When you talk to energy insiders,
it becomes clear that the proposed hydrogen solution is a fiction
that could actually terminate the
birth of a true solar revolution
in California.
August 2004
The Sun Rises in the West
by Gar Smith
It’s summertime in San Francisco and seagulls, temperatures and gas prices are soaring. While gas-gouged SUV owners impatiently creep-and-beep down Second Street’s sweltering asphalt, two eco-activists are hunkered down in the top floor of a nondescript Mission District building working on real-life solutions to oil profiteering and global warming. David Hochschild and Adam Browning are the mainstays of Vote Solar, one of the pioneering nonprofits transforming San Francisco into the world’s leading solar-powered City.
The centerpiece of San Francisco’s visionary 360MW Electricity Resource Plan is a 50MW Solar Power Facility — a “pipeline of projects” that could cover up to 250 acres of commercial, residential, and government rooftops with photovoltaic panels capable of generating 6-10 percent of the City’s power. Boosted by another 50 MW of power from wind (with possible excursions into biomass and cogeneration) and an additional 100 MW in savings from inexpensive energy conservation measures, San Francisco’s green-power infrastructure is on target to becoming the world’s largest solar-power system. The current world leader is the town of Serri, Italy, with 4MW of installed solar power.
Even Governor Arnold Schwar-zenegger has vaulted onto the sunshine bandwagon, endorsing a plan that calls for half of the 125,000 new homes built in California each year to be equipped with solar power.
“This is actually not an achievable goal since there’s just not enough manufacturing capacity at this point,” VoteSolar’s Director of Operations Adam Browning confides, but, he adds, “there’s a lot of value in having a really bold idea out there.” And some of the boldest ideas out there are coming out of Fog City.
On an average day, San Francisco consumes 850 MW of electricity (650 MW at night). Because electric-power comprises the largest industrial sector in America (accounting for a third of the US economy and generating more cash-flow than telecommunications or the airline industry), choosing where your electrons come from is a serous matter. The US electricity sector is the world’s single largest contributor to climate change and the major source of air pollution and radioactive wastes. Pollution from power plants remains one of the leading causes of childhood asthma. But since electricity is so essential to wall-socket economies, the power industry has become one of the country’s most powerful (if generally unrecognized) special interests.
On May 11, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors aimed a stake at the heart of Big Energy and the political pollutocrats when it passed Supervisor Tom Ammiano’s Energy Independence Ordinance giving city residents and businesses the right to switch to “green” electric power. By 2005, the City’s old energy diet of oil, hydro, natural gas, and nuclear power will be replaced by a banquet of photovoltaic panels, distributed-generation fuel cells, wind turbines, hydrogen-power, energy efficiency, and conservation technologies. And with a boost from an ingenious voter-approved $100-million Solar Bond Authority, it may be possible to completely finance the transition out of energy savings, thereby obviating the need for a rate increase.
The City’s move to green power was abetted by Carole Migden’s historic Community Choice law (AB117), which permits communities to abandon contracts with large commercial suppliers (like Pacific Gas & Electric) and purchase power from green-energy providers. Community Choice enables power providers to mix solar with less expensive energy technologies, thereby lowering the average price of electricity so it’s competitive with PG&E.
“Energy independence offers San Franciscans permanent protection against future energy crises and hard savings that cannot be taken away,” Ammiano boasts. “We can work towards closing the City’s polluting power plants and make the City comply with the Kyoto Treaty, all at the same rates PG&E charges. Now I call that a bargain.”
The View from VoteSolar
Vote Solar’s Director of Programs, David Hochschild, a tall, sandy-haired, easy-going gentleman, has just returned from an around-the-world trip with his wife. His encounters abroad have prompted him to start work on a book detailing the world’s changing attitudes about America. “It’s not a pretty picture,” he sighs. But if there’s one thing that might help restore America’s profile, it’s weaning the country from its dependence on foreign oil — and the military might currently deployed to control this dwindling resource.
San Francisco is one of the cities playing midwife to the birth of a solar-based 21st century economy. Hochschild happily ticks off the accomplishments: “We’ve got a 675-kW system in place at Moscone Center. Construction on 250kW solar array in the southeast City will begin in July. A couple of port buildings — Pier 96 and Pier 50 — and Moscone West are all in the pipeline.”
