PG&E

Ongoing threat

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› amanda@sfbg.com

The debate over city plans to build and own two combustion turbine power plants, a project Mayor Gavin Newsom has made a last minute effort to alter, shows that public power — and Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s fear of it — is still a significant issue at City Hall.

Newsom, a past advocate of the project, pulled the plug on its progress May 13. The proposal for the natural gas–fired power plants to handle peak energy demand (called "peakers") was up for approval at the Board of Supervisors until Newsom requested a one-week continuance.

Christine DeBerry, the mayor’s liaison to the board, told supervisors the mayor would use the time to aggressively pursue better options than the peakers, even though it’s an item that spent eight years on the planning block and was approved by the Newsom-appointed San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

"What can be aggressively pursued in the next week that hasn’t been aggressively pursued in the last few years?" asked Sup. Chris Daly, one of the four supervisors publicly opposed to the plan, questioning DeBerry on why the mayor and his SFPUC hadn’t put forth the best energy project.

"The mayor engaged in a full exploration of the options over the last several years," DeBerry said, but wants to ensure the city is considering all options.

"Are you anticipating there’s going to be a new technological breakthrough in the next several days?" Daly asked before casting the lone vote against granting the continuance. As of the Guardian‘s press time, the plan’s hearing was scheduled for May 20, but sources said June 3 would be more likely. Newsom Press Secretary Nathan Ballard would not confirm whether another continuance would be requested or discuss what alternatives the mayor’s office is pursuing.

But it appears that the new technological breakthrough being pursued by the mayor’s office is actually a retrofit of an older, existing power plant in Potrero Hill, owned by Mirant Corp.

Sam Lauter, representing Mirant on the issue, said the company has been answering questions about a retrofit from diesel to natural gas for its three turbines. Mirant already agreed to close the older natural gas units at its Potrero plant once the $15 million contract, which requires the plant to maintain the reliability of the power grid, is pulled by California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO). Lauter also said Mirant’s redevelopment of the site for commercial use would still happen if the board decides a retrofit of Mirant is a better deal than building city-owned power plants.

As of the Guardian‘s deadline, no sources could provide any solid numbers on what a retrofit would cost and if pollution would be more, less, or equal to what the city anticipates from the peakers. But, Lauter told us, "The cost is considerably less than the cost of the peakers."

The contract with Cal-ISO could mean that the costs of retrofitting the diesels would be passed on to ratepayers. As for the pollution, Lauter said it’s not an easy answer and depends on how often the units have to run: "It’s not exactly correct to say they’d be less polluting, and it’s not exactly correct to say they’d be more polluting."

Barbara Hale, SFPUC’s assistant general manager of power, agreed there are still many uncertainties about retrofitting Mirant, including permits for the plant, restraints on how much it could operate, exactly how much it would pollute, and if it would even meet Cal-ISO’s demand for 150 megawatts of in-city generation. "I’m told by engineers that when generators go through a retrofit, often their megawatt capacity goes down," Hale told us. Each Mirant diesel unit currently puts out 52 megawatts.

As for other options Newsom requested from the agency, Hale said they’re exploring how to get more demand response and efficiency from the existing grid.

That suggestion comes from Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which actively opposes the city’s peaker plan and sent representatives to meet with Newsom’s staff May 5 (while Newsom was in Israel with Lauter, who said the two did not discuss Mirant or the peakers while overseas), shortly before he sought the delay.

PG&E spokesperson Darlene Chiu confirmed the contents of the proposal as presented to the mayor’s staff, which includes ways to eke more from the grid as well as a new transmission line between two substations.

Tony Winnicker, spokesperson from the PUC, said of PG&E’s plan: "We absolutely support each of these projects, think they’re long overdue improvements to the city’s transmission reliability, and hope they are committing the necessary funding to begin and complete them."

He added that there is little in the plan that differs from a past PG&E proposal that Cal-ISO rejected — except the new transmission line. But, he said, its target completion date of 2012-13 was "very ambitious, given that they haven’t even started the permitting."

PG&E’s Chiu, a former spokesperson for Mayor Newsom, didn’t respond to a question about the time frame for such a project, nor did she comment on whether PG&E considers the city’s ownership of the peakers a threat to its jurisdiction.

She didn’t have to. While City Hall scrambled to come up with an alternative that hasn’t been vetted during the last eight years of community meetings, city studies, and negotiations, PG&E was telling its shareholders that the threat of public power is alive and well.

At the May 14 annual meeting of PG&E investors, held at the San Ramon Conference Center, CEO Peter Darbee assured the assembled, "I, too, am concerned about municipalization and community choice aggregation."

He was responding to a criticism from an employee and member of Engineers and Scientists of California Local 20, who said PG&E shouldn’t be contracting outside the company because it created an experienced proxy workforce ripe for employment by another entity, like a municipality, that would be a threat to PG&E’s jurisdiction.

In responding, Darbee recalled the recent efforts in Yolo County, where the county attempted to defect from PG&E and join the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. "Peter, it’s half-time, your team is down, you better get directly involved with this," he said of the potential loss of 70,000 customers. The company mustered 1,000 employees to volunteer their time, walking from house to house and knocking on doors, prior to the November 2006 vote. "I was one of them," he said. "That vote went overwhelmingly in favor of PG&E."

Beyond knocking on doors, PG&E dropped $11 million on the campaign, outspending the competition 10 to 1.

But Darbee said it was a real victory in a state like California. "There’s always been in the water a desire for public power," he said, adding that 30 percent to 40 percent of the population approves of municipally-owned utilities.

Customer service, Darbee went on to say, is the best defense against threats to PG&E. And for the past two years, PG&E’s corporate strategy has been focused on that. To that end, its ranking in an annual JD Power customer satisfaction survey rose from 51 to 43 last year for the residential sector, and from 46 to a lofty second place for business customers.

But the JD Power survey also ranks municipal utilities, and 2007 results show PG&E was outpaced by three municipalities — the Salt River Project, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which also took the highest ranking in the nation. *

Disclosure: Amanda Witherell owns 14 shares of PG&E Co. common stock.

The peakers vs. Mirant

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EDITORIAL In the late 1960s, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District made a terrible decision and began building a nuclear power plant. Rancho Seco started generating power in 1977.

But over the next 10 years, environmental activists put pressure on the elected board that runs SMUD — and in 1989, the public power agency shut down the nuke with 11 years left on its operating license.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. built Diablo Canyon nuclear plant about the same time — but despite massive public protests, it’s still running today. That’s a big difference between public power and private utilities — and its one the San Francisco Supervisors need to recognize as they debate power plants in the southeast part of town. Because right now, two big private power companies are setting the agenda for the city’s energy policy.

And if they’re in control, the environment will be the loser.

Over the past several weeks, Mayor Gavin Newsom has met with representatives of PG&E — which is desperately trying to keep the city out of the retail electric power business — and Mirant Corp., which seems quite happy to keep operating its power plant at the foot of Potrero Hill. And as a result, the mayor has changed his position, is backing away from a plan for three city-owned power plants, and is prepared to offer the worst possible alternative: he wants to retrofit the dirty Mirant plant and keep it running.

That’s unacceptable, and the supervisors need to reject it.

The background on this issue, for those who haven’t been paying attention, is fascinating and a bit complex.

For years, residents of the southeast neighborhoods have been trying to shut down the Mirant plant, which runs a natural gas-fired turbine and three diesel-powered auxillary generators. California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), which manages the state’s electricity grid, has balked at removing the only large-scale generating facility within city limits, saying San Francisco can’t bring all of its power in from outside.

