is no other program in the commonwealth that produces cleaner electrons without subsidy, according to the Consumers Alliance, only one Massachusetts CCA - the first one - is in the top twenty in the US at number 12. The million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy is sourced, not built, and suggests a total generation at about 700 MW. CCA 1.0 is a lot better at supporting renewable energy than any other policy in Massachusetts, but was depth-charged by California's v2 model.

California's CCA 2.0 model, though implemented in just the past decade and most of them in the past five years has already beat every utility in the nation for the number of customers served green power above state requirements. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory's latest annual ranking showed that nine California CCAs were ranked in the top 10 nationwide, beating utilities hands-down. These top nine represent 4.6M customers, compared to the lower 10 on the list, which only total 650K customers. This makes CCA 2.0 hands-down the US green power winner when it comes to exceeding the minimum standard of green power set by regulators. Not only is CCA 2.0 ten times more impactful than other energy business models out there, but it achieved this level within just a few years, whereas the utilities have had decades to achieve change like this - and simply have not.

The firepower of CCA 2.0 is easily illustrated. CCA 2.0 in California has committed $30B in 14GW of renewable generation mostly in-state, often regional and sometimes in-town, together generating 29,000 green construction jobs in California. The thirty billion dollars total as of 2023 includes the “Climate Bonds” Local Power developed to fund renewable energy and efficiency (San Francisco’s Proposition H charter amendment, 2001) in the amount of $6B to date in Solar Bonds added to $19B of private investment to produce the 14GW.

A key here is time. Utilities have had thirty years of mandates to green their power and did not do so. Massachusetts CCA created one big achiever - the Cape Light Compact - but even it took a quarter century to get there, and most CCAs in Massachusetts followed a more conventional model and remained largely limited to the purchase of Renewable Energy Certificates to this day. California CCA 2.0 programs built 14 GW of new renewables in just a few years, compared to Massachusetts where 1.0 merely bought power from the equivalent of a 0.7GW facility.

California's population is larger, but even adjusted there is still no comparison. 14 is twenty times 0.7.. And the 14 GW is new, whereas Massachusetts' 0.7 is mostly purchased power from already existing facilities. That means CCA 2.0's net carbon benefit is in the zone of 20-50x CCA 1.0. .

That's the good news. Better news is, CCA 2.0 is 20 years old. We have been working on the Next Level for the past decade, releasing CCA 3.0: Climate Mobilization in 2020 and implementing it since then. The CCA 3.0 model now getting started in New York State will take an even greater leap in terms of accelerated energy transitions by upgrading an already proven model both with new depth from revolutionary customer engagement methods to drive voluntary investment in energy localization; and with an expanded breadth across all addressable carbon - aggregating not just power but, heat, vehicles and waste. You can order a copy for free at the link above. This is already getting going in New York but is designed to work in any state: even California.

Just as we learned the lessons of the limitations of Green Municipal Aggregation or CCA 1.0 in the late 20th century, so we have learned from the limitations even of California's record-shattering CCA 2.0 model, transforming an already successful idea onward into something even more transformative and powerful: a platform and umbrella for Climate Mobilization in any community.

National Renewable Energy Lab: California CCA 2.0 Programs Beat the Nation's Utilities for 9 of 10 Top Spots for Green Power, and 10x the next ten

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 14:43:00 +0000

Got market structure? If not, your climate pathway is fatally flawed. There's a reason that California's CCA 2.0 model, though new, has already beat every utility in the nation for number of customers served green power above state requirements. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory's latest annual ranking showed that nine California CCAs were ranked in the top 10 nation wide, beating utilities with hands down, as summarized by CalCCA.

California's CCA 2.0 model, though realized in just the past decade, has already beat every utility in the nation for number of customers served green power above state requirements. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory's latest annual ranking showed that nine California CCAs were ranked in the top 10 nation wide, beating utilities with hands down, as summarized by CalCCA. These top nine are 4.6M customers, compared to the next ten on the list, which together total 650K customers. Cape Light Compact, the nation's first CCA, made 12th in the nation at 150K, which if added to California CCAs makes it 4.75M customers vs the utilities' 650K customers. This makes CCA 2.0 hands-down the US green power winner when it comes to exceeding the minimum standard of green power set by regulators. Not only is CCA almost ten times as successful, but it achieved this in just a few years of existence whereas the utilities have had decades to do it and have not. The CCA 3.0 model will, we believe, take an even greater leap in terms of accelerated energy transitions by upgrading an already proven model with new depth based on customer engagement in voluntary investment in energy localization and breadth across all addressable carbon - power, heat, vehicles and waste: another 10X is is coming soon!

You can get NREL's report here.

The Great Orange County CCA U-Turn

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 21:08:00 +0000

Great news this week, Local Power's 2022 audit of the performance of a California CCA program claiming benefits to consumers, green power and decarbonization has prompted a major U-Turn by the agency. According to staff reports last week, the Orange County Power Authority (OCPA), a recently formed CCA, has made major changes in both top staff and board members, and is realizing its mission to decarbonize and lower costs for consumers. Back in March, following Local Power LLC's report and recommendations regarding its operations, policies and procedures, which were subsequently backed by internal County and State Audits, the Orange County Power Authority publicly presented an improvement plan and announced changes already made and others in the works. Since then major changes have been made in staff, board membership and policy.

“We have undergone several audits over the past six or seven months and numerous hours responding to these audits and reports,” Joe Mosca, OCPA’s director of communications and external affairs, told its board of directors Wednesday. “What we have for you today is an improvement plan that captures all the recommendations ever made and how we are going to address every one of those audits,” in an article by the Orange County Register last week, which contains a links to the original article about Local Power's investigation for the Orange County Administrator.

Criticism is essential to good government and indeed the long-term success of CCA. What could have ultimately discredited CCA as a concept in Southern California can now be a demonstration how local democracy outperforms corporate governance in so many ways. OCPA's turnaround consisted of removing top level management and board changes, resulting in the major policy and program design changes that have now followed. Orange County may be the biggest turn around of a CCA yet, and should serve as a lesson to CCA supporters and opponents alike of the unique ability of a democratic process to tackle important changes and challenges like climate change or energy crisis. CCA is a means to an end, and not an end in itself, requiring leaders and followers alike to be more critical and more positively involved in CCA as a process that takes years rather than the flick of a policy switch. Addressing climate change requires not just active consumers, but active local citizens. It's also important for elected officials and CCA managers to remember that citizen advocates of CCA formations are the reason it ever happened, and deserve be respected whether as critics or champions. The reason Orange County asked Local Power LLC to perform this audit of OCPA was the result of a longstanding margnialization of OCPA's founding advocates by OCPA staff and the OCPA board. This behavior is actually typical in government, and where CCAs do it, make for mediocre CCA programs with marginal benefits, but in the case of Orange County Power Authority led to poor policy decisions, procedures, and benefits to ratepayers and the environment. CCA is a tool that still requires skill and discipline, not an automatic fix: and criticism brings refinement and clarity.

Staff said OCPA had already implemented greater inclusion of a Community Advisory Committee in oversight and board meetings. Regular meetings will be held and a member of the committee will be present at board meetings from here on out. The agency has also amended how it tracks its agendas and meets notification requirements, including time stamping when they go online to improve transparency, which Local Power LLC had strongly recommended.

“We have gone through so many challenges particularly to the dynamics within our jurisdictions, but it doesn’t mean that we’re not accountable to the public; it doesn’t mean that we aren’t trying hard to restore that trust that has been knocked down in the last two years,” said Jose Castaneda, OCPA board member and Buena Park council member according to the Orange County Register. “I appreciate the opportunity to memorialize our improvements.”

So do we! Turnarounds like this are not typical of either electric utility or deregulated supplier corporate boards, even those convicted of criminal activities. Local governments can do better because they are open to criticism from the public. Advocates had to struggle alone for years in order for the correction to be finally made. One of them, indeed, now sits on the OCPA board. This is how democracy can work.

OCPA implemented not one but many of our recommended changes, hiring a board clerk and assistant to the CEO to better ensure transparency, another recommendation in our performance audit. Reflecting Local Power LLC's critique of OCPA for also inappropriate risk management policies, the California State Auditor’s Office recommended the agency amend its risk management program, and by May, OCPA officials said an oversight committee that includes members of the board will start meeting regularly.

OCPA also implemented changes based on Local Power's audit recommendations concerning The CCA's contracting practices. "Already, policy has been set to report contracts to the board between $50,000 and $125,000 and all active contracts more than $125,000 have been approved by the board and the board will sign off on any contract of that value from now on, in addition to board quarterly progress with financial details of all contract," the Orange County Register reported. "The agency has also made amendments to its disclosure of payments to establish accountability and will require large checks to be signed by senior management."

Staff said OCPA will have a policy by June 2024 to further amend contracting concerns raised in Local Power LLC's performance audit and Orange County Auditor by questioning whether the CEO should be able to bypass existing purchasing requirements, whether or not it is "urgent," and is studying precedents from other California CCAs on how to handle these needs as well as threshold dollar amount formal triggers for OCPA bid solicitations.

