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HomeMy WebLinkAbout6/16/2020 Item 11, Schmidt Clerk, Intern From:Richard Schmidt < To:E-mail Council Website Subject:Agenda Item 11: Clean Choice Energy Attachments:TRIB Should San Luis Obispo require most new houses be all.pdf; CCT CCA part 2.pdf Dear Mayor and Council, I urge the council NOT to pass this ordinance at this time. Here are solid reasons not to pass the ordinance. 1. The pretext it will reduce GHG emissions is false. It will actually increase GHG emissions. This is because electrification will be done not with some idealized “green power,” but with what actually comes out of our power meters, which is about 40% or more generated from fossil fuel, including some dirty coal. (The exact fossil percentage is unknown since 11% comes from unidentifiable sources, some of which are certainly fossil fuel.) Since fossil fuel electrical generation is terribly inefficient, taking 3 units of natural gas energy or 4 units of coal energy to produce one equivalent unit of electrical energy, you can see the huge fossil fuel GHG impacts universal electrification will cause. If at some future time we actually have carbon-free power in our lines, reconsideration of universal electrification may make sense. But it makes no environmental sense today. It will increase exactly the harm you claim to be curing. 2. The ordinance will institutionalize and exacerbate inequality locally and globally. Locally, we’ll have two classes of housing: all-electric, expensive-to-operate housing for the lower echelons, and economical-to-operate gas-powered extravagance for the rich. Make no mistake about it: this ordinance with its cost-based permit system for gas is classist, economically and socially. The rich will – and can -- gladly pay so they can have their 12-burner Viking stoves, their tchotchkes with perpetually flickering flames, their gas fireplaces, their rooftop and deck gas space heaters, rooftop gas kitchens and barbecues. Look at how the multi-million-dollar downtown condos at either end of Marsh Street are advertised: Gas is big. We see this also in our new hotels for the rich: the gas flare in the front window of Hotel SLO is a disgusting and ostentatious display of how the rich will get gas to waste, while the rest will have to deal with sky-high electric bills. This is the opposite of social justice or environmental justice. The notion we’ll soon have 100% green power – which is the premise justifying this ordinance -- is predicated on things Big Green Propaganda (BGP) shoves under the rug: specifically the fact this will be possible only if the wealthy global north exploits and steals precious resources on a massive scale from the poor global south, destroying land (much belonging to indigenous peoples), ecosystems, forests, farmland, water, and air at rates never before seen. This will be a new wave of colonialism and mass suffering driven by the decarbonization demands of the global north’s bloated and unsustainable lifestyle. Existing rare earth and mineral extraction operations that make green tech possible, while small compared to what will have to come, already displace indigenous residents, and create nightmare social assaults 1 analogous to the better-known issues in the trade of conflict diamonds. And why do we do this? To make possible perpetuation of the global north’s thoughtless and unsustainable lifestyle of excessive consumption. In other words, we don’t care about the welfare of the many so long as we can have the stuff we want. This is sick. Far from being a progressive move, this ordinance is the opposite. Passing this ordinance would be the city’s “let them eat cake” moment. Please don’t go there. 3. There are alternative measures – much simpler than de-gasification – that actually produce modest GHG emission reductions while improving our overall quality of life. For example, banning gas-powered leaf blowers. These ridiculous machines, which do nothing a rake and broom (made, incidentally, from an annually-renewable crop, cornstraw) can’t do, spew more GHG emissions than a truck. They also pollute the air with fine particulate matter that shouldn’t be stirred up this way, thus causing lung and respiratory disease, and noise, which causes deafness and cardio health problems. They also transfer junk from private property to the gutter, where it becomes a city clean-up issue. Under your emergency health powers, you could ban these things at your next meeting and do more to cut GHG emissions than your proposed gas ban. 4. Passing a far-reaching, controversial ordinance like this while normal civic discourse and participation are shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic is wrong. As Derek Johnson wrote in a recent email, “The norms of public engagement are obviously difficult to achieve during isolation and a pandemic.” It’s arrogant and autocratic to proceed with this at present. It’s also anti-democratic. There is no rush here. Please wait till we have normalized discussion and participation opportunities before even considering something as radical as this ordinance. 