By Bruce Wolfe, HANC Board Member At-Large and Eric Brooks,Our City Executive Director
In 2002 California passed the Community Choice law which allows cities and counties to join their electricity customers into community run cooperatives for the purpose of effectively building and purchasing clean energy sources to replace the energy provided to them through their private monopoly utility providers like PG&E.
Under Community Choice, transmission and distribution of electricity and line maintenance will still be provided by the monopoly utility, but the community cooperative decides where the power going over those lines will come from.
San Francisco's Community Choice program, now named CleanPowerSF, is planned to install hundreds of megawatts of local clean energy and efficiency measures in and around the City and provide San Francisco with at least half of its electricity through such local clean sources within the next decade. In the design of CleanPowerSF an integrated mix of solar, wind, efficiency, customer usage strategies and storage strategies, are all carefully balanced together logistically and economically in order to ensure power that is always on, and prices that are competitive with PG&E's electricity rates.
CleanPowerSF was enacted in 2004. Its basic implementation plan was passed in 2007, and in September 2012 the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution allowing the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) to begin the program by the Spring of 2014, with the understanding that the large integrated 'build-out' of clean energy and efficiency will form the foundation of the program. Recent preparation work for this local build-out has shown the potential to create 1500 or more jobs per year, for the next ten years.
However, for the last few years both the mayor's office (which is strongly influenced by PG&E campaign donations) and the SFPUC (which is strongly influenced by the mayor) have attempted to sidetrack the program away from establishing a strong local build-out, and instead merely purchase clean energy on the market, while building only limited clean energy facilities locally in San Francisco, at a very slow pace; too slowly to have a sufficient impact on solving the climate crisis.
Recently, advocates from Sierra Club, Local Clean Energy Alliance, Our City, the SF Green Party, HANC, 350 SF and others have put heavy pressure on the SFPUC to return to the original build-out plan. We have succeeded in getting the SFPUC to adopt competitive rates for the program, and to take the local build-out planning seriously, but the SFPUC is still very resistant to engaging a full citywide build-out plan on the scale that the law requires, claiming that financing such a program would be very difficult.
Over the next few months, advocates will need to keep up the pressure, and are also planning a CleanPowerSF financing workshop to be held before the CleanPowerSF friendly Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo). The workshop will engage renewable energy financing experts from around the state of California, to show the SFPUC and other decision makers how to make such financing work, so that the SFPUC will become a more willing participant in this bold, groundbreaking program.
If this advocacy succeeds, CleanPowerSF will launch both customer inclusion and large scale local installations in the Spring.