As Local Power LLC's CC performance audit recommended, OCPA's executive team and board of directors drafted bylaws to increase its transparency which were reviewed at the public hearing last Wednesday.

OCPA is also finally implementing local renewable energy projects rather than just signing contracts, the longstanding goal of Local Power LLC.

Congratulations everyone!

Local Power LLC's original Orange County Power Authority performance audit is downloadable as a PDF from Local Power's web site here.

Local Power LLCs New Program: Decarbonize Landfill and Sewer Waste

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 16:51:00 +0000

Why has Local Power LLC expanded its definition of Community Choice Aggregation to include municipal post consumer and sewer waste management? Creating “white” hydrogen is one reason, but more than that, is to properly convert, detoxify and sequester landfills in the name of decarbonization. Waste is among the top four sources of climate change that can be addressed by local governments. It has been a missing piece in local decarbonization efforts. With CCA 3.0, our new 2020 program now being prepared for implementation in New York, w gas aggregation for electrification of heat and hot water, and EV/hydrogen fuel cell vehicle integration as DER batteries with bidirectional chargers have already been added to CCA’s traditional electrical “plug load.” Addressing waste through CCA hits two birds with one stone: solve the waste problem, while creating local hydrogen for microgrid backup hydrogen storage. It fits together, and adds resilience by complementing EV batteries to facilitate self consumption by Distributed Energy Resources cooperatives at the DER facility level (building to block).

Local Power LLC Waste Project

Local Power entered the world of waste in 2019 with the development of a project to convert landfills and human sewage to hydrogen and industrial limestone while also destroying forever chemicals that largely constitute them. We did it first because municipal landfills are the fourth "addressable carbon" identified by the United Nations apart from carbon pollution caused by electricity, heating/hot water, and vehicles. But we had been following the problem of post consumer waste toxicity - particularly the strange persistence of Teflon pans and plumbing tape despite longstanding and widespread knowledge of Teflon health risks both in landfills filled with plastics, in drinking water and household pipes, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFOAS) alongside many older toxics like PCBs, all of which end up in humans, because we drink water. Doing something about America's 40,000 landfills, both existing, new and ongoing in a national waste trading and hauling system so that garbage can be burned a few hundred miles away instead of here.

The depravity of current waste management, blamable to the corruption of an EPA and FDA that have done nothing about PFOAS for sixty years, even puts shade on climate change, which it least may be excused based on the human need for energy. For PFOAS it was for nothing. We already had natural pipe thread materials, we already had iron pans It was for nothing. So clearly these materials, and all plastics, need to be banned outright. However, the 40,000 landfills remain, full of toxics seeping into aquifers and soils. In the meantime, proliferation of diseases caused by PFOAS toxicity go through the roof among causes of death, many of them resulting from unregulated industrial pollution. The nonrecyclable plastics and PFOAS in landfill waste are matched by sewer waste, which contains PFOAS that are ubiquitously in toilet paper. Many known toxic PFOAS are still being sold today as microwave food containers. Even with a PFOAS or plastic ban, the existing landfills release increasing levels and numbers of PFOA chemicals each year because they become more toxic with degradation, meaning like climate change - if nothing is done, the problem gets worse.

Local Power LLC has included landfill and sewer waste in its New York CCA Master Implementation Plan which it filed with the New York Public Service Commission in March, 2023.

In Massachusetts, we continue to develop a pilot project for a regional waste decarbonization by hydrogen and edible food composting with local towns.

Whereas in New York Local Power LLC is acting as a CCA Administrator under New York law and regulations, in Massachusetts we are a developer of a hydrogen facility that will provide exclusively waste detoxification, conversion and sequestration. Thus the project solves municipal waste problems while also creating white hydrogen fuel for fuel cells in buildings and vehicles. We are also developing a project for California and other states.

Municipalities traditionally manage water, but many have privatized services, both of which made natural clients for Local Power LLC. Working waste decarbonization into our 2020 CCA 3.0 model was the first step, followed by persuading the City and Town of Ithaca, New York to include waste decarbonization in their CCA local laws in 2022. We expect to build the first facility in Massachusetts independently, rather than through a CCA for the time being, but are developing the knowledge to procure something like that in New York State, and provide a pathway for other CCAs around the country.

Background on “Forever Chemicals” PFOAs in our Waste Stream

Detoxifying waste must confront the PFOAs crisis, which the waste to hydrogen strategy can do. As we have asked ourselves with respect to the inefficacy of decarbonization, how many ti,mes do you have to see federal regulation fail while continuing to believe it works or ever will work?

From The Devil they Knew: Chemical Documents Analysis of Industry Influence on PFOAS Science, https://annalsofglobalhealth.org /articles/10.5334/aogh.4013:

"Our review of industry documents shows that companies knew PFOAS was "highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested" by 1970, forty years before the public health community. Further, the industry used several strategies that have been shown common to tobacco, pharmaceutical and other industries to influence science and regulation – most notably, suppressing unfavorable research and distorting public discourse. We did not find evidence in this archive of funding favorable research or targeted dissemination of those results. …The lack of transparency in industry-driven research on industrial chemicals has significant legal, political and public health consequences. Industry strategies to suppress scientific research findings or early warnings about the hazards of industrial chemicals can be analyzed and exposed, in order to guide prevention."

Even with PFOAs now a known national issue, consumers continue to purchase PFOA products unawares, just as they do with phthalates in plastics that rob their children of sex organs and give them cancer. The many products containing PFOAS in landfill and sewage treatment combine and break down into the soil, everywhere, including contaminating the food supply due to PFOAS in fertilizers and composts.

A recent Guardian story, “KOS Nature-Powered Organic Plant Protein drinks and powders contain toxic ‘forever chemicals’, a recent filing with the California Department of Justice charges.”

"A filing, made by the Environmental Research Center (ERC), a San Diego-based consumer protection nonprofit, states that its testing found PFOA, a dangerous PFOAS compound, in five KOS products. The filing states the non-profit found PFOA in KOS Nature-Powered Organic Plant Protein chocolate and vanilla flavors in two package sizes, as well as one package size of chocolate chip mint flavor. The document did not provide the level at which PFOA was detected, but the Environmental Protection Agency found this year that virtually no level of exposure to the compound in drinking water is safe. KOS powders and drinks are sold at Walmart, Whole Foods, CVS, Walgreens, Target and other national retailers. The groups are now intervening in the lawsuit and regulatory proceedings between the EPA and Inhance Technologies, which they estimate produces about 200m PFOAS-contaminated plastic containers annually. A review of regulatory documents, court filings and patent applications shows Inhance appears to have repeatedly lied to regulators and customers about whether its containers shed PFOAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) into products stored in them. Still, the EPA and the Department of Justice have not pointed out the company's inconsistencies in court, and the groups have questioned whether industry influence at the EPA is playing a role in the agency's decision-making. Last week, the groups formally asked the EPA to order Inhance to stop distributing the containers, and will soon file a motion asking a judge to do the same while highlighting the company's inconsistent statements. ‘It's a serious and ongoing threat to public health,’ said Bob Sussman, an attorney representing the consumer groups. ‘It involves not only the demonstrated hazards of the PFOAS that are in the containers, but the huge number of containers and their economy-wide uses.’

(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/30/PFOAs-kos-protein-powder-environmental-research-center)

H Bonds Finally Realized: California CCAs issue $5 Billion in Solar Bonds

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 01:32:00 +0000

In addition to founding Community Choice Aggregation, Local Power has long boasted of our founder's invention of the Solar Bond or Green Bond ("H Bond" from Proposition H, the original bond authority adopted by San Francisco Voters in 2001). However, we have long been frustrated by the how very long it has taken CCA programs in the Bay Area and California to implement H Bonds. Climate change does not forgive slowness, and neither do we.

As we have been telling CCA leaders for over nearly two decades, the buying power of municipal aggregation must combine with municipal financing through revenue bonds to transform a CCA into something much, much more powerful. From 2008 when Marin Clean Energy chickened out, and then San Francisco Supervisors lost their courage in 2013, we were afraid CCAs would never see the light.

But finally, this past week, Local Power's leadership finally paid off - however belatedly - with the announcement of the issuance of $5 Billion in revenue bonds by CCAs to build renewable energy in California. The "Clean Energy Project Revenue Bond" is a renamed H Bond, the original CCA revenue bond authority written by Local Power and adopted by San Francisco in 2001. Local Power drafted San Francisco's CCA law to combine CCA with revenue bonds for the first nearly twenty years ago, in 2004. Since then, only San Francisco had ever used the authority. But now the H Bond, like CCA itself, has hit prime time. Five billion dollars is very big news indeed: the level of big we have long awaited. Climate change scale: community wide scale.