How do you choose which rooftops to solarize? “We do a solar survey to select best buildings,” Hochschild explains. San Francisco has two rate structures for electricity. “Enterprise fund” rates pay 15 cents/kWh while “general fund” rates pay 3.5 kWh. “Of course, it makes more sense to have solar on the buildings that pay the higher rates so they pay for themselves sooner.”
“The Moscone Center is a good example of what we’re trying to do,” Hochschild says. “It’s a $7.4-million project — $3.2 million goes to efficiency and $4.2 million goes to solar. Essentially what you’re doing is combining the energy savings and efficiency in solar to produce an overall payback that’s very short. The Moscone project has an eight-year simple payback while solar-panels have a life of 35-plus years.”
Wind power is also part of the City’s plan. Does that mean we can expect to see propeller blades sprouting from Coit Tower? “Wind power is pretty unlikely in the city,” Hochschild shrugs. “It’s more likely to be on land that the City owns near Hetch Hetchy [in Yosemite]. Studies have shown wind machines are be quite good in those areas.” For the near-term, wind electricity would most likely be purchased from outside energy producers.
But even as wind and solar become more popular and feasible, a battle royale is brewing in Washington and Sacramento over an energy boondoggle that may lead to scandals more foul-smelling than Enron.
The Hydrogen Hype-way
Governor Schwarzenegger has received a lot of media kudos for promoting his vision of a “Hydrogen Highway.” But when you talk to energy insiders, it becomes clear that the proposed hydrogen solution is a fiction that could actually terminate the birth of a true solar revolution in California.
The hydrogen needed to fuel the governor’s green road map would come from natural gas, Browning explains. “But the natural gas that comes into California already feeds the existing power plant structure. There’s not enough additional natural gas to feed the Hydrogen Highway.” The solution? The governor and the Bush administration are planning to fuel the “hydrogen economy” by importing tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a volatile oil industry by-product with serious environmental impacts.
Paul Fenn is the Director of the Oakland-based advocacy group Local Power. He is also the author of San Francisco’s Energy Independence Ordinance, California’s Community Choice law (AB117), and San Francisco’s 2001 voter-approved Solar Bond Authority. Pacing the floor in the sunlit upper floor of his red-barn home in rural Canyon, California, Fenn is cordial but emphatic.
“With all the fanfare about Hydrogen Highways and the state renewable energy law, you get the impression that our bipartisan leaders share the public enthusiasm for green power,” he says. But the fact is that Sempra, Calpine and other powerful energy interests are working overtime to lock their ratepayers into long-term natural gas contracts tied to planned LNG terminals in Long Beach and in Baja California. If the plan succeeds, Fenn warns, “natural gas imported from oil fields in the Middle East, Indonesia, or Algeria may soon be the only source of fuel for many of Southern California’s electric ratepayers.
“The industry is exploiting fears of rolling blackouts to make California dependent on imported foreign gas,” Fenn scowls. But any decrease in available domestic gas supplies can easily be met with existing “renewable energy, efficiency and conservation measures.” Besides, he adds, it wasn’t gas shortages that caused the blackouts of 2001, it was “energy supply manipulation by the gas suppliers.” And some of these same suppliers stand to benefit from the LNG import scheme, which could give them “even more market power to manipulate gas and electricity prices in the future.”
In May, at a Global LNG Summit in San Diego, Sempra Energy began pushing state regulators to make ratepayers foot the bill for its multibillion-dollar investments in LNG. Under Sempra’s scenario, 20% of the state’s new natural gas would be imported from the Middle East, Africa, Russia and Asia. Fuel makes up 90% of a power plant’s lifetime investment, so how wise it to bet our future on pressurized gas shipped halfway around the world from Algeria?
With three million customers demanding a switch to green energy, Sempra (which owns San Diego Gas & Electric) hopes to protect its profits by locking customers into ten-year natural gas contract with Calpine. SDG&E’s customers would also be forced to purchase a new 500-MW power plant — from another Sempra affiliate! “Sempra is clearly calling the shots,” Fenn says. The result is “a supply chain involving several regulated and unregulated affiliates ... lined up in a classic vertical monopoly integration that used to land people in jail.