Until recently, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission — with Newsom’s blessing — has proposed that the city operate three natural gas turbines, known as peaker plants, that would run only when demand for power is high. Cal-ISO says the peakers would fulfill the in-city reliability requirement, and if they’re built, the Mirant Plant would be shuttered.

The peakers (which the city already owns, thanks to a lawsuit settlement) are fossil fuel plants and release air pollution — not as much, the city says, as the Mirant plant, but not zero. So environmental justice activists want to stop the new plants, saying the city can make do with conservation, new renewable energy facilities, and a new power line across the Bay. So far, Cal-ISO disagrees, but the activists are pushing the city to try harder to make the state accept a greener option.

So PG&E and the environmentalists are both trying to stop the supervisors from approving the peakers. PG&E sees them as public power, and is funding a sophisticated lobbying and direct-mail campaign against the city peakers.

That effort has turned Newsom around: as Amanda Witherell reports on page 15, the mayor is apparently prepared to offer a new plan that would scrap the city-owned peakers in favor of retrofitting the diesel units at the Mirant plant. PG&E would bring more cables into the city and would work on conservation efforts.

Conservation is fine, and PG&E ought to be pushing those efforts anyway. But the proposal makes no sense.

For starters, all evidence suggests that even after a retrofit, the Mirant plant would still generate fossil fuel pollution, quite possibly more than the city peakers. So the southeast would continue to get dumped on, with no significant relief. And the plan would leave PG&E and Mirant in control of generating and distributing power in the city.

We’re sympathetic to the environmental justice arguments, and we’ve been consistent in our position that the city shouldn’t build or operate new fossil fuel plants unless the scientific evidence shows they’ll be cleaner than any reasonable alternative. We would much prefer that San Francisco refrain from any new fossil fuel sources and rely instead on a completely renewable portfolio. But for all the problems we have with the peakers, they would, at least, be owned by the city.

That’s a crucial issue: if San Francisco controls the plants, San Francisco can turn them off any time, the moment the city’s renewable efforts convince Cal-ISO that the peakers aren’t needed (or even before that, if we want to risk a legal fight with the state). If a private company owns the generators, the plant will continue to run as long as it makes money.

If there’s a credible way to avoid any fossil fuel generation, we’re all in favor. But if the choice is between the peakers and retrofitting Mirant, it’s a no-brainer. And the real lesson here is that the supervisors should be moving forward with Sups. Mirkarimi and Peskin’s charter amendment to create a full public power agency at City Hall. *

Peakers delayed 2 weeks

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At the May 20 meeting, the Board of Supervisors agreed to a two-week hold on a plan to build two combustion turbine “peaker” power plants in the city. (Also known as the CTs.) The delayed legislation was also amended by Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who injected a 90-day due diligence period into the process.

Translation: if the Board, two weeks from now, passes the plan to build the peakers, a 90-day due diligence period kicks in. And if, during that period, the SFPUC general manager finds that another plan meets a certain list of criteria (which are included in the amendments and can be read here), then he can kill the city’s peaker plan and put forth the alternative. The alternative would still have to go through all the permitting and planning processes that the city’s peakers have already weathered, but the city’s peaker project would be dead.

Elsbernd’s amendments contain a list of qualifications that any alternative must meet, including an agreement that Mirant’s Unit 3 would still close (so the company can redevelop that site for some other profitable commercial use), and that any other “proposed project” would improve environmental quality and city control over energy supplies.

The language here is pretty careful: nowhere does it say that a new proposal must be as clean, if not cleaner, than the city’s peakers. Nor does it say it must be owned by the city.

Elsbernd asked for the two week continuance when introducing the amendments, to give the Board more time to get comfortable with them and “to make sure that the CTs are either the right thing or the wrong thing.”

Peskin, describing the motion before them, jabbed that the extra time was for any possible alternative “proposed by PG&E and/or Mirant.”

To which Elsbernd took issue, “Actually, I would disagree with your statement,” he said. “This is not a proposal from PG&E.”

After the item passed, with Sup. Chris Daly citing it as a delay tactic and dissenting, Elsbernd told the Guardian the amendments did not come from the Mayor’s staff. “They came from my pretty little head,” he said. “I asked the city attorney to draft them for me.”

PG&E’s peaker-less proposal

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For all those following the latest and greatest in the saga of San Francisco’s energy future, here’s a copy of the proposal PG&E put before Mayor Gavin Newsom’s staff on March 5, and which has been making rounds at City Hall. It outlines (though doesn’t go into too much detail) a number of energy efficiency measures, demand-response targets, and transmission upgrades.

Tony Winnicker, spokesperson for the SFPUC, seemed nonplussed by the plan, and said it only slightly differed from a past anti-peaker proposal from PG&E that Cal-ISO found wasn’t enough for San Francisco to forgo building two new combustion turbine power plants. The new plan includes a line connecting two substations in Potrero and Embarcadero, ultimately making our local grid a little more dynamic. But, said Winnicker, “There’s no indication from Cal-ISO that doing this would allow us to close Potrero without Cal-ISO’s consistent requirement of ‘in city, dispatchable, reliable’ generation.”

Cal-ISO’s Gregg Fishman said the new proposal had pros and cons they’d have to weigh, and introducing a new plan at this point could mean more delays on closing Mirant. “One drawback to a transmission alternative is that building a new major transmission project, instead of installing the peakers, will mean potentially years of delay in the closure of the highly polluting Potrero. Additionally, any new in-city resources, including demand response, would need to be available “around-the-clock” to meet national reliability standards the ISO is required to uphold. Currently, demand response is not available 24/7.”

Don’t know about you, but my Mission district mailbox has been bombarded by scary mailers from PG&E, posing as the Close It Coalition, screaming “NO NEW POWER PLANTS.” They claim environmental reasons but one inside source told me PG&E is “paranoid” about public power. Their 2007 annual report to shareholders includes a section detailing the risks of loosing customers to Community Choice Aggregation or municipalization of electricity services. (See pages 74-76 of this document. I also recommend page 56 for details on the fossil fuel burning power plants PG&E is also building, that are bigger and dirtier than the city’s would be.) Peter Darbee, CEO of the corporation, also expressed his own personal concern about public power at PG&E’s May 14 annual meeting (but you’ll have to tune into tomorrow’s Guardian for details on that.)

Yup, Newsom buckles to PG&E on Mirant plant

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

When PG&E spits, City Hall swims. Mayor Newsom to Potrero Hill: Drop dead.

For more than 40 years, the Guardian has watched every San Francisco mayor without exception buckle to PG&E and help the giant utility keep its illegal private power monopoly intact in San Francisco.

The latest to buckle, this time more openly and ignominiously than most, appears to be Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is revving up his campaign for governor and wants to keep PG&E nice and cuddly by his side.
Here’s the story as it leaked from City Hall this weekend. For 40 years, the people of Potrero Hill and the southeastern part of the city have fought to close down the fossil-burning Mirant power plant at the bottom of Potrero Hill. Newsom personally supported the plan to close Mirant and replace it with city-owned peaker power plants. And his Public Utilities Commission has spent years developing a plan to do just this. (Alas, the peakers were the PUC’s only alternative and the PUC demanded that they be sited at the Mirant plant, amongst the long suffering Potrero Hillians, never a serious thought to anywhere more uptown. This rightly agitated the environmental justice community, but that is another story.)

PG&E has been fighting the peakers because they would be PG&Es worst nightmare: a major public power beachhead in San Francisco. As the historic vote neared last Tuesday at the Board of Supervisors, PG&E counted the votes and found it did not have a 6-5 majority. And so it did what it has historically done to protect its illegal private power monopoly in San Francisco, It rolled out its heavy artillery, went directly to the mayor, and started pounding away on a weak and wavering Newsom.