California CCAs East Bay Community Energy, MCE, Silicon Valley Clean Energy, Pioneer Community Energy, and Clean Power Alliance have all issued clean energy revenue bonds, claiming to save an estimated $840 million for California electricity customers over the next 30 years. Each of the CCAs entered into a long-term power supply agreements for sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower. The municipal revenue bond or H Bond issuer – in this case, California Community Choice Financing Authority (CCCFA) – issued tax-exempt bonds to fund a prepayment of energy that is to be delivered over the contract length. The CCA energy supplier utilizes the bond funds and provides a discount to the CCA on the power purchases based on the difference between the taxable and tax-exempt rates. This approach was articulated for San Francisco in Local Power's H Bond Action Plan in 2007 and with the help of our attorney Howard Golub and the bond team at Nixon Peabody in 2009.

Now it is a very real thing at the kind of scale climate action demands, and "CCA 2.0" - the new model for municipal aggregation in California that Local Power LLC invented 20 years ago after coauthoring the nation's original CCA law in Massachusetts - is finally complete. Congratulations, everyone.

CCA 2.0 now not only provides the most power in California, they are using H Bonds to achieve a whole new level of decarbonization, sustainability, and energy independence.

“CCCFA’s member agencies have now issued six clean energy prepayment transactions ranging from $460 million to $1.2 billion," said CCCSF, which boasts that "this prepayment structure allows California CCAs to reduce long-term costs on clean energy projects by issuing tax-exempt clean energy revenue bonds to prepay for the renewable energy....These transactions have locked in $210 million in savings for customers with the potential to save $840 million over the next 30 years according to representatives."

The California Community Choice Financing Authority (CCCFA) was established in 2021 by Central Coast Community Energy, Clean Power Alliance, East Bay Community Energy, MCE, Pioneer Community Energy, and Silicon Valley Clean Energy.

Local Power established CCA in California and started, or helped to start, many of the first CCAs in the state to implement CCA 2.0. Local Power LLC has now moved on to "CCA 3.0," which its founders are implementing in states like New York. The CCA 3.0 model brings new, additional leverage to grow the climate impact of CCA in profound and even more powerful ways than CCA and H Bonds. CCA 3.0 activates a new layer beyond just government and finance: people. With people properly engaged and empowered to "Own Your Power," real scaled local climate action will be within the grasp of citizens in Anytown, America. Click on the CCA 3.0 link to get a free white paper on how Local Power's new model for energy transformation might work in your community tomorrow.

CCA 3.0 Hits New York as CCA 2.0 Achieves the "Highest Level of Sustainably-sourced Energy Out of Any Major US City"

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 16:56:00 +0000

One of America's ten largest cities is on track to carbon neutrality by 2030. Did you hear that? Do you know how little "on track" the other nine largest cities are? If you are clever, you will ask, "what on earth enabled San Jose to do that?" A climate activist from Boulder immolated himself in front of the Supreme Court last week due to the fact that worldwide carbon emissions have increased 50% since 1990, the date against which most climate agreements are gauged. In other words, the nation, and the world, are failing utterly. But not San Jose. What gives? Why can't we all do that? I am here to tell you that you can! Si puedes!

The City of San Jose announced last week that it's CCA program, San José Clean Energy (SJCE) had made "a major accomplishment" in the City's efforts to combat the effects of climate change. SJCE, the CCA for 350,000 homes and businesses in San José, has achieved a 95% carbon-free electricity mix through their use of solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, and is the cleanest electricity mix out of the ten largest cities in the country. Renewable sources like solar and wind comprise 60% of SJCE’s power mix. The CCA has launched San Jose to the leader among America's ten largest cities in an authentic physical decarbonization of its entire energy sector. Most importantly, SJCE has achieved this for the entire San Jose community without charging anyone higher electricity rates than the utility charges for brown power:

"As the community choice provider for San Joséans, SJCE sources energy at competitive rates while PG&E delivers the energy over its system of poles and wires. GreenSource, SJCE’s standard service option, is currently sourced at 60% from renewable energy. Community Choice Aggregation (CCAs) like SJCE are a driving force in California’s clean energy future: in total, 23 CCAs have contracted for nearly 10,000 MW of new solar, wind, biogas, geothermal, and energy storage, fueling renewable energy development, green jobs, and economic growth. CCAs are also driving markets for grid reliability solutions like long-duration storage."

Where's my prize? Ah well, smell the roses. Regional carbon neutrality based on massive new investment, for free!

"To date, SJCE has invested more than $1 billion to add new solar, wind, and battery storage to the grid at cost-effective prices for customers. In February 2022, Mayor Liccardo, along with SJCE, announced the completion of a new 62 megawatt (MW) solar generation and energy storage facility in Kern County that is delivering clean, pollution-free electricity daily from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. for San José homes and businesses for the next 12 years. This builds on SJCE’s investment in a 225 MW wind farm in New Mexico produced from 117 wind turbines that deliver enough clean electricity to power 186,000 San José homes."

Wow. a billion dollars of investment, 60% renewable, and with hydropower, 95% carbon free.

Does that mean we have a model? Yes, a foundation. Now we must build the edifice of community wide energy transition itself: something not yet done in California. While California's CCA program has grabbed the headlines like these for the past few years based on a "CCA 2.0" program designed to build local renewables at scale through a regional wholesale power agency, New York municipalities are now pursuing a new business model of Community Choice Aggregation designed for climate action. Version Three uses municipal and civic partnerships to organize voluntary investment in onsite renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies known as Distributed Energy Resources, known as DERs. Whereas California's CCAs work like wireless utilities, New York municipalities doing CCA 3.0 are lightly staffed coordinators of intra-municipal partnerships that enable any resident or business to invest in DERs in their building, on their block or in the neighborhood.

CCA 2.0 exploded the original mold of CCA 1.0 from back in 1995. I know because I co-authored the first and authored the second. The idea of 2.0, written 20 years ago, was to make CCA give a physical impact, not merely purchase greener power. Today, It has utterly succeeded, both in achievements of carbon goals like San Jose, and in replicating fast: speed and scale. It is time to take the success of California's 2002 CCA model to a 2022 scenario facing 2030 without a climate plan. How can we do this for all four "addressable carbon" sources, not just electricity? And how to do it in so many thousands of low income, resource-poor communities? These are the only remaining questions. The rest is now proven.

Now we are taking it to the next level. CCA 3.0, which Local Power released in 2020, uses energy democracy to take another leap in terms of decarbonizing whole communities in a timely and cost effective manner. Scalable across all "addressable carbon," CCA 3.0 is also scalable in terms of reaching the entire community, most of which remains ineligible or "redlined" everywhere today. CCA 3.0 uses local municipal oversight of energy loans in conjunction with CCA-managed "shares" and "cooperatives" agreements to offer a voluntary investment option to every customer in a community irrespective of income or home/office ownership. CCA 3.0 uses an "equity lens" to find commercialization pathways to reach every customer through an authentic local program in each participating municipality, and plans technological convergence to decarbonize not only the electricity sector but natural gas, gasoline/diesel, and local sewer and solid waste, integrating all into interoperable microgrids, thermal loops and EV sharing on a block level.

Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) has been going on for 25 years. There are 1800 US municipalities doing CCA states comprising half the US energy market. Tens of millions of Americans get their energy from CCAs. But what happened in California was different from all the others. And what is now happening in New York will put California's great achievements in the dust. So you are wondering, which New York cities are now doing this? Who is Local Power working with? When will these new programs launch?

As I hope you have learned today, it's only official when it's over.

Stay tuned....

Planet of CCA: From "100% Renewable Cities" to Local Green New Deal

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Fri, 08 May 2020 01:54:00 +0000

The global climate emergency is a crisis of policy and political will. It is not a lack of cost-effective technology. Above all else, we are blocked by fear of disrupting the economy. The United States is central to this problem, both as the world’s second largest cause of greenhouse gas emissions and as a global policy leader. Establishing an economically viable model for climate mobilization in America is of paramount importance globally.

In 2020, Local Power is launching a nationwide technical and educational resource for communities and municipalities with democratically-run local energy programs called Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) to ramp up their programs for climate mobilization, following a new model we call CCA 3.0. Local Power’s Local Green New Deal project has been created to drive an implementation and replication process through educational engagements of communities, technical assistance to municipal staff and elected officials, and an international clearinghouse of best practices.

This is what climate mobilization looks like.

Municipal governments lead climate action, but lack the legal framework to scale up their impact; CCA 3.0 provides that leverage. CCA 3.0 "cools" the grid by placing storage and generation behind the meter. It empowers local governments to drive greater distributed power by enabling them to invest in their residents and businesses. Funded with municipal "Green Bonds," CCA 3.0 ensures that local money stays local, employing data to match technologies to place, using customer shares and cooperatives to turn monthly utility bills into energy equity accounts.

As we demonstrate below and in great detail in our study, all of this can be deployed immediately.