“If Sempra, Edison and PG&E ultimately prevail in bringing LNG and new gas-fired power plants to California,” Fenn warns, “it will be a 10-20 year decision. The current moment in history will indeed be California’s major policy opportunity to steer a course out of the Climate Crisis.”
Note To Arnold: ‘Don’t Pass Gas’
While natural gas burns cleaner than coal, it is 17 times more reactive than carbon dioxide when it comes to global warming. The natural gas lost to leaks from pipes and tanks during transport and storage accounts for 25% of the state’s release of greenhouse gases.
“Natural gas is not natural,” Fenn notes. Before it can be used, LNG must be liquefied at temperature of minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit and shipped to distant terminals inside 12-story-tall tankers, each longer than three football fields and holding more than 33 million gallons of LNG. In their book, Brittle Power, Amory and Hunter Lovins estimated that the explosive potential of a single 125,000-cubic-meter LNG tanker was “equivalent to ... about 55 Hiroshima bombs.”
In January, an LNG facility in Algeria exploded, incinerating 276 workers and shattering windows seven miles away. The proposed terminal in Long Beach harbor would be built on unstable landfill, near an active earthquake fault. Congressional studies have identified LNG terminals as “serious” terrorist targets. According to US antiterrorist czar Richard Clarke, members of Al Qaeda have stowed away on LNG tankers destined for Boston Harbor. Despite these downsides, the Bush administration is prepared to preempt state laws to force construction of the LNG terminal in Long Beach.
“The move to LNG is a massive political failure that must be renounced by Senator Feinstein and Governor Schwarzenegger,” Fenn insists. “We do not need the gas. With San Francisco moving on its Energy Independence plan to build the world’s greatest green power network, a buildable alternative to gas has arrived.”
The Renewables Revolution
If LNG is the biggest threat to the dawn of a Clean Energy Century in California, spirited citizen activism is the nemesis of the LNG’s Old Energy Lobby. Over the past two years, spirited grassroots campaigns have blocked plans to locate LNG terminals in Eureka and Vallejo. And each defeat for LNG has cleared the path for clean energy alternatives. As California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) President Michael Peevey recently marveled, green-energy solutions are now “growing like wildflowers in the North and the South of this state.”
VoteSolar’s mission is to encourage cities nationwide to follow San Francisco’s example and their message is being heard with new solar initiatives underway in Marin, Fresno, Santa Cruz, Honolulu, New Mexico and New Jersey. The goal, Browning says, is to “help the solar industry build economies of scale, bringing down solar’s costs, and letting market forces do something for global warming that even Dick Cheney couldn’t stop.”
San Diego’s mayor has made a 10-year, 50 MW commitment to solar and renewable alternatives and, at last year’s Solar Cities Summit, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown committed his city to installing 5 MW of solar power. If all of Oakland’s pending proposals get the green light, VoteSolar’s Adam Browning says, Oakland will “exceed the solar in place in San Francisco. If there isn’t a competitive spirit yet,” he grins, “There should be.”
Adding to Oakland’s competitive edge, Mayor Brown recently hired Rainforest Action Network founder Randy Hayes to serve as his new Sustainability Director. Hayes has set a goal of turning Oakland into a 100% renewably powered city within 25 years. Within this year, Oakland plans to install solar-electric panels on housing and apartment projects, 16 city-owned buildings, the Oakland Coliseum, the Federal Express building at the Oakland Airport and the Chabot Space & Science Center.
The state has set a goal of 20% renewable energy by 2017, but many Bay Area cities are on track to reach 40% renewable levels by that time. “Climate change problems aren’t getting solved at the international or national levers,” Hayes observes, “so governments at the local level need to show leadership, courage and moxie.”
Greenpeace USA’s energy advocate Kristin Casper sums it up nicely: “Renewable energy is a power source that is local, secure and price-competitive, right here in California. It’s clean, and it creates jobs for Californians. Why ship this dirty fuel halfway around the world, when the alternative is all around us?”
Gar Smith is Associate Editor of Common Ground.
RESOURCES
If you want a windmill or solar panel in your back yard, contact Paul Fenn (paulfenn@local.org) or Local Power, 4281 Piedmont Avenue, Oakland CA 9461, (510) 451-1727. www.local.org
For more info on the Vote Solar Initiative, visit www.votesolar.org
For background on the dangers of LNG tankers, see: timrileylaw.com/LNG_TANKERS.htm
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