This time, as reported in the Bruce and Tim Redmond blogs, seven lobbyists (you heard me, seven) called on him in his City Hall office and told him to kill the peaker proposal, or else, and offered him a blank check to do a Mirant retrofit. Newsom buckled.

PG&E got Newsom to ask for an extension on the vote, which he got for a week, and he lamely announced that he would be looking for some kind of last minute alternative to the peakers PG&E so dreads. The alternative appears to be the PG&E alternative: junk the peakers and do a retrofit of the existing Mirant plant. This would subject the Potrero Hill neighborhood, and the mushrooming Mission Bay population, to the ruinous plant for the duration.

As a City Hall source put it to me, “This is the dumbest of all options, retrofitting the Mirant plant so that it’s a little cleaner, but still nowhere near as clean as the peakers, way less efficient, and a waste of land to boot. It is the mayor’s choice to avoid upsetting PG&E.” The vote is scheduled again for this Tuesday, but it may be postponed again if neither PG&E nor the peaker supporters don’t have the votes.

Hey, remember Dick Sklar, the former PUC executive director who Newsom recently appointed to the PUC to peddle the mayor’s PG&E policies (and remember Sup. Chris Daly, who cast the deciding vote for Sklar’s confirmation.and said that Sklar was “neutral” on PG&E.) Sklar was right in there as expected, pumping away for PG&E and helping facilitate the latest mayoral cavein to PG&E. As the Guardian has maintained for years, if people at City Hall want to work for PG&E, they should be dispatched to PG&E so they can work for the utility directly, not work for PG&E on the city payroll.

The only real way out of this PG&E uber alles mess is for the people to kick PG&E out of City Hall and bring real public power to the city. As Guardian readers know since 1969, San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is required by federal law to be a public power city, because of the Raker Act that allowed the city to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park for the city’s water and power supply.

The best emerging plan is the public power initiative that Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, who opposes the peakers, and Aaron Peskin, who supports the peakers, are working on with public power forces to put on the fall ballot. Click here to read more about the initiative.

Question: Will Hearst corporate allow its reporters and editors to cover the PG@E/Raker Act scandal and the real public power story. Stay tuned for details and how the public can provide input and support.

To repeat: When PG&E spits, City Hall swims. Mayor Newsom to Potrero Hill: Drop dead.

P.S. Deadline summary: The vote lineup at blogtime, according to our check and City Hall sources. For: Peskin, Dufty, Maxwell, McGoldrick. Against: Mirkarimi, Ammiano, Daly, Alioto-Pier. Swinging away: Chu, Elsbernd, Sandoval. Prediction: The vote will be postponed again, probably until July or so, to give the PUC time to study the PG@E alternative put forth by Newsom. So PG@E may win this skirmish, but obviously the battle for public power and to enforce the Raker Act goes on.

B3, who watches the fumes from the Potrero plant every day from my office window at 135 Mississippi Street, courtesy of PG&E and Hearst journalism

PG&E investors get “say on pay”

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The official results are still pending, but it looks like PG&E investors may get a little more control over take-home pay for the top dogs at the corporation. That’s right, Mr. Peter Darbee. Me and my 14 shares of PG&E stock are coming after you and your $7,821,073 in compensation.

PG&E investors voting by proxy passed a shareholder proposal that would allow some “say on pay” when it comes to compensation for named executive officers of the company. At the May 14 annual meeting it was announced that 52 percent of proxy voters approved of the resolution, enough of a majority for it to pass, although votes from the couple hundred attendees of the meeting had not yet been tallied. An official count will be released Monday.

UPDATE: May 19, 2008. We got the official word. From today’s PG&E filing with the SEC: “PG&E Corporation shareholders approved a shareholder proposal requesting that the Board of Directors adopt a policy to provide the shareholders an opportunity to vote at each annual meeting on an advisory resolution to ratify the compensation paid to certain executive officers. The Board of Directors will consider the approved shareholder proposal.”

The real energy-policy choice

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EDITORIAL According to City Attorney Dennis Herrera, if San Francisco wants to see the Potrero Hill power plant, which spews pollution over the southeast part of the city, close down next year, the city’s going to have to operate its own fossil fuel plants in the neighborhood. Some environmentalists say that’s not true — that the city could develop enough renewable energy and use existing backup systems to obviate the need for the so-called peaker plants.

Opposition to the plants comes from the Sierra Club, Supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi — and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

Even for people who spend an inordinate amount of time studying energy policy, it’s a confusing mess of a situation — and San Francisco, of all cities, shouldn’t have to be facing it.

The peaker dilemma exists for a reason: San Francisco has allowed private-sector companies like PG&E and Mirant, which owns the existing Potrero plant, to control the city’s energy systems. The good news is that the fight over the power plants is driving a new move for public power — a move that ought to bring together the public interest activists on both sides of the plant divide.

Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, a peaker foe, and Aaron Peskin, a peaker supporter, plan to introduce a Charter Amendment mandating that the city’s Public Utilities Commission create a plan to establish a retail power agency in San Francisco. The amendment would provide the badly needed kick start to get city officials to act on San Francisco’s historic mandate for a municipal electricity system.

Peskin and Mirkarimi may not agree on the three peaker plants the PUC wants to site at the foot of Potrero Hill, but they do agree that PG&E is up to no good here. The giant private utility desperately wants to keep the city from developing its own electric power plants: the city peakers would be competition for PG&E and would open the door for the city to get more directly into the electricity business. Although the fliers put out by the "Close It Coalition," funded by PG&E, talk about environmental issues, that’s just old-fashioned greenwashing. PG&E is building similar combustion turbine gas-fueled generators all over the state.

Why should this be the city’s only choice?

If there’s going to be a fight over energy policy in San Francisco, it ought to focus on the real long-term questions: Who should control the local grid, and the future supply of electricity, and the decision over how much of the local portfolio should be in renewable resources? Should PG&E continue to hold that power, or should the city take it over?

The movement for public power is exploding all over California. In Marin County, a group called Marin Clean Energy is mounting a sophisticated campaign for a community-controlled power agency that would use 100 percent renewable power. The South San Joaquin County Irrigation District is trying aggressively, against a full-scale PG&E political assault, to buy out PG&E’s distribution facilities and create a new public power system. Stockton is looking at becoming a public power city.

San Francisco is pursuing CCA, but needs to do much more. This is, after all, the only city in the nation that has a mandate under federal law to sell retail electricity.

If the city had created a public power agency years ago, the peakers wouldn’t be an issue. San Francisco would have been able to develop more extensive renewable power sources, create a long-term energy plan, and concentrate on shutting down fossil fuel plants instead of building them.

But whatever the outcome of that fight, it’s time to think about the future — and the future is community-owned energy programs. That’s the choice that ought to be on the ballot in November.

PS: Stop the presses — has Newsom buckled to PG&E? The mayor at the last minute May 13 has orchestrated a delay in the peaker vote — at the behest, we hear, of PG&E, which is begging the mayor to do anything to stop public power. Now he wants to retrofit the Mirant plant. That’s an unacceptable option and needs to be rejected.

Here comes the public power initiative!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann (Scroll down to see the historic Mirkarimi/Peskin/City Attorney resolution)

Today, at the Board of Supervisors meeting, Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin introduced
a Charter Amendment mandating that the city’s Public Utilities Commission create a plan to establish a retail power agency in San Francisco and start the process of kicking PG&E out of City Hall and the rest of the city.

The amendment, as our editorial in Wednesday’s Guardian outlines, would “provide the badly needed kick start to get city officials to act on San Francisco’s historic mandate for a municipal electricity system.”