5. Your inbox is full of “support” from BGP-induced social media and other propaganda generators, like U-40’s Slo Scoop. I got a plea from the state Sierra Club (of which I’m not a member) urging people from all over to sign a happy-face formletter urging your adoption of the ordinance. You must understand such “support” is based on feel-good ignorance, is often from out of town, and is not from people who understand the issues in other than a most superficial way. The City's shut out local and national critical intelligence from assisting in drafting this ordinance, preferring to deal only with those staff perceives to be on the “same team.” Thus you have a deeply flawed ordinance, conceptually and textually. Your initial hearing draft contained blatant errors. Such material should never have made it that far, but lacking informed critique it did. One provision would have violated the California Business and Professions Code – a provision I was able to trace to the self-interested pleadings of several self-aggrandizing parties who got staff’s ear. Another provision imposed window glass technical specifications that would have made passive solar buildings impossible, which is exactly what you wouldn’t do if seriously interested in exiting the GHG emission train. I asked staff who drafted this, staff or consultant. They refused to answer that question. So much for an open transparent process. My deductive conclusion is this ordinance has been created as a sop to the BGP parties that are behind the erroneous idea that building electrification today will reduce GHG emissions. Make no mistake about it, adopting this ordinance now will increase GHG emissions, not reduce them. Sometime in the future that may change. Wait till then to massively degassify, and at that time do it in an equitable fashion. In the meanwhile, it makes sense, given their small cost, to require electric stubouts for possible future conversion should we ever have carbon-free power available. That offers users a true Clean Energy Choice Program, which is something many desire. 6. Finally, I’m non-plussed by the city’s hiring 4LEAF, Inc., a company whose website doesn’t mention offering such services, for consumer technical support. Why? Is this so complicated city staff aren’t up to the job of answering the public's questions? This is complicated. I’ll wager council and the mayor have a hard time making sense of the ordinances when you try to read them, with their opaque bureaucratese and discussing things in terms of other ordinance 2 sections not in your approval package. Thus for anyone to have confidence in what is actually being adopted seems highly presumptive. To me that is yet another indication this is a premature and precipitous move. For your further education, below are pdfs of a couple of articles I’ve written related to #1 above, the first appeared in the Tribune and is a brief response to this ordinance the last time you heard it; the second appeared at Cal Coast Times and deals with some of the false premises about MBCP’s “carbon-free” power which under-gird the ordinance’s rationale, and dates from late last year. Sincerely, Richard Schmidt, green architect and long-time low energy building design instructor 3 Should San Luis Obispo require most new houses be all-electric? SLO’s rationale: Fossil fuels cause global warming. Monterey Bay Community Power supplies us “carbon-free” electricity. The state requires residential solar panels. It’s time to get rid of natural gas, and save the earth. Devil’s in the details: • Two-thirds of MBCP’s power is old Northwest hydro. Most has been around for decades. Putting our name on it does nothing to lessen global warming. • We don’t get, or use, MBCP’s “clean” power. There’s no direct line to get it to us. • Power we do get and use is the “California power mix,” about 40% fossil fueled. • Converting fossil energy to electricity is enormously inefficient. Typical gas plants’ electricity output contains about one-third the fossil energy going into the plant. About two-thirds is wasted. • On-site burning of gas to heat buildings can be highly efficient, and uses far less gas than burning gas to make electricity to convert back to household heat. The upshot: All-electric houses using today’s California mix will increase, not decrease, greenhouse gas emissions. Those state-mandated residential PV systems are sized for dual-fuel gas/electric houses, and are too small for all-electric bragging rights. Incredibly, SLO