The Opportunity

CCA 3.0 energy transformation is defined here as a 50%-85% across-the-board greenhouse gas reduction for an inclusive geographic community, and completable within a five- to ten-year period from today. With 1500 municipalities and 30 million Americans under CCA service, CCA 3.0 is based on a mature and globally replicable model for climate mobilization. It has the immediate potential to answer the United Nations’ call for worldwide energy transformation in the next decade "to avert irreversible damage to the Earth's ecology."

The CCA 3.0 program was designed by Local Power, creator of CCA, to work under existing law in states with CCA that make up half of U.S. energy demand: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Virginia. CCA 3.0 can be replicated starting within one year for U.S. states in the process of adopting new CCA legislation, such as Wisconsin, Colorado, Maryland, Washington, and Utah. Moreover, CCA 3.0 is implementable starting within two years in the European Union and most other countries’ energy markets with enabling legislation. Half the U.S. can complete climate mobilizations within five years, states introducing CCA laws within six or seven years, and other countries that authorize CCA within seven or eight years.

The Problem

The cost of energy from integrated green energy technologies has been competitive with grid power and pipeline fuels for many years. There has been a dramatic decline in the cost of Distributed Energy Resources (DER), including solar photovoltaics, electric vehicles, microgrids, and efficient electric HVAC and hot water systems. Regulatory capture and flawed energy market designs have trapped developers of these strategic technologies in a systemic dependency on utilities for access to functionally captive energy users.

The technical feasibility of integrating DERs has also existed for many years. However, efforts by states to set up markets to encourage rapid deployment of such technologies have been stuck in startup mode for a quarter-century. Centralized megaprojects continue to dominate the renewables market today, driving up carbon-causing transmission line overdevelopment and new fossil investments to accommodate their intermittency. As a result, DERs remain relegated to niche markets. Ratepayer and taxpayer subsidies are invested in a manner that delivers little impact on carbon emissions. Based on renewable energy company door knockers and pyramid scheme marketing, or inherently limited utility contracts based on regulatory mandates and fees, marketing and customer acquisition cost represents around half of the installed cost of solar today. DERs are siloed as a luxury item limited to the few, with marginal carbon impacts.

Inadequate state-level policy decisions of recent decades have created a dysfunctional market that blocks climate mobilization. The vast majority of residents and businesses are functionally redlined by this market from energy transformation, largely limited to options of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). RECs pay middlemen “market incentives,” but do not result in physically changing a customer’s energy supply. The result is that the combustion of fossil fuels required to provide “renewable” products and services has been reduced little if not at all. For affluent or devoted businesses and residents willing to pay more for a “premium green” REC product, state governments have created a "virtual" paradigm of renewable energy procurement. This form of REC procurement certifies transactions, pays suppliers and signals good consumer intentions, but does not actually cause physical carbon reductions.

DERs can fix this problem, but are prevented by incumbent-protecting markets and state regulations. Conventional solar, like RECs, remains a niche market for the few. Even with incentives and rebates, the utility tariff-based business model and physical configuration of solar virtually ensures superficial climate impacts. Inherently limited business models created by states under undue influence of incumbent utilities and financial institutions has created this problem. This is not a technological problem, nor a problem of the cost of DER technologies. DER development is limited to serving only A-list customers with strong credit ratings who own their buildings. Conventional rooftop solar is wired for export, not demand reduction. Under conventional market design, neither RECs nor DER can come close to the level of physical change that the climate emergency demands. CCA was originally created as an exit strategy from that market. CCA 3.0 creates the pathway to a new system entirely.

The Solution

Market design has always been the real solution to climate mobilization.
Community Choice Aggregation was created as an alternative to supplier-controlled markets: a younger brother idea that grew up alongside electricity and gas industry deregulation of the 1990s. CCA was developed to directly confront climate change. Democratically stewarded by municipal governance, CCA enabled local public oversight of energy procurement for residents, businesses and governments that did not opt-out. Deregulated customer choice regimes adopted in most U.S. states have benefitted only a small minority of large industrial and commercial customers. By comparison, CCA has proven uniquely successful at extracting economic benefits for all energy users. CCAs have consistently outperformed both utilities and energy marketers in the sheer magnitude of green power they have bought and built while also reducing consumers’ energy costs.

CCA is widely regarded by Democrats and Republicans alike as the one success story to come after a quarter century of electricity and gas industry restructuring. CCAs serve one in ten Americans. Saving over thirty million Americans billions of dollars on their utility bills, CCAs have caused some of the largest greenhouse gas reductions in history. Purchasing green power well above required state levels, CCAs have also built many billions of dollars of additional new renewable energy facilities beyond state requirements. CCAs are proving out important innovations in the DER space, too, as detailed in our 2020 report, CCA 3.0: Accelerated Greenhouse Gas Reduction. In this last respect, California CCAs have physically added whole new levels of renewable power that would not be there otherwise today.

The Situation

While CCAs have outperformed the market and proven a viable path to climate action without taxes or fees, they have yet to fulfill their true potential. To be truly successful, CCAs must achieve impact on a scale that is commensurate with the unprecedented magnitude of climate crisis. Their impact has evolved exponentially with the advent of a second generation CCA (“CCA 2.0”) developed by Local Power for California, focused on building large-scale regional renewable generation. However, the climate emergency calls for swifter action. In 2020, a second exponential leap is needed to give CCA programs the leverage to act as administrative umbrellas for climate mobilization across all customer types and all energy uses in a community. This focus on customer ownership will unlock widespread investment in physical, local decarbonization throughout the private sector. Existing consumer payments for power, gas, diesel and gasoline will repay this investment. Our third iteration of CCA incorporates lessons learned and best practices from 25 years of growing CCA, including three commissioned national surveys. CCA 3.0 is designed to overcome past limits to achieve the physical energy transformation of whole municipalities and groups of municipalities in a five-year schedule.

CCA 1.0 proved the feasibility of greener power at lower prices than regulated and deregulated power suppliers. CCA 2.0 proved the feasibility of building additional renewable power above
regulatory requirements, at competitive prices with brown power. Today, CCA 2.0 programs in California constitute fully sixty-seven (67) of all seventy-two (72) U.S. cities with 100% renewable energy in 2020, including RECs and built renewables. That being said, climate mobilization requires a much larger energy transformation than CCA 2.0 has achieved. CCA 2.0’s limitation is due to a lack of programmatic focus and resources on demand reduction.

Systematic grid/pipeline demand reduction is the essential key to scaled, accelerated and sustained carbon reduction. While Local Power’s CCA 2.0 model succeeded in delivering an exponentially greater carbon impact than the Renewable Energy Certificate purchases by CCA 1.0 programs, climate mobilization-scale greenhouse gas reductions require removing electricity demand from the grid, and fossil fuels from pipelines. The “subtractionality” of energy demand for grid/pipeline energy resources, not merely “additionality” of renewables to the grid, is the next step. CCA 3.0 can meet the United Nations’ 2030 deadline, carrying a ten-fold to thirty-fold increase in carbon reduction potential compared to CCA 2.0.

The Details

U.S. municipal governments already lead climate action, but often lack the state legal framework to leverage the scale and impact of local programs. CCA 1.0 and 2.0 increased this leverage with impressive results, but a different operational and technological business model is needed.

CCA 3.0 employs a cutting-edge behind-the meter onsite interoperable renewables and flexible storage technology strategy. The result is a reduction in physical grid- and pipeline demand at the onsite and community levels. CCA 3.0 calls for a focused municipal program design and staffing plan to engage customer investment in DERs. Under CCA 3.0, CCA 2.0’s core centralized energy procurement strategy is refocused around a community redevelopment-centered operational business model. CCA 3.0 program design sets in place a series of strategic changes, enabling implementation of locally built, locally-owned, locally-used and locally-shared renewable energy systems on a parallel, CCA-wide basis.

CCA 3.0 refocuses CCA agencies and municipalities to drive development and engage customers in voluntary customer DER investment. CCA 1.0 offered discounts and purchased energy from existing renewable suppliers or purchased conventional fossil supplies with RECs as “mitigation.” CCA 2.0 offered bill neutrality and built more new renewable facilities to "add" renewables to the grid. CCA 3.0 takes the final major step in decarbonization: customer equity investment to subtract load from the grid from the bottom-up, through deployment of a renewables-plus-storage platform.

CCA programs identified in our CCA 3.0 Report demonstrate that a “cooling” of the grid and “lightening” of pipeline load is immediately deployable, and technically and economically feasible. Integrated DERs can replace city-wide or town-wide community's load on the power grid and gas/heating oil (heat and cooling sector), as well as gasoline/diesel pipelines (transportation sector).

CCA 3.0 is a platform for removing communitywide greenhouse gas emissions sources by avoiding grid consumption, “peaking,” and fossil fuels for heating and transportation. CCA 3.0s will build renewably powered microgrids with electric vehicles and HVAC/hot water systems as flexible storage to minimize importation of energy, while eliminating exportation of onsite power. This critical strategy removes grid barriers to DER deployment, because installed systems do not flow onto or congest the local distribution grid. Therefore DERs may be installed ubiquitously throughout a CCA’s service territory without delay or disruption by incumbent utilities.