The move is prompted by the battle over whether the city should replace the ruinous Mirant private power plant with city-owned power plants called peakers at the foot of Potrero Hill. PG&E has quietly orchestrated a major political and public relations onslaught to kill the peakers because they would be what PG&E fears most: city-owned public power.

In fact, as Tim Redmond’s blog discloses, PG&E even marched seven lobbyists (yes, seven) into the office of would-be-green Mayor Gavin Newsom, who once personally backed the plan and whose Public Utilities Commission backs the plan. PG&E jacked Newsom around and muscled him into asking for a delay in today’s scheduled power plant vote to give PG&E more time to kill the peakers.

The rationale: some sort of vague and ridiculous idea of retrofitting the Mirant plant and keeping the PG&E uber alles status quo.

IF PG&E ultimately loses the peaker vote (and it will be close), PG&E will most likely run a referendum on the November ballot against this dread move to peaker public power. So the Mirkarimi and Peskin move is aimed at putting a counter initiative on the November ballot and breathing new life into the historic battle to enforce the federal Raker Act (which mandated San Francisco have a public power system) and bringing our own cheap Hetch Hetchy public power to the people of San Francisco. (See Guardian stories and editorials since l969.) The initiative would be timed to take advantage of the expected heavy turnout of Obama forces for the presidential election and for the election of supervisors.

The legislative digest sums up the amendment in a paragraph of City Hall legalese:

The amendment is to “address the need to change electricity production, delivery, and use to ensure environmentally sustainable and affordable electric supplies for residents, businesses, and city departments and to require the Public Utiliies Commmission to comprehensively study and determine the most effective means of providing clean, sustainable, reliable, and reasonably-priced electric service to San Francisco residents, businesses, and city departments.”

The amendment was written and signed by Deputy City Attorney Theresa Mueller and approved as to form by City Attorney Dennis Herrera. It was introduced by the president of the board (Peskin) and a powerful supervisor who is obviously running for board president and mayor (Mirkarimi). These references are important: when the public power movement was reinvigorated in the late l990s, it faced a massive lineup of PG&E stalwarts inside City Hall: City Attorney Louise Rennie, Mayor Willie Brown, the PUC executive director and PUC commission, and all the supervisors with the notable exception of Sup. Tom Ammiano.

Mikarimi led the two famous initiative campaigns as campaign manager in 2000 and 2001, which PG&E defeated with muscle, mutli milliions, and staunch daily paper support. Now, Mirkarimi is inside City Hall in a starring role leading the charge for community choice aggregation (CCA) and now a public power initiative. And the whole thing scares the hell out of PG&E.as never before.
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Hurray! The battle is on!

P.S. PG&E marches in: You can see how PG&E works by seeing who was at the critical May 5 meeting in the mayor’s office. No public power people, nobody from the Sierra Club, and no environmental justice activists who are also opposing the peakers (but for understandable environmental reasons.) But standing tall at the secret meeting were seven PG&E lobbyists, led by Travis Kiyota, and such PG&E friendly folks as PUC Commissioner Dick Sklar (remember him?), Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, and a representative from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

PG&E and NRDC arranged to have a timely letter on NRDC letterhead, dated May 12 , come to the supervisors from Robert Kennedy Jr., with ccs to Newsom, President Michael Peevey of the California Public Utilities Commission, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The letter was of course released to the press and the public on the eve of the vote. PG&E, NRDC, and Kennedy had at least one line right: “Where San Francisco ultimately decides to invest its precious energy dollars is a choice that will send a message to cities around the country.”

The tipoff: nowhere do the PG&E supporters, including the Chronicle editorialists who suddenly took a down-with-the-peakers stand yesterday, nor the Examiner, with a wimpy story today on Newsom’s sudden change of plans, mention those dread three letters that divulge the secret agent at work (PG&E) nor that dread phrase that tells what the secret agent is really up to (killing public power.) C’mon, folks, this isn’t that hard to figure out. Is there some law somewhere that says the local media can’t cover what PG&E is doing to perpetuate the PG&E/Raker Act scandal and once again kill public power? (See “The Shame of Hearst” in previous Guardian and blog items.)

On guard. The pubic power forces are once again moving up to the front lines, muskets at the ready. B3 (who sees the fumes from the Mirant plant every minute of every day from my Potrero Hill office window)

Click here to read Mirkarimi and Peskin’s recent Charter Amendment.

Click here to read Redmond’s recent blog, PG&E offers Newsom a blank check

Click here for this week’s PG&E editorial.

PG&E offers Newsom a blank check

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Gavin Newsom is a mayor who hates to make the tough decisions, and the proposal for three new power plants in Southeast San Francisco is his worst nightmare.

Newsom’s own Public Utilities Commission is pushing the plan, and he’s backed it in the past. Environmentalists are making a stink about it, and that’s caused the mayor-who-wuold-be-green some headaches.

But the major reason he suddenly decided to ask for a delay in the power-plant vote may have nothing to do with environmental issues at all.

Seven lobbyists for Pacific Gas and Electric, led by Travis Kiyota, visited the mayor May 5th and told him that the giant utility would spend whatever it takes to stop the peakers, a reliable City Hall source tells me. Attending the meeting were Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier and PUC commissioner Dick Sklar, the source said.

According to this source’s account, PG&E offered to pay for more power cables into the city, for an expensive demand-management program … for just about anything that would prevent San Francisco from owning its own power plants.

I couldn’t reach either Sklar or Alioto-Pier this afternoon. But Nathan Ballard, the mayor’s press secretary, confirmed that the meeting took place:

On Monday, May 5, PG&E participated in a meeting to provide substantive
expertise in the areas of energy efficiency, demand response and power
generation and transmission. Along with staff from the Mayor’s Office,
Board of Supervisors, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Department
of Environment, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, CA Public
Utilities Commission (CAPUC), and the National Resources Defense Council
(NRDC), we were able to engage some of the most creative and knowledgeable
experts in the room together as we work to identify alternatives to the
current action plan.

Ballard also said that retrofitting the Mirant plant — leaving the big privately owned polluter in place — was “one of the options on the table.”

As far as I can tell, there were no public-power advocates in the meeting.

So PG&E is still driving energy policy in the Mayor’s Office. How nice.

Three missing letters in the Chron’s peaker editorial

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The San Francisco Chronicle came out today against the plan to build three combustion turbines, known as “peaker” plans, at the foot of Potrero Hill.

But while the editorial quoted both sides in what I agree is a complicated issue, the editors ignored one of the most alient points: The campaign agains the peakers is being funded largely by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

Three missing letters, people: PG&E.

PG&E is underwriting the “Close It Coalition,” which sounds like a group aiming to close an existing power plant. The problem, peaker proponents say, is that the Mirant power plant that’s now pumping carbon and particulates into the air can’t be closed down unless the power it produces is replaced, locally. That’s what the state regulators are mandating That means significant new generation within city limits. And it means generating capacity that can run at night, when solar panels aren’t firing.

PG&E doesn’t want the peakers (which would produce about a third less pollution than the Mirant plant does) because they would be owned by the city; that’s a step toward public power. The utility isn’t worried about pollution or green power; this is a company that owns a nuclear power plant (on an earthquake fault). It’s a company that is building its own fossil-fuel plants up and down the state.

No: for the major funder of the no-peakers effort, this is about preserving a power monopoly. Beginning and end of story.

I am dubious about the peakers, too. It’s hard to support new fossil-fuel plants in San Francisco. But when you look at who’s behind the anti-peaker campaign, the story gets a lot more complicated.