plans to exempt from all-electric rules “more than 1,500” unbuilt homes. That’s about 8% of the city’s current housing supply. SLO is amending its building code to include the all-electric mandate. Lay people must understand building codes define the worst, not best, building that’s legal – in this case, the least energy-efficient legal house. And “worst building” is what SLO seeks in its all-electric houses, which must merely meet the code’s lowest energy standard. A dual-fuel house, on the other hand, must be at least 15% more efficient and pay a pollution fee. This is the superior building, yet the builder gets “punished” with $10-15,000 in extra costs for the building’s better energy performance. We need better buildings. We have become blasé about the profligate energy demands of buildings, which nationally approach 50% of total energy usage. We must use less energy in buildings, not just change fuels on wasteful buildings and claim the battle’s won. SLO has not even begun to consider such issues, which have been on the menu elsewhere since the 1980s. We can design buildings that employ nature’s free energy to heat, cool, ventilate and light themselves. This is nothing new. A young bride, Xenophon tells us, was thrilled her new house had “living rooms … that are cool in summer and warm in winter,” and Aeschylus called such homes “modern” and “civilized,” unlike those of “primitives” and “barbarians.” That’s in the 5th Century B.C. In the 20th century, we forgot what we knew about natural energy as it became cheap and easy to flip a switch for instant light, ventilation, and comfort control, plus plenty of nifty new things to do with energy, and that’s why we’re where we are today. We are “barbarians.” Nearly new houses along Prado Road ignore every measure needed to capture free natural energy for thermal comfort. Why? Our existential environmental crisis goes deeper than popular global warming hysteria takes us. Our earth provides the resources and services necessary for life. We unawarely demand too much of both. One service is processing waste. Nature can process carbon dumped into the atmosphere, but we dump so much so fast nature cannot keep up. Global warming is the result. That’s only one of hundreds of fundamental ways we overwhelm our earth. Today’s human demands on the earth would require 1.7 earths if they continue. If everyone lived like Americans – and do we have a right to say they can’t? – we’d need almost four earths. This is unsustainable. What cannot go on forever doesn’t. We can wind it down, or we can let nature take her revenge. We need meaningful actions, not noise, to avert environmental catastrophe. Given our human nature, to wallow in the familiar and comfortable, this is not going to be easy. The task is made more difficult by noisy political “solutions” that aren’t solutions. As for touting electric conversion as a rosy solution for energy-guzzling buildings, my Latin teacher had an appropriately memorable saying: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” ## https://www.sanluisobispo.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article235929402.html With the calendar running downhill to year’s end, the city of SLO still hasn’t told us much about our New Year’s change of electricity providers, which they claim is a “choice” we made, despite our not knowing we made it. So that means curious folk, like me, have to turn over rocks to see what’s there. After much rock turning, I have updates to my previous article on this, and none of what I’ve found supports the city’s carney-barker salvation theology preaching that switching from PG&E to Monterey Bay Community Power (MBCP) will save the earth from global warming or anything else. In fact, it may greatly complicate saving the earth. MBCP is a community choice aggregator (CCA) – a public agency that buys wholesale electricity and resells it to us for community benefit. A standard rationale for CCAs is they are the way for us to demand and get carbon-free power. The city’s carney-barker preaching about MBCP emphasizes this point. The problem is that’s somewhere between deceptive and untrue. While MBCP does provide clean power, so does PG&E, whose standard power mix is already nearly 80% carbon free, with the remainder coming from natural gas. Gas emits carbon into the atmosphere, but at a fairly low rate compared to other fossil alternatives – and PG&E is under state mandate to eliminate gas-fired electricity. Any carbon superiority MBCP might claim is thus small – certainly not enough to determine the fate of the earth – and temporary. It is even possible, under a scenario where MBCP customers use more carbon-free electricity than MBCP expected and purchased, that the excess, purchased on the electric “spot market,” may not be carbon free. A related