CCA 3.0 creates a customer investment space outside the conventional market. Whereas CCA 2.0 uses conventional financing that limits eligibility to consumers with minimum credit scores and collateral, CCA 3.0 employs a municipally-administered energy sharing and cooperation platform based on public finance. The platform extends eligibility to every single resident and business owner who does not opt-out of the service: a new option to the entire community. CCA 3.0 localizes investment to the entire community. CCA 2.0 programs have depended mostly on outside tax-appetite (avoidance) financing to build absentee-owned facilities, exporting the community’s energy dollars to Wall Street. CCA 3.0 employs municipal Green Bonds to leverage voluntary customer investment propositions based on a projected customer return-on-investment to every single energy consumer in the community. Inclusive of all energy use, and ubiquitously deployed independent of financial market and federal tax code fluctuations, CCA 3.0’s definition of energy transformation as a community transition, rather than merely a commodity service, is key to effective community-wide engagement and mobilization.

This is what energy transformation looks like: retrocommissioning private homes and businesses that consume 95% of all energy and eliminating physical demand for grid power and pipeline fuels. Customer engagement and ownership is enabled by active and passive protocols, including an “opt-up” system of shares that enrolls CCA customers through a voluntary check-box option, and an “opt-with” neighborhood microgrid cooperative option operated by a CCA agency, and billed by a municipality.

CCA 3.0 programs can be run by much smaller agencies than CCA 2.0 required. CCA 3.0 sets up a partnership with existing member municipalities’ local service agencies to finance projects and engage residents and businesses as owners of DER. This is done through a “universal share offering” and CCA/municipal protocol for managing customer loan/equity accounts. Municipalities in a CCA will individually vote to participate as DER loan administrators and to develop municipal DERs as shares assets. CCA rate design will incorporate protocols for customers to receive bill credits based on DER equity accrued. Municipal staffing costs will be collected from DER loan contracts, while CCA staffing recovers costs from monthly electricity/gas bill charges. Joint Powers Entities of multiple municipalities, or individual municipalities, may implement CCA 3.0.

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For 25 years, Local Power has pioneered innovative programs for municipalities, passed legislation and educated the public. Creating CCA 1.0 in Massachusetts in 1994, Green Bonds in 2001 and CCA 2.0 in 2004, we co-founded California’s first CCAs, including Marin Clean Energy, CleanPowerSF and Sonoma Clean Power, causing an historic transformation of California’s energy system and leveraging billions of dollars in local renewable development in the past few years. More recently, we assisted in the creation of a statewide CCA regime in New York. Since 2015, we have developed a new system for energy transformation, releasing CCA 3.0 - Accelerated Greenhouse Gas Reduction in March, 2020. Paul Fenn, who leads our technical work, has been quoted and featured in hundreds of media outlets in the past two decades, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Truthout and The Nation, Bloomberg and Fast Company; and is the focus of many academic studies, including books by Cambridge University Press and MIT Press. We access a team of experts with diverse skills and experience based on our varied project needs, from program design, negotiation and launch to data analysis, policy, legal, engineering, governance, education, and campaigns.

Planet of the Neoliberals: Environmentalism and Policy Collapse

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Wed, 06 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

From climate change to nuclear proliferation, deforestation to species extinction, resistant bacteria to psychotropic drug proliferation, collapsed schools to media consolidation, civic idiocy to identity politics, endless warfare to mounting terrorism—all are extensions of the dialectic of enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1969) into the atmosphere, the ocean, genetic evolution and culture, and so on. At center is a dialectical silence echoing an untenable myth that nation states and the marketplace must define the theater of human history: an empty stage of human culture that has replaced slavery with machines, and democracy with imperialism, knowledge with information, and political liberty with culture war and overconsumption. As all crises are rooted in a common epiphenomenon, any solution must lie in a transformation of not merely policy but of democracy, economics, and the idea of knowledge as well, as they are practiced throughout our culture. It is up to us: we are today on the cusp of either catastrophe or transformation, the midnight hour at which the Owl of Minerva must finally take flight, or every crisis will indeed combine into an epochal, permanent darkness.

Environmentalism, which focuses on the defining epiphenomenon of climate change, is profoundly defensive, dissembling a negative posture toward the world, but falling into it, to a point of myopia. Environmentalists oppose windmills as passionately as a coal plant and smart meters as passionately as nuclear power. Environmentalism is paranoid. Activists run from issue to issue like children at a haunted house, encompassing, ultimately, an existentially passive position: a fixed position in empty time by which the past races ineluctably: Benjamin’s Angelus Novus. Like Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, we awaken from a sleep of denial—to regretted oceans, regretted forests, lists of annihilated species, giant industrial aberrations, and profoundly undermining trends, as if they had already happened, yet also as if nothing ever happens. Passing seamlessly from denial to resignation, a rising fatalism perceives that an existential condition, not actions, condemn humanity to inevitable ruin. Environmentalism is the penultimate pragmatism and utilitarianism, which is to say that it is defined by the absence of theory—by the active trivialization of the idea of nature, which is scaled to the global and inclusive, into the empty concept of “environment,” which is simply de facto, decontextualized and dehistoricized.

Environmentalism is the vision of the dead watching the living in horror. Symbols of a pristine paradise ruined by people regurgitate the Biblical sense of blinded fallen-ness, but with pagan, misanthropic promiscuity. Energy’s destructiveness is not merely an environmental problem. Ours is a life made intense by compulsive work and consumption, devoted to filling time that has been made empty by systematic social displacements. Energy replaced slavery in more ways than one. Big business, through energy and mineral exploitation, has reinvented the conditions of medieval lords, repatriating a new position independent from any democratic government. As with white flight and globalization, under US/UK liberalization and deregulation regimes, corporations have off-shored the wealth of all nations that comply with Pax Americana.

Globalization is trade imperialism, and free trade is the global imperialism that it espouses progressively against the slavery-based and metallurgical empires of old.

A financialized feudalism has opposed itself existentially to democracy since World War II: led, ironically, by the United States, which itself is mired in the multiple personality disorder of homeland politics under empire. Free trade agreements have subverted all constitutions and disempowered all states. Big business, which is the continued force of the de Medici family and the industry that financed the Crusades a millennium ago, has reinvented the medieval land- and violence-centered definition of noble political rights into a contractually centered, financial definition of political rights based on laundered violence. Moreover, Big Business has acquired the Fourth Estate to control political discourse within the democracies it has subverted.

Financial interests represent a new utopia based on commodity fetishism rather than political freedom. Not eliminating slavery, the energy industry has replaced and universalized it as “modernization” with machines and fuels: petroleum, coal, gas, hydro-and nuclear-powered machines. Energy slavery defines a new vision of progress erected upon a condition of permanent warfare over fuel resources and imperial corruption of those “cursed” with natural resources. Energy corporations control the resources in agreements with foreign princes and governments. While operating under European and American banners, many are functionally placeless and no longer politically loyal to their mother countries. As with Rome, globalization comes at a price—with new emperors born in the provinces and emergence of imperial disloyalty to one’s somehow reduced homeland.

Historically, the electricity industry is the hardest industrial sector to change; it is the single largest cause of crises worldwide; and it represents the largest concentration of capital that exists in the world’s economies. Indeed, rather than protect the homeland borders, the control of foreign energy resources and defense of global supply chains defines US military objectives. Nuclear power adds new kinds of domestic and foreign military threats based on the proliferation of nuclear materials in plants and uranium enrichment facilities, necessitating a militarization of the homeland, too, where energy is the center of the domestic economy, controlled mostly by monopolies and cartels traded on Wall Street.

The energy industries both cause climate change and actively campaign against anyone who tries to do something about it, leading the Left in a circular dance between bad regulation and criminal deregulation. Resisting or misdirecting technological change for decades, they have corrupted and controlled governments, using extra-constitutional leverage to erect barriers to policymakers and competitors who might achieve public technological objectives inimical to their private interests. This revolt of true elites has produced carbon policy collapse worldwide as well as a rapidly collapsing atmosphere and ocean die-offs from increasing acidity, radiation, and war, and created artificial pressure for nuclear and gas-fired power plant development as “bridge” strategies that are actually off-ramps— political betrayals. Fuel is a destructive business upon which electricity generation was built, but from which local power must now decidedly divorce itself.

Today America is a detritus of failed markets, and Europe continues to imitate American economic policy mindlessly, under the free trade, deregulation, and austerity regimes of the EU. Changes in trade or military policy have become more unthinkable than cultural transformation, world war, or genocide. Facing an eclipse of enlightenment as if suddenly today, Americans and Western Europeans face a crisis in our self-image as champions of freedom and democracy around the world, because we ourselves no longer practice political freedom, nor political democracy, at home.

We live within manufactured fictions, and these fictions prevent us from being able to change.