You wouldn’t know that from reading the Chron’s editorial.

Flash: Is Stockton ousting PG@E?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Joe Neilands flashed the news late Friday afternoon. The City of Stockton may be moving to kick PG@E out of town.

Neilands broke the PG@E/Raker Act scandal wide open with an expose in the Guardian in l969 and started the long battle to kick PG@E out of City Hall and out of San Francisco.

Sure enough, Joe was on target again. The Stockton Record carried the story on Wednesday (April 30) with a strong headline: “PG@E Sued by Stockton, City Pursues Ruling to Aid Possible Power Takeover.” The story, by David Siders,
reported that the city sued “its century-old power provider Tuesday and requested “that a court rule Stockton has the right to oust Pacific Gas & Electric Company and to take over the local electricity market–even before the city decides if it ought to.

“A ruling in the city’s favor would reinforce its position that PG@E is contractually obligated to sell–agreeing to do so in its franchise agreement in l954–and would undermine PG@E’s claim that a takeover would be hostile and that its assets are not for sale.”

Mayor Ed Chavez had called for a takeover bid in his State of the City address in February. The story quoted him as saying that a takeover would cut rates and generate millions of dollars in revenue. A preliminary estimate found that it could cost Stockton $368 million to buy PG@E’s assets but that the market is so profitable the city could recover that cost and save $8 million more annually, according to the Record.

Hey, Mayor Newsom and all the PUC and other City Hall officials are scared to death of PG@E. Listen up. If Stockton can take on PG@E, why can’t San Francisco take on PG@E? After all, San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is required by federal law to have a public power system (because the Raker Act of l913 allowed the city to build the Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park for its water supply, on condition the city residents get cheap Hetch Hetchy public power.) The city got the water but it never got the electricity because of PG@E muscle and City Hall cowardice and so PG@E stands to this day as an illegal private utility in San Francisco. (See Guardian stories and editorials since l969 and the Neilands story.)

Well, it’s good to see Joe still on the story after all these years. But, as I always tell him jokingly, “Joe, with a little more seasoning, you may be ready to cover City Hall in San Francisco.”

Click here to read the Recordnet.com story PG&E sued by Stockton: City pursues ruling to aid possible power takeover and check out the story links for the background.

CA’s horrible net metering law

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Up until now, net metering has been a sort of mythical to me. I understand how it works – you put up solar panels or wind generators and the utility company rebates you for the power you make – to an extent. You can’t be paid for any extra power you generate. I get that, but I’d never actually seen what it looks like.

Then I checked my mail today and found a letter [PDF] from JB Neilands, a retired UC Berkeley biochemist and past writer for the Guardian who broke the original story about the Raker Act scandal. Six years ago Neilands put solar panels on his Berkeley home, and now PG&E sends him a summary of all the excess power he’s generating for them – that they don’t pay him for. He could have made $122.86 off his panels last year. That’s not a lot, but it certainly would have helped pay back some of the cost of purchasing the panels. Plus it gives you a good feeling about what you’re doing, and that can go a long way.

Instead, how crummy it must feel to get a letter from PG&E detailing the money the AREN’T reimbursing you. As Neilands points out in another letter [PDF]to Assemblymember Lloyd Levine, ten states surveyed by Home Power magazine (gotta be a member to read) found that California is the only one that doesn’t pay people for the extra power they generate.

This is ridiculous. California legislators need to rise above the lobbying of overly powerful utility companies and change this law. This is a disincentive to put up more panels than you need. Energy misers with huge roofs could be selling renewable power into the grid for the rest of us to use, but they’re not going to buy more panels than they need unless the cost can be recouped.

Assemblymember Jared Huffman has introduced legislation to fix this, but it appears PG&E has already gotten to him.

We’ve been greenwashed!

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Ha! I love this. Somebody over at Venables Bell, PG&E’s big greenwashing firm, isn’t paying attention at all. What a gaffe. And last year the corporation paid them $5,678,182 from a $6,855,643 ad budget. Five million bucks and you run ads in the Bay Guardian? Whoops. I hope we’re charging top dollar.

Weigh in on the peakers

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The city’s proposal to build two fossil-fuel burning “peaking” power plants on our precious peninsula (one in Portrero/Bayview, the other at the airport) has become a hot topic.

On one side we have Supervisors Michela Alioto-Pier, Chris Daly, and Ross Mirkarimi, allied with PG&E and a host of environmental groups and activists like the Sierra Club, GreenAction, SPUR, and Van Jones, who think building any fossil fuel plants – even if they burn the cleanest fuel available – is a bad idea.

On the other, we have Mayor Gavin Newsom, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, and Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Sophie Maxwell, who believe this is a necessary handshake with the Devil – in order to close down the older, reportedly more polluting Mirant Portrero power plant, the peakers must replace it. (See the $2 million handshake here.) Public power advocates also tend to favor this position as the peakers will be owned by the city and considered a crucial player in energy independence from our local utility monopoly. This is why PG&E, disguised as the CloseIt Coalition, hates the idea.

We can see Mirant’s stack from our Guardian offices, and though we love public power, we hate the idea of replacing one fossil fuel plant with another – particularly if the $250 million for the project could be used to build more city-owned renewable generation for our Community Choice Aggregation power co-op. Last week we ran an editorial suggesting the city explore floating the peakers on a barge, but overall, to build or not to build is the tricky part of this issue. We’ve been watching the back and forth with interest. Follow the jump to read some leading locals weighing in, as well as more data from our research. Feel free to add your own comments, information, and critiques.

Pics: Goats and green at Heron’s Head Park

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By Ariel Soto

The EcoCenter at Heron’s Head Park groundbreaking ceremony was held yesterday, April 22, in San Francisco’s Bayview/Hunters Point. The EcoCenter will be the first LEED-certified building in the southern part of the city and first building to run completely off the grid. Heron’s Head Park was opened in 1999 to provide an open and natural space for the communities nearby, and since then more than 1,200 volunteers have helped restore the area by removing invasive plants and trash and replacing them with native plants. With the continuous support and effort of the Port of San Francisco and Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ), the EcoCenter will finally open, giving students the opportunity to learn in hands-on programs about issues such as clean air and water, renewable energy, healthy foods and open space restoration. (To get involved in the Heron’s Head Park project, contact Laurie Schoeman at: lcprojectmanager@lejyouth.org) Here’s some pics from the event.

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The entrance to Heron’s Head Park with the old PG&E plant in the background that’s in the process of being demolished.

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Goats are used in Heron’s Head Park as a natural method of weed control.

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Volunteers gather at Heron’s Head Park before the beginning of the groundbreaking ceremony.

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A Scrophularia californica, or Bee Plant, is just one example of the many native California plants that will be re-introduced into Heron’s Head Park.

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Beautiful Heron’s Head Park.

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Milton Reynolds, a member of Literacy for Environmental Justice, started the day’s events at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new EcoCenter at Heron’s Head Park.

Peaker plan afloat

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› amanda@sfbg.com

A proposal to build two natural gas–fired power plants is still floating through the city’s planning process, set for approval by the Board of Supervisors as soon as May, but no one seems truly comfortable with the deal.

"It’s not my first choice or my second choice, but it’s the choice I have," Board president Aaron Peskin told the Guardian. The choice seems to be either the city builds newer, potentially cleaner power plants — known as "peakers" because they would be used mainly during times of peak energy demand — or does nothing to shut down the super-polluting Mirant Potrero power plant.

The combination gas- and diesel-burning power plant spews a cocktail of toxins from its stack every year and draws 226 million gallons of water a day from the bay to cool its generators yet it’s mandated by the state to keep operating. The discharge flows back into the bay significantly altered, with microorganisms and fish larvae replaced by mercury, dioxins, and PCBs.