In energy, the predominating fiction is the kilowatt-hour. Samuel Insull built the electric industry on selling energy in time—a commodity we have internalized. We pay rates per kilowatt-hour, and regulation of energy costs is focused not on how much we have to pay in our bills but in how these rates are structured and set. When economists assess economic feasibility of technological change, they compare the old with the new in terms of rate savings by the minute. The economics of energy thus rests not on how much energy costs us in our electricity bill each month but on the rates per kilowatt-hour: just one charge or measurement of 8760 hours per year per meter, per building, per block, per substation, per municipal boundary, or per transmission control area. These are nonlinear factors radically impacting actual fixed capital costs: an implicit financialization of need.

Allowing rates to define energy, as if it were paying for gallons, excludes energy efficiency (as unconsumed energy) from the core economic and environmental equations of policymaking and relegates grid energy demand reduction (on-site renewables, efficient appliances) to a mental and administrative ghetto—a welfare program attached by legislatures, but not counting in the customer-facing economics of delivered energy needs. Renewable energy and energy efficiency do not require commodity fuels: reducing demand for energy is not counted in “rates,” which define the supply-side ideology underlying energy economics.

The United States has built a kingdom of fictions upon Insull’s foundational fiction. Having a flawed, supply-centric idea of what energy is, all of our concepts and laws concerning changing energy have had to be fictions too. In the fiction that electrical transmission has enabled, we have a timeless concept of energy as something that is omnipresent and constant, rather than the product of a fire that is burning somewhere and fuel extracted somewhere else that is being pumped into that fire—and consumed. The kilowatt-hour facilitates this fiction by reproducing the structure of fuel combustion in a charge-per-minute. It is a fiction that obliterates energy literacy and marginalizes fuel-free technologies, particularly those that may be installed behind the meter and outside an incumbent monopoly utility system’s infrastructure. Rates are thus a reification of corporatism itself.

Throughout the world, green power is defined by two policies: Feed-In Tariffs (or less generous Net-Metering Tariffs) and Renewable Energy Certificates. Both are neoliberal, growth imperative-sustaining fictions designed to accommodate a supply-centric system that will not change but merely be added to. Under such tariffs, utilities pay a consumer who elects to install solar panels on her rooftop for the power that is generated, as if it were to feed into the utility’s electrical transmission grid. Marketing materials say the utility will pay you for your power, that your meter will run backward, which it does, this fiction of supply, like water as it were, this metaphor of physical flow. Intuitively it seems real, yet it is another financial fiction: a mechanistic arms-length effort to cooperate with society anonymously under engineered conditions of location neutrality, under which actual physical cooperation with community members has been systematically rendered uneconomical.

To understand the fiction of price itself, one must acknowledge the challenge. The tariff is inherently cost-imposing on transmission and distribution, but causes no impact upon generation. Tariffs require no changes in the utility system itself, no reduction in fuel procurement, no reduction in spinning reserves or idling power plants that ramp up and down based on fluctuating system demand. It requires no change at all; the random, non-engineered principle of deployment and technology selection has resulted in a machine-gunning of solar panels strewn across the landscape. Not one iota of design was used to match intermittency of capacity, which is utterly predictable for renewable resource technologies like solar photovoltaics, with the known schedule of demand for any given customer at any given location—facts known to both the utility monopoly and the customer. Most solar systems are installed on homes that are empty between 10am and 4pm each day, when solar panels generate power. Tariffs impose a degenerate timelessness under which yet another commodity form supplants actual redesign of the resource, with a distorted, ineffective physical impact on known, geographically specific patterns of energy consumption during the night and morning vs. during the day.

The blindness of tariffs results in a double cost: the cost of paying for the solar and the cost of upgrading transmission systems to export on-site solar power. A blind selection of technology and location has de facto forced local phenomena into export transactions that constitute the ultimate neoliberal method of “prosperity.” The customer must ultimately pay twice, while the utility has arranged to suffer no loss of revenues from reduced sales. The result is an apparent fiction that renewable energy is high cost, and ultimately a decision to discontinue renewables development, raise rates , or reopen coal mines to close nuclear plants, or vice-versa.

Adding resources in a symbolic, ineffective way is another case of cutting the baby in half: give politicians (and voters) what they want, which is sacrificial expenditures on solar panels as spectacles of change, while not actually changing anything at all at the system level—no reduced budgets for substations and transmission lines based on reduced system demand, no reduced fuel sales for gas and coal companies, no degrowth, and no substantial decarbonization of energy. Everyone is happy in this bloated national fiction of greenness: a simulation that ironically represents the greenest strategy available to mainstream policymakers. This is policy collapse under an unquestioned regime of naïve economism.

But there is nothing unique in the comforts of fiction. Even solar leaders are guilty of solar tokenism or charity—not re-engineering the grid utility to accommodate operational management of intermittent resources, storage, and demand levels, but randomly placing solar panels according to isolated consumption decisions upon a network of raging fire: a spending of money, a statute, or idol, not an integrated resource displacing grid supply. The industry is intellectually trapped in (and dependent upon) this two-dimensional metric universe, siloed in feudal dependencies upon the energy monopolies, each naïvely accepting its trap as a “business model.”

Western democracies are proceeding with climate change along lines that obey this fiction and pretend a solution may be found that does not require physical change, only piecemeal additionality. We ignore the difference between policies that turn off fossil plants and policies that do not turn them off. We implicitly exclude scenarios where the owners of legacy power plants and transmission infrastructure may be stranded, even bankrupted, and instead pour billions of dollars on supply-centric schemes of renewables development that only compound the claims of economists that any real change will result in higher prices. It is all an outrageous fiction: a political charade, expressing only an inability to make decisions within zero-sum games. Unless something has to give, the rhetoric of change is all much ado about nothing.

The lie is that technology decides our fate, not politics. The lie is that markets exist independently of government, like the water that fish inhabit, and cannot be questioned. Yet research conducted on California cities and counties by this project that analyzed detailed, previously unavailable, customer meter data, as well as system-level aggregated demand data, and geographically specific renewable generation data has proven clearly that much greater change is achievable economically, without higher electric bills or even higher rates (Local Power 2008a, b, 2013a). But all of this is possible only with the political adoption of the policy structure based on a determination to bring about real change irrespective of damage to the incumbent monopolies (Local Power 2013b). Given this political will, the energy system of any city or county can be physically transformed over a five-year period without increasing the cost of energy, presenting a scaled opportunity to achieve region-wide greenhouse gas reductions without higher rates or taxes: the two conventional choices that voters and decision-makers face and typically refuse to make.

The fictions upon which policy discourse is constructed also support the fictions that comfort people. The idea of solar power has its appeal in some latent paganism: a desire to return to the sun. The idea that we can power our lives on the sun is symbolically beautiful and elegant. But it is irresponsible.

Renewable resources are prolific, each with its own temporal pattern of generation and demand levels. Locational energy demand has a corresponding, temporal intermittency, and these patterns must be matched by rationally chosen technologies. Some communities have lots of daytime commercial energy use; other communities have a strictly nighttime residential need pattern. Conversely, every location in the world has a unique pattern of renewable resources: some have year-round sunlight; some have windy areas, biomass waste from farms, waste heat from commercial boilers, ocean waves, underground geothermal heat, or rivers; and each one of these resources occurs intermittently at different times of any given day.

Our transcendent, import-oriented system ignores this problem and opportunity to integrate technologies locally to create benefits at the meter, substation, and commodity electricity market cost patterns. In a market equation of producers and consumers, the reality of community is simply ignored. Producers have the prerogatives of ownership and consumers merely of infantile, uninformed “choices”: the Astroturf paradise of neoliberalism. Whereas tariff programs appeal to the sun worshipper by encouraging her to select her favorite goddess, and the utility will pay her a credit to make it seem real, there is no consideration given to the pattern of life in a home or business, a block, a neighborhood, a city—in deciding which technologies are best suited to a place and way of life. Trapped in a fiction of pagan fetishes, there is no enlightenment: only a hermetic symbolism facilitated by state-sanctioned fictions—a virtual displacement of reason itself.

Chaos results from even the best-intentioned state-mandated ignorance. Germany reached its limit of randomly inserted renewables in the mid-20 percentiles, meaning that its ability to afford grid upgrades reached its limit when renewables deployed in this mindless way reached about 25% of the power generation. For example, American utilities are demanding ratepayers pay for huge transmission upgrades claiming it must have them, and consumers must pay higher rates and new “access charges” if governments insist upon higher levels of renewable supply. It is all a charade of stasis: an oligarchic resistance to change and a failure of democracies to force it.

Research indicates that the limit of a designed (vs. marketed) approach that builds portfolios from the ground up rises from 25% to 80% without increasing the cost of service and is achievable in a five- to ten-year period vs. a 50-year period. This is real change: massive greenhouse gas cuts and permanently reduced physical system demand, a leap out of the limited market fictions that cripple energy and climate policy today.