The California Independent System Operator (CAL-ISO), the state agency that oversees electricity reliability, said it would break the Mirant contract if the peakers came online. The city-owned plants would use recycled water and more up-to-date air quality controls, making for cleaner facilities at the two proposed sites — the airport and the intersection of 25th and Maryland in the Bayview.

They also would be city-operated, giving a little more leg to the local public power movement. But they still burn fossil fuel, and at a time when the climate is in crisis and natural gas prices are only rising, many say this isn’t the direction a trend-setting city like San Francisco should be heading.

"This isn’t the progressive way to go," said Sup. Chris Daly. "We need to be more forcefully installing renewables that are municipally owned."

Daly, along with supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Michela Alioto-Pier and the city’s current power provider Pacific Gas and Electric Co., have lined up against building the peakers in what Mirkarimi calls an "unholy alliance."

PG&E, lobbying under the guise of the "Close It! Coalition," states that the peakers "further San Francisco’s reliance on fossil fuels and add to global warming." The $12 billion utility company currently gets 40 percent of its power the same way and is in the process of constructing several similar plants throughout the state. Nevertheless, the company has submitted detailed proposals to the city and state outlining demand response measures and transmission upgrades that would mitigate the need for more energy.

Mayor Gavin Newsom and City Attorney Dennis Herrera support building the peakers in order to close the Mirant plant, and Sups. Sophie Maxwell, Bevan Dufty, and Jake McGoldrick are carrying the legislation that would seal the contract with Cleveland, Ohio-based Industrial Construction Company to start the $252 million project.

That legislation points out that Mirant’s water permit is set to expire Dec. 31, and the Regional Water Quality Board has indicated it has no plans to renew it unless Mirant upgrades to best practices. This has been suggested as an alternative way to close the plant. When asked whether Cal-ISO’s reliability demands trump the Water Board’s requirements, Cal-ISO’s Gregg Fishman wrote in an e-mail, "What happens if the Potrero unit’s water permits expire? Simply put — we’re not sure."

Beyond that, a number of questions remain: Should the requirement for a full feasibility study for city contracts more than $25 million really have been waived for this project? Is it fair to put the new power plant in the neighborhood that has always endured the lion’s share of the city’s pollution? What if they were on movable barges instead? And has the city been forceful enough with CAL-ISO when it comes to planning the city’s energy future?

Alioto-Pier has introduced two resolutions addressing a couple of these issues. One calls for a straight-up feasibility study — which supporters of the peakers have waived. "The city has a policy of conducting a full fiscal analysis of capital projects over $25 million," Alioto-Pier said in a press release. "This should be no exception." Her other resolution asks for an independent analysis of the whole thing and a revised 2008 Energy Action Plan for the city.

For several years, Cal-ISO has said Mirant could stop operating if San Francisco can provide an alternate "firm" power source in its Energy Action Plan. In 2004, San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission proffered the peakers, and that became the city’s power plan before adopting the CCA (community choice aggregation) plan for the city to develop an energy portfolio of at least 51 percent renewables.

Though the SFPUC has continuously asked Cal-ISO if the 2004 Action Plan is still the way to go now that the Trans Bay Cable and other line improvements have come into play, Josh Arce, a lawyer for Brightline Defense, which sued to stop the peaker plan, says they’ve been framing the question all wrong: "The PUC has essentially been saying, ‘Does the Action Plan include all four combustion turbines?’ And Cal-ISO has said, ‘Yes, it includes all four.’ Instead, the PUC needs to come up with a new Action Plan and give it to Cal-ISO and say we’re doing this instead."

Alioto-Pier’s resolution, if passed, could prompt a fresh response from Cal-ISO about what the city really needs — one, two, or three peakers, or maybe none at all. Maxwell’s resolution includes a caveat that the city must determine if needs could be met by building smaller plants with fewer than the four turbines currently proposed.

Peskin, who chairs the city’s Government Audit and Oversight Committee and will hear both Alioto-Pier resolutions on May 5, as well as the Maxwell plan to move to build the peakers, told us, "This is one of the toughest decisions that’s been before me in the eight years that I’ve been on the Board of Supervisors."

No one, it seems, really wants to build two fossil fuel–burning power plants on San Francisco soil. But what if they weren’t on our soil? What if they were floating on barges?

Another resolution pending in the Land Use Committee, brought by Mirkarimi, proposes putting the two power plants on barges, which could be moored alongside the city when needed and dispatched elsewhere when they’re not. What if, a few years from now, citizens are able to cut down their power needs, CCA brings more renewables online, and the city finds it no longer needs the 200 megawatts generated by natural gas power plants?

Proponents say it’s an option worth considering if the city really intends to eventually close the plants. Dismantling a facility if the city decides to sell leaches away 20 to 30 percent of its overall cost. But if it’s on a barge, the natural gas, electricity, and mooring lines are simply cast off. A barge would be steadier in an earthquake and continue to float if the sea level rises — a climate change scenario that could swamp both current bayside power plant sites. Barges also can be dispatched to emergencies, leased down the river to other cities in the Bay Area, or sold for a profit. They’ve been in use around the world since the 1940s and have been called a more regional approach to energy planning.

"It’s 145 MW of portable energy," said Rick Galbreath, Mirkarimi’s aide. "You can pull it up, plug it in, and you’re on the grid. It’s really a dynamic solution."

Paul Fenn, the brain behind the city’s CCA plan, points out that if CAL-ISO still insists the peakers are needed now but not in the future, a power barge is the kind of flexible solution that could pay off in the long run. "It’s making a temporary measure for an urgent situation," he said, adding that such a temporary solution should reflect the city’s long-term goals. "If the city is planning to replace them with renewables, it’s important to get the city to make that commitment. This is one of those strategic decisions that’s going to impact the future."

The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission generally opposes building anything in the bay if it can be built on land first. "The proponents would have to do an analysis and convince our commission that this is really a good idea for the region," said Will Travis, a BCDC spokesperson.

But Dave Nickerson, owner of Houston-based Power Barge Corporation, said he’s looked at the city’s peaker plans and thinks it would cost about $100 million to build a three-CT barge. "We would probably build the plant here and ship it up," he said, pointing out that the city’s turbines are already in storage down in Texas and it’s cheaper to build it in a shipyard. To claims of environmental degradation, he says, "It would have the environmental footprint of a state of the art land-based plant."

He also pointed out that there’s a scarcity of these particular turbines now, which are worth about $1 million more every year. This year it’s around $16.5 million apiece, with $18 million as the projected 2008 price.

Emma Lierley contributed to this story.

PG&E’s attack on CCA

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EDITORIAL It’s a bit odd (if not terribly surprising) that the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story April 16 on public power and alternatives to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. — and almost entirely ignored what’s going on in the paper’s hometown. And it’s striking (if, again, not surprising) that the story, by Kelly Zito, allowed a dubious expert from the University of California at Berkeley, who never supported public power and generally supports private sector and deregulation efforts to undermine, without rebuttal, the community-based anti-PG&E efforts.

But in the midst of this journalistic train wreck was the nut of a fascinating story: PG&E is on the ropes as communities try to find more renewable energy supplies — and is fighting back in ways that are demonstrably illegal.

There’s a message here for San Francisco, where plans for community choice aggregation are moving along slowly but steadily. The giant private utility will be trying to sabotage the efforts here, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera needs to be moving — now — to make sure there’s no illegal interference.

The focus of Zito’s story was Marin County, where there’s an active and aggressive move to create a CCA (community choice aggregation) system that would replace PG&E as an energy supplier in 11 cities. The program would function as a buyers’ co-op, purchasing electricity in bulk for all of the businesses and residents in those communities, then using PG&E’s lines to transmit the power to customers. Marin is pushing the environmental angle: PG&E uses at most 12 percent renewable power, and Marin Clean Energy can offer consumers 100 percent green power. While that option might cost a bit more (an additional $5 per month for the average customer) Marin’s CCA also says it can offer a 50 percent renewable option that meets or beats PG&E’s rates.

The Chronicle‘s expert, UC Berkeley professor Severin Borenstein, is quoted as saying that it’s risky for cities to get into the electricity business. But that’s just horse pucky: cities have been in the power business for as long as there’s been electric power. In the Bay Area, Alameda, Palo Alto, and Santa Clara all have established successful public power agencies — and all have cheaper rates than PG&E.

The state law authorizing CCA programs bars PG&E, a regulated utility, from lobbying against their implementation. In fact, in hearings before the state Pubic Utilities Commission, the company promised it would be neutral toward CCAs and wouldn’t try to discourage its customers from joining the public programs.

But in the Central Valley, where a group called the San Joaquin Valley Power Authority has been trying to create a broad-based CCA, PG&E has admitted it illegally tried to scotch the deal. Lawyers for the SJVPA filed a complaint with the CPUC, and on April 10, PG&E settled in a way that clearly admitted guilt. The company agreed to cease its illegal lobbying and pay the SVJPA $450,000 in legal fees.

It was a significant victory for public power — and San Francisco needs to make it clear right now that it will fight just as vigorously to stop PG&E interference in its own CCA efforts. The CPUC is accepting comments on the settlement, and Herrera should file a statement supporting SVJPA, in effect putting PG&E on notice that it will face immediate, furious legal action if it dares try to undermine a San Francisco CCA. Herrera also needs to put a legal team together to prepare to fight PG&E as the city’s own plan moves forward.

It’s embarrassing that San Francisco — the only city in the United States with a congressional mandate to run a public power system — is behind Marin County and the Central Valley in getting its own CCA up and running. But the process is moving forward€. And the city needs to be starting its own marketing campaign to inform the public that cheaper, greener power is on the way.

Marin has been sending out fliers showing how effectively the CCA can replace fossil-fuel and nuclear generation with greener energy options. The county has clear information about lower prices and consistent efforts to fight global warming. San Francisco is lagging here — and it’s time to get on the stick.

Hearst blacks out the PG&E scandal. Again!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Often, on Wednesday, the San Francisco Chronicle will run a nice color PG&E ad on the lower right hand corner of its front page.

On Wednesday, April 16, the Chronicle did not run a PG&E ad on the front page, but it did run a major story on the front page above the fold that did a major favor for PG&E.

The story by Kelly Zito focused on public power and alternatives to PG&E, largely in Marin County where there’s an active and aggressive move to create a CCA (community choice aggregation) system that would replace PG&E
as an energy supplier in ll cities.

The story once again largely ignored San Francisco and its CCA movement headed by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi. It didn’t quote Mirkarimi nor any public power or CCA leaders, but instead used a dubious expert from the University of California at Berkeley, who never supported public power and generally supports PG&E private power and deregulation efforts to undermine without rebuttal the community- based anti-PG&E efforts.
And it once again followed the longtime Hearst policy of blacking out the key element of any serious public power story: the PG&E/Raker Act scandal and the fact that San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is mandated by federal law to have a public power system. (See Guardian stories and editorials back to 1969.)

I don’t blame Zito the reporter. She is only the latest in a long line of Hearst reporters who ends up executing Hearst policy of coddling PG&E and blacking out the Raker Act scandal. And, after years of questioning Chronicle reporters and editors and trying to get to the bottom of Hearst’s incessant censorship of and capitulation to PG&E, I really don’t know who to blame. But let me ask the questions again: who censors Hearst stories on PG&E as a matter of Hearst policy. The reporter? The city editor? The top editor? The publisher? Hearst corporate? Anybody over there?

In any event, I would much rather have a straightforward PG&E ad on the Chronicle front page, properly labeled PG&E, than stories that omit the Raker Act scandal and slant the stories for PG&E and against public power. B3

Click here for this week’s editorial, PG&E’s attack on CCA.

Click here for this week’s editorial, The floating peakers: An energy solution on the Bay?

Click here for The shame of Hearst

Green dreams

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As we celebrate Earth Day in this era of all things green, it’s worth contemplating whether our enviro-guilt has gotten the better of our skepticism and critical thinking. Is “Green=Good” our sole metric these days, making us susceptible to self-serving spin from our politicians and corporations? After all, our Governator seems to have gone from bad to good simply by donning verdant armor and signing a landmark global warming measure that he long fought and watered down.
Closer to home, PG&E’s has been trying to greenwash away our knowledge of their penchant for polluting technologies and political corruption, a quest that our lazy but ambitious and ever image conscious Mayor Gavin Newsom has sporadically tried to piggyback on (ie tidal power, sponsored conferences, and solar everything). When Newsom tried to beef up the city solar commitment by robbing a seismic upgrade fund for renters and then the city’s own bank for building municipal solar panels, it was understandable that the Board of Supervisors balked.
But in today’s Chron, SPUR policy wonk Egon Terplan and righteous activist Van Jones whack the move and decry city plans for more fossil fuel generation. It’s not a bad point, although it is an oversimplistic one, like too many of our either-or green political debates these days. Indeed, we seem to lose the ability to see shades of gray when we talk green, and we too often forget that money is the other form of green in the equation.
As we’ve reported, San Francisco’s solar problems are complicated, just like our power generation problems (see our story in tomorrow’s paper for a more nuanced look at the peaker plant issue). To solve the problems, we need honest leaders speaking candidly to us and each other, rather than all the spin, self-interest, and political gamesmanship that has sullied San Francisco’s political dialogue in recent years.
Green can be good, or it can be the equivalent of snake oil or the IPO for a overhyped tech company that will never make any money. As an excellent recent cover story in Harper’s Magazine noted, the green economy could be the next great bubble after the housing and dot-com crashes, something that desperate capitalists and their political partners are eagerly trying to make so.
Maybe that will be a good thing, but let’s learn our lessons from the last couple bubbles and don’t simply assume that the green label is some kind of stamp of public interest approval.

Take that, PG&E!

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And congratulations go out to San Joaquin Valley Power Authority, which has reached a settlement agreement with PG&E over how the utility company has been behaving itself with regards to Community Choice Aggregation (CCA.) Best part: PG&E has to pay.

I’m giving a nod to the Associated Press here, which described SJVPA as a “public electricity cooperative,” because that’s essentially what a CCA is – a group of cities and counties getting together to buy or build their own power, and then run it through the grid that’s already established. Many CCAs say they can bring us cheaper, greener power. According to Tim Rosenfeld, who’s working on Marin’s CCA, “Public power can simply do things cheaper than investor-owned utilities.” For example, he says, the cost of financing a new power plant is about 5.5 percent for a municipality issuing a bond, and it’s more like 12 percent for a private company. “Apples to apples, building the same power plant we have a huge cost advantage,” said Rosenfeld.

As one might imagine, PG&E has some issues with CCAs because it means losing customers, and they’ve been lobbying hard against them throughout their service territory. They were so effective in San Joaquin that Fresno and Tulare backed out of the deal, meaning the SJVPA had less customers.