The climate debate pretends that the ability to change is a problem of the cost of technology—the price of solar power vs. the price of coal-fired power. Price is the ultimate fiction, a yawning apology fixed in a naïve rhetoric to the effect that the people, not the corporations, cannot afford change. Our civil society is trapped in an absurd fiction: a protection racket. The extortionist would suggest that you could stop smoking without harming the tobacco companies, who must naturally be entrusted with reducing smoking: such is an industry-dominated energy policy. Unless those fires go out, climate change goes on. Yet climate change is a zero-sum game: nature does not lie!

References (order of appearance)

--Local Power Inc. 2008a. Sonoma County Community Climate Action Plan Energy Element. http://localpower.com/SonomaCleanPower.html.
--Local Power Inc 2013a. CleanPowerSF In-City Build-Out Business Plan and materials, City and County of San Francisco. http://localpower.com/CleanPowerSF.html.
--Local Power Inc 2013b. Preliminary Budgetary Estimates, CleanPowerSF In-City Buildout Report. http://localpower.com/CleanPowerSF.html

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Excerpt from Paul Fenn, "Enlightenment and Power," Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction: Intellectuals, World Disorder, and the Politics of Empire (Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, Critical Theory and Radical Practice Series - S.E. Bronner, editor, 2018).

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

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Sun, 03 May 2020 20:43:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 17:25:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 01:35:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 22:27:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 15:32:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Sun, 27 May 2018 18:06:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 17:15:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (accountablepublishing.com) — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 19:28:00 +0000

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.

Don't Think of a Windmill

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 23:43:00 +0000

Activists from the West Coast to the East are awakening to the necessity of local action to transform the energy system. This has put new wind into the sails of the Community Choice movement, and with it a whole new level of purpose and meaning.

Next month, the Center for Climate Protection will host its annual California CCA conference in Long Beach: the Business of Local Energy Symposium. Like similar events going on around the country where CCA laws are in place, this year's Business of Local Energy Symposium is conspicuously focused on the theme of energy localization, "distributed energy resources," or CCA 2.0: on how CCAs can be the vessel for a bigger idea about change.

In part, the trend towards local action comes from widespread disappointment with President Obama's performance in battling climate change over the past eight years. An already growing awareness of the shortcomings of national politics in addressing climate change is reinforced by now-President Trump's effortless unravelling of Obama's modest gains. What little progress was made in the past eight years, was so easily unmade: hardly a recipe for stopping climate change.

In another respect, there is also growing awareness among people committed to climate action that the goal-setting paradigm of state and federal energy policy is simply inadequate. There is a growing awareness that it is easy and misleading to pretend to solve problems by setting targets for carbon reductions or green power levels twenty or thirty years into the future when future governments may un-set them. More people see now that greater strides and more permanent changes are needed. Creating new targets, incentives and trading schemes that can just be unchanged by the next politicians are just another form of kicking the can down the road.

Energy policies that don't actually change the energy system, but merely set targets, provide funding, adjust incentives or subsidies, or trade carbon credits, have inherently limited horizons that "real" change can and must transcend before we can declare victory. Another form of this can-kicking, widely adopted by policy makers of all stripes until recent years, is also increasingly scrutinized by activists: renewable energy certificates (RECs).

From the time that Climate Change became a generally accepted phenomenon in U.S political discourse in the 1990's until today, the governing paradigm of public policy has been neoliberal, in the specific meaning that the government's role is implicitly defined as creating and/or tweaking markets in which incumbent corporate interests compete. Under neoliberal policies, governments do not do anything directly, but merely create market mechanisms so that market players will do it. This is the origin of carbon trading, renewable energy certificates, and similar policy frameworks.

Today, many activists and elected officials have come to recognize that deliberate, controlled actions by governments are required to ensure that significant greenhouse gas reductions are achieved and endure into the future. This cannot be under carbon credit and renewable energy credit trading, which are a form of "rented" green-ness that can disintegrate tomorrow when the natural gas market shifts.

In so many ways, neoliberalism has met its match in climate change. Much as Bernie Sanders called broadly for a "revolution" in American politics, many climate activists now see that structural change is needed to deliver a new business model in energy, and not just greener behavior by the same players. Many Americans now recognize that we need physical change in the energy industry, not trading schemes and meaningless goals and targets: a different way of doing energy, not just mitigations and marginal improvements.

We seem to have passed beyond a secret threshold, in which bigger ideas about change may now be considered. And we have come to a greater commitment to ensure that the policy solutions we work on are themselves sustainable into the future. The epiphany that engages more and more Americans with each passing year involves a shift from the idea of "green power" to the idea of "local power," and from a paradigm of renewable energy certificates to a to a paradigm of physical change. The benefits of physical change, from de-growth, customer- and community-ownership, to grid and fuel independence, rate stability, to local green jobs and local economic development, offer ten-fold more compelling reasons to implement CCA compared to increasing renewable energy credits, as so many early CCAs limited themselves to doing. In this emerging view, environment, prosperity and social justice are not competing for crumbs, but combining into a single purpose.

As with Bernie, it was the "vision thing," that mattered: the people are not to be spoken down to with simplified fictitious renewable energy certificate schemes, but talked up to with palpable, enduring investments in a completely new energy, community-scaled system. This shift in emphasis is paradigmatic. It is a shift from thinking about making energy greener to reducing dependency on the grid: from green consumerism to energy independent communities.

In my view, the recent surge in CCA proliferation is the direct result of the successful realization of the CCA 2.0 vision to deliver a "revolution in power," starting with the Bay Area CCAs and spreading South and East to inspire climate activists who simply did not see the opportunity to use CCA in this way. As a result, the constituency for CCA is growing rapidly, and the trend towards innovation in iDER approaching a critical mass. We appear to be on the cusp of a national movement for energy localization.

Today, the realization of CCA as a platform for fundamental change is reaching a shift from the conventional utility-based conception of renewable generation and energy efficiency programs to a more specific technological concept of integrated Distributed Energy Resources (iDER): of technologies like microgrids, storage, load control, and islanding that when integrated provide a complete change from, and vastly increased independence from, the old system. The maturation of technological integration has been matched with increasingly mature community-based energy mechanisms. Since the advent of Solar Bonds, an army of DER financing industries has developed which, in conjunction with key program design elements such as shared renewables, solar co-operatives, on-bill financing, and blockchain (non-utility) billing systems, provide ample opportunity for CCAs to organize and finance iDER.

From day one (22 years ago) CCA was designed to be a platform for this change, which has been a long, long time coming. The time has come to put down those credits, and pick up a shovel!

Honey I shrunk the utility: California's final nuclear plant closure attributed to CCA

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 01:37:00 +0000

The impact of CCA on California is just getting started, but it has already caused a nuclear power plant to become redundant. Pacific Gas & Electric officials said its recent decision to close the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant was influenced in part by the loss of customers because of Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), under which local jursidictions group power purchases to choose alternative suppliers.

With six Bay Area counties already under service from Napa to San Francisco, and virtually every coastal county of the state now preparing to launch their own local electricity services, PG&E's nuclear baseload power is simply no longer needed. Industry analysts predict that 60% of all Californians served by investor-owned utilities like PG&E will soon be served by CCAs, leading the media to ask, can renewables and energy efficiency replace nuclear power?

Moreover, now that CCA is definitely and permanently transforming California's electricity system, the operative question is, will the CCAs forming up and down the coast from Humboldt to Alameda County, San Mateo County to San Jose, Santa Cruz to Lancaster and Los Angeles County and Riverside, San Diego and Del Mar, realize their founders' dreams of becoming energy independent, building local renewables and energy efficiency, creating local green jobs. and achieving a new business model focused on the other side of the meter? These are palpable local benefits that only get delivered if substantial local buildouts happen, and in a meaningful time frame.

The answer lies in the very activists who are driving each of these efforts in each community. CCA is not just a solution to the energy crisis and climate change: it is an opportunity for democracy to deliver this result. CCA is not an end, but a means to an end. Activists must realize that this unique opportunity to change everything requires more than the conventional campaign, in which winning a vote on a law is the goal, then everybody folds up their tents and goes home.

CCA is a more holistic, comprehensive process that takes years of community deliberation to fully execute. Changing everything takes perseverance on the inside, and activists who see CCA through to launch only are blowing it if they think they are "done" once the program launches. Creating your new CCA program is just the beginning, not the end, of CCA. Now you have to attend to the details of transforming energy. It must involve an active community process. If you want to deliver local jobs, local development, local companies, and local ownership, there is work to do to make those things happen. The physical transformation of energy takes time but it won't happen unless it starts at program launch. No waiting for reserves is called for, because so many ways now exist to finance efficiency and renewables, build-outs should begin at program launch, and local build-out be the centerpiece of the program from day one. If CCA activists, who have successfully made local build-out the central focus of California CCA, will just persevere with their elected officials that govern CCA programs, and hold their feet to the fire, democracy will prevail: we will truly revolutionize energy in this state, as we have promised for so many years.