As we reported last year, SJVPA filed a complaint with the California Public Utilities Commission, which had already decided that it was a conflict of interest for utilities to expound on the pros and cons of CCAs, and if they were going to bitch about it they better do it with their shareholders’ piggy banks. SJVPA had evidence to the contrary and now they’ve settled with PG&E. The terms: PG&E agrees to make sure their investors pay for the marketing and lobbying and that said lobbying will be “truthful and non-misleading” – which makes my job more boring. Best part: they’re also paying up to $450K of SJVPA’s litigation fees.

The other interesting aspect of this is PG&E admits they changed horses midstream.

A solar plan that works

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EDITORIAL Solar energy makes so much sense in San Francisco that it’s crazy this city didn’t figure out years ago how to get at least a quarter or more of its power from the sun. And it’s crazy that now, with the financial benefits of solar power improving, the technology improving, and the environmental mandate getting more profound by the day, the city still doesn’t have an effective citywide solar program.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, who wants to be known as a green mayor, has a solar proposal on the table that environmental groups like the Sierra Club are reluctantly supporting. But a lot of the supervisors have serious questions — and so do we. At its most basic, Newsom’s plan is a shift of solar resources from the public sector to the private sector and does little to promote a sustainable long-term energy policy.

There’s a way to do solar right in San Francisco, and we can outline a basic blueprint.

1. Start with all the interested parties. Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, with Newsom’s support, created a Solar Task Force in San Francisco — but none of the supervisors were invited. The Sierra Club wasn’t invited. None of the public power advocates were invited. Instead, it was dominated by solar industry people, with Pacific Gas and Electric Company along for the ride, guaranteeing that the proposals would run into political static.

2. Make it work as part of a public power plan. The future of San Francisco’s energy policy has to start and end with the notion that PG&E won’t be the long-term supplier of commercial electricity. The city has a community-choice aggregation (CCA) plan, and any solar programs should be designed to enhance and work with that plan.

3. Don’t shortchange public generation. Newsom is asking the city to take money away from a public-sector plan, which pays for solar panels on city-owned buildings, and shift it to a private-sector program, which would subsidize homeowners and commercial landlords who want to install solar panels. We’re all for encouraging solar on homes and office buildings, and we recognize that current state and federal law are skewed toward private projects. But the city has a huge interest in building its own generation capacity: city buildings now use Hetch Hetchy hydropower, and every kilowatt that can be replaced with solar frees up Hetch Hetchy power for retail sales to local homes and businesses and increases the financial rewards of public power.

4. Use the Berkeley model for private parties. The city of Berkeley is pursuing an excellent program. Homeowners and businesses would be able to borrow money from the city at very low interest (a city can raise capital at around 3 percent these days) to install solar panels and would pay the money back over 20 or 30 years through increased property taxes. This would cost the city nothing, encourages solar installations — and still leaves room for subsidies if they turn out to be necessary.

5. Look at using CCA to buy solar panels in bulk and install them free. Eric Brooks, a public power advocate, suggests this idea, and it’s a good one. A city power agency could buy panels and offer them free to property owners, with the energy going into the city grid. The residents and businesses would see their power bills drop, and the city would see environmental and financial benefits.

6. Demand two-way meters. PG&E doesn’t allow property owners to bank power that they generate beyond what they use. That means the owner of a solar system that’s actually generating surplus money is giving power free to PG&E. The city ought to be pushing for a change in state law to demand two-way electric meters. And as part of a public power plan, San Francisco could allow homeowners and commercial landlords not only to cut their power bills to zero but also to bring in cash by installing solar-generating systems.

7. Recognize that PG&E is part of the problem, not part of the solution. PG&E doesn’t want public power. The company doesn’t want widespread solar generation. In fact, the giant private utility has no incentive to do anything that keeps it from making money by selling power over its lines. You can almost judge a solar plan by one standard — if PG&E is OK with it, it must be a bad idea.

The supervisors are right to question Newsom’s plan, and in the end, they should reject it — and create a new one that meets the key tests of an effective long-term energy program for San Francisco.

Do you hear what I hear?

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Just an FYI for those of you who follow PG&E as rabidly as we try to. Their head honcho will be speaking to the moneyed masses of investors tomorrow. Tune in to the web cast at 10:10 tomorrow morning:

http://www.pgecorp.com/investors/investor_info/presentations/index.shtml

Newsom’s commission games

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom didn’t want Debra Walker, an artist and activist, running the Building Inspection Commission. He doesn’t want Theresa Sparks, a transgender woman and community leader, running the Police Commission. And now, we’ve learned, he doesn’t want Robert Haaland, a labor activist and one of the city’s most visible transgender leaders, to serve as vice president of the Board of Appeals.

But of course, the mayor thinks it’s perfectly fine to put two employees of Pacific Gas and Electric Company — an outfit that is suing the city, breaking the law, trying to subvert public power and cheating the public out of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — on city commissions.

This is what the second term of Mayor Newsom, who is now openly running for governor, looks like. It’s not pretty.

We knew the mayor had his sights on higher office, but now that it’s out in the open, almost everything he does at City Hall seems to be aimed not at improving San Francisco but at increasing his odds of moving up in the political world. Why, for example, would Newsom appoint Mary Jung, a PG&E customer services manager, to the Civil Service Commission, and Darlene Chiu, a PG&E City Hall flak, to the Small Business Commission? What possible qualifications could someone whose job involves promoting the interests of a giant corporation that routinely screws small business people have as an advocate for the city’s local merchants? Why would the Civil Service Commission, which deals with city employee issues, need the expertise of someone whose employer wants to prevent the city from creating more public jobs?

Why would Newsom be doing this — if he didn’t need the support of PG&E and its allies for his next political step?

Why would he be directing his appointees to keep out of leadership posts anyone with strong progressive credentials if he weren’t trying to build new bridges to the developers, the big employers, the police unions, and the more conservative interest groups he’ll need for a statewide campaign?

The bottom line is, Newsom needs to stop thinking about running his next campaign and start running the city — because this sort of commission funny business, this practice of treating important agencies that manage key city departments as nothing more than political patronage posts for rewarding allies and punishing enemies, is terrible for San Francisco.

It’s too late to do anything about Mary Jung, but the supervisors can, and should, overturn the Chiu appointment — and let the mayor know that putting PG&E executives on city commissions is unacceptable under any circumstances.

Meanwhile, the Board of Appeals votes for new officers March 19. By tradition, the top posts on the five-member panel rotate based on seniority, with an appointee of the mayor holding one job, and a board appointee the other. But Newsom’s three members have indicated that they won’t allow Haaland — a conscientious commissioner with an excellent record — to serve as vice president. That’s a slap in the face to labor, the queer community, and the supervisors. Newsom ought to show some political integrity and tell his appointees not to suddenly change the rules.

PG&E’s Green War Chest?

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Greetings, Californians for a Clean Energy Future! Welcome to the fold of innocuous sounding, pseudo-environmental political front groups. This one is brought to us by our buddies over at Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

The group, which doesn’t seem to have a Web site or any other physical manifestation outside of filings with the California Secretary of State, already has $340,000 ready and waiting for the upcoming election cycle. According to a Secretary of State spokesperson, the group was born on Dec. 21, 2007. The only contact is the law firm Nielsen Merksamer, which has a history of teaming up with PG&E to break the law for political gain.

So far, they haven’t spent a cent — all of which were dumped into the committee by PG&E in three lump sums. Wonder what they’re going to spend all that money on? Since it’s calling itself a “coalition of environmentalists, taxpayers, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company,” it could go for or against nearly anything — including boosting Prop 98 on this June’s ballot. If passed, the measure would kill rent control and make it illegal for governments to use eminent domain to seize utility infrastructure and use it to provide the services themselves, an idea San Francisco has considered in the past and Stockton is currently pursuing.

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