New York Gets CCA 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 20:16:00 +0000

On April 20, the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) approved an order authorizing the
establishment of Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) programs by municipalities statewide, and articulated the necessary program design principles and standards that municipalities must apply in developing and implementing CCA programs for their constituents.

The PSC order adds one of the nation's largest markets for power to the list of U.S. states that allow CCA, including California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, and New Jersey, with several other states considering similar laws. Local Power Inc. played an active role in educating the PSC and other New York state agencies throughout its process, drafting legislation in 2014 and preparing testimony and comments in the proceeding over the past year, while also advising local advocates on their efforts to win CCA rules to encourage and open a clear path to DER development and community energy in New York.

The order opens a path of activists in Ulster County, Sullivan County and others to follow the lead of Westchester County, which launched its local CCA program under a PSC pilot project earlier this year. Perhaps most significantly, New York's CCA take California's move toward a more ambitious form of CCA foward another step, focused strategically not only on retail choice or greener power, but the development of Distributed Energy Resources, or DER.

The Public Service Commission's order, approved following the lead from NY Governor Andrew Cuomo following disruption of New York's power supply from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, states that while CCA will offer the vast majority of residents and businesses benefits from retail electric competition that deregulated markets have failed to deliver, but "(m)ore importantly, the CCA construct provides substantial positive opportunity for meaningful and effective local and community engagement on critical energy issues and the development of innovative programs, products, and services that promote and advance the achievement of the State’s energy goals....CCA programs can educate, encourage, and empower communities and individuals to take control of their energy future through engagement with existing...opportunities and development of new DER and clean energy programs" with the Governor's Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) and New York's Clean Energy Fund (CEF).

Local Power Inc. is very pleased by this order, and thrilled to see CCA growing both in the scale of the market, and in the wisdom of is intention. We look forward to helping New York communities realize energy independence, develop local economies, create local jobs, and transform customers into owners in coming years under this order, and encourage community energy activists everywhere to take encouragement that our strategy is not only working, but finding its way to the mainstream.

CCA Transforming Electricity in California

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 00:02:00 +0000

California CCA Activity - Spring 2016 (Local Power Inc.)

How to report on the details of a revolution? As of this year, everything has changed. No longer is California's energy landscape dominated by Investor-Owned Utilities. No longer is CCA just an idea for how things might be different. Things are different. No longer are CCAs just talking about localizing energy. They are actually doing it.

As of today, most Californians know about CCA - in a few years, most Californians will be served by CCAs.

As the Center for Climate Protection's Ann Hancock recently reported, it appears that over half of all Californians are about to become CCA customers. Whereas just one CCA served a population of 261K in 2010, by the end of 2016 San Francisco, the South Peninsula and Silicon Valley - plus Lancaster - will cover a population of over 3 million: by next year CCAs will cover over 12 million Californians. CCP estimates that the total population of communities launching or exploring CCA to be over 17 million, which comprises some 60% of California's entire population served by Investor-Owned Utilities. Considering that their estimates actually exclude a number of CCAs, these figures are actually conservative.

California's electric pie 2018 - IOU pops. (red) vs. CCA pops. (blue)

What is more, virtually the entire crop of cities - even, finally, Marin Clean Energy - is strategically focused on energy localization goals: local jobs, demand reduction, carbon reduction, and local economic development. With the launch of Lancaster Choice Energy in Southern California last year, California saw its first CCA formed outside of PG&E's service territory. Boasting one of the most ambitious solar photovoltaic programs in the U.S., its Republican mayor has put Lancaster on the map as one of the nation's greenest cities. Perhaps most importantly, Lancaster's business model is clearly focused not just on greener power, but on energy localization, local development of renewables, local storage, and strategic demand reduction.

California CCA growth curve from 2010 to 2020 in pops.

The die is, as they say, cast. Sonoma Clean Power is building local solar. San Francisco is launching CleanPowerSF this year, and has already shifted its focus upon localization. The City of San Diego became the first city in the nation to adopt binding targets for its CCA program - the very kinds of targets Local Power Inc. has pushed for. Reading through the solicitation and planning documents of CCAs covering virtually the entire California coast, I must conclude that we have won the war of ideas. The revolution is truly here.

These basic elements describe the Revolution in Power that Local Power Inc. had in mind when we created CCA, and we are even more thrilled to see "CCA 2.0" take hold in California and beyond than we are to see CCA hitting prime time. A great deal of pain and suffering - controversy and acrimony - has paid off.

Sign up for Local Power's News Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 19:25:00 +0000

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.

California Gets Second CCA - Sonoma Clean Power Blows Past Marin on Local Power

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 20:01:00 +0000

I am pleased to announce that it is official: California finally has a Community Choice Aggregation with a focus on energy localization, as applauded by an editorial of the local daily (PD Editorial: "The promise of local power contracts"). Local Power Inc. spent many years helping Sonoma county and the Sonoma County Water Agency design this program with significant funding from the California Energy Commission.
We collected a mass of PG&E data and other government data, and used the data to come up with a localization regime for Sonoma county, which reached a localized portfolio of 67% by 2015), including a significant portion of power from a local Geysers geothermal expansion.

Sonoma Clean Power officials say the three-year contract will allow them to be competitive with rates by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., according to a Santa Rosa Press Democrat article, in a 10-year deal with a subsidiary of Calpine Corp. that will "fulfill their promise to spur local green energy generation and support local jobs." The deal will account for 15 percent of the agency’s overall supply as it begins rolling out to customers next year, and will make up for a little under half of the agency’s initial renewable energy portfolio according to the Press Democrat , which quoted Sonoma Clean Power's statement that "the power venture’s political standing, if not its business future, depends on staying true to that mission. “This is a really good start. I think it gives us credibility,” said Sebastopol Mayor Michael Kyes, an agency board member who has pushed for pursuit of local power. Another Sonoma Clean Power board member, Supervisor Shirlee Zane noted, the county wants the company “to expand as we expand and create those local jobs.”

We at Local Power Inc. are very pleased that a CCA has finally gone beyond the Marin-type green supply business model, and to include a first step of localization - signing a long-term agreement with an existing local renewable power operator to expand its capacity. This is an example of a CCA telling the market what it wants rather than asking what it can have.

While Marin has improved a great deal on PG&E in terms of greener power at the same price, with a 50% renewable mix that is price competitive with PG&E's 20% renewable mix, it has limited it self to a more conventional old business model based on CCAs pursing green power in other states like Ohio and Illinois, which have tended to focus on getting greener power content, or renewable energy credits. The first CCA in California, Marin neglected local resources and imitated a supply-centric business model of power plant owners. Marin declared victory early without physically doing anything different - "The biggest change you'll never notice" was Marin Energy Authority's marketing campaign, though approval of the agency was achieved with a promise of localization. Three years later, no significant localization has been delivered - as of today, the agency's web site's "Local Power" page refers to a single solar array at the airport.

The Sonoma CCA's motto is "Local. Renewable. Yours." With its commitment to true localization in physical plant and customer ownership, Sonoma has provided needed leadership to other CCAs now investigating or pursuing green power strategies among 1300 municipalities and 5% of the U.S. population under CCA service, most coming online in the past few years. Sonoma Clean Power will produce local green jobs, cause local tax revenues, achieve major regional greenhouse gas reductions, enhance local resilience and permanently eliminate energy dependency upon remote grid-based resources. These are mainstream, national policy goals.

San Francisco will hopefully provide additional leadership for Sonoma on direct financing and development of new local projects. Sonoma was blessed with a no-brainer low-cost resource with a willing operator, Calpine. So some will say "that was easy" because a high-capacity, low-cost resource is so conspicuously available in Sonoma county. But the truth is, every city and county has a number of local renewable resources - solar, wind, wave, river, and most important - energy efficiency measures.

San Francisco is still debating how to get local build-out into it portfolio, where Local Power Inc.'s analysis has indicated a combination of energy efficiency solar photovoltaics, wind, battery storage, and other technologies will achieve the full "CCA 2.0" business model - building rather than buying more of your power. Sonoma's deal with Calpine is an important step forward by purchasing power from an in-county facility, and Sonoma Clean Power has indicated it plans to issue revenue bonds, like San Francisco, to actually finance and build new local renewable resources. San Francisco's voter approved the Solar Bonds a decade ago - "solar neighborhoods" being a cornerstone of CleanPowerSF since the beginning.

Defensively, Marin Energy Authority's staff have criticized Local Power Inc. for pushing so hard for localization and local green development to be central to CCA, claiming it was smarter to "start with baby steps" and implying that localization itself is the problem. So, with Sonoma's decision to go local, we are vindicated that localization is both technically and economically feasible in any of the 1300 CCA municipalities in America today, and we are grateful for the leadership of Sonoma municipalities and county, water agency staff and Sonoma activists, in particular the Climate Action Campaign, for getting us a step further towards The Real Thing. Next - look to San Francisco!