city claim about MBCP is it provides a “significant increase in renewable energy generation.” At present, this is flat-out untrue: last year MBCP got 34% of its power from renewables, the year before PG&E’s standard mix had 33% -- they are tied. Both utilities are committed to growing their renewable percentages, but it is likely MBCP, due to serving new territory in SLO and possibly Santa Barbara counties, may see a near-term decrease in its renewable percentage as its available renewables are diluted by larger overall sales. MBCP offers an added-cost upgrade to 100% renewable power (as opposed to its standard “carbon-free” power), but so does PG&E. With greenie enthusiasm about MBCP’s renewables, one might imagine this 100% renewable option would be a popular way to show love for Mother Earth. But it’s not. In 2018 MBCP’s 100% renewable package accounted for a mere .16% of its power sales. Regular MBCP power – the kind with 34% renewables – is two thirds large scale hydroelectric. Under a quirk of California law, large hydro is not considered “renewable.” That’s because regulators want to expand solar and wind capacity, and feared if they counted large hydro as renewable, utilities would grab existing hydro from the Pacific Northwest instead of creating renewables in California. That’s exactly what MBCP has done to achieve its 100% carbon-free power portfolio. Sixty-six per cent of its power comes from hydro that’s been around for years. Prior to MBCP gaining access to it, somebody else had access to it. So, one begins to ponder what this means. Is there actual good to the earth from MBCP having this hydro power in its portfolio instead of somebody else having it in theirs? Who had it before, and might they have had to turn to fossil- fuel electricity to make up for lost hydro? I put this question to MBCP, and while their response isn’t totally satisfying, they assure me they did not outbid some unfortunate poorer power buyer, but that power generators approached them and offered MBCP hydro no other customer was taking. Another thing the city claims for the MBCP change is it will save us money. Well, yes, but not much. MBCP charges what PG&E would have charged us and “promises” the spend-and-save gimmick of a 3% rebate at the end of each year. In my earlier article, I described how this rebate is dependent upon revenues being sufficient to support it – information then easily found on MBCP’s website, but on their current website I can no longer find it. Before you get excited by a “3% rebate,” however, know that it applies only to energy charges, not to your entire electric bill. On MBCP’s website there’s a sample bill which shows this breakdown: Current PG&E Electric Delivery Charges $109.14 Monterey Bay Community Power Electric Generation Charges $44.37 The total bill is $153.51, the 3% rebate on $44.37 is $1.33, which is less than .9% of this bill. Future pricing can be tricky, and hard to predict, no matter where we get our electricity. As I write, a CCA pricing mess is unfolding in Ventura County, where a number of enthusiastic cities opted for the 100% renewable level from their local CCA. Apparently they didn’t understand what they were signing up for, and now some cities find their own power bills so unaffordable they are returning their city business to Southern California Edison, which unlike PG&E provides carbon-dirty power. This cost issue apparently affects only large volume users, not homeowners. Something that’s disturbing about the Ventura situation, however, is the reaction of CCA advocates: instead of admitting a problem that needs both explanation and fixing, they dismiss price instability with a shrug and call it CCA “growing pains.” Our city’s salvation theologians would have us believe MBCP is a radical change agent creating more renewable electric generation by working to develop new solar and wind power, even though all California utilities are in this venture together. MBCP is currently behind a new wind operation in New Mexico and two solar plants in the San Joaquin Valley. There’s also a potentially huge off-shore “Morro Bay” wind project MBCP is interested in seeing built – the quotes because it’s actually 30 miles off Cambria-San Simeon. New Times had a weird story about this last month. Fourteen companies have indicated interest in leasing federal offshore waters for wind turbines, but the story was about only one of those, Castle Wind, and the kiss-up politicking taking place to advance its lease bid. The story made it sound as if all that remains is processing permits and the project’s a go. A more grounded story in the Monterey County Weekly called the project a “moon shot.” New Times’ slant is all the more surprising since it’s no secret a team of Cal Poly physicists and biologists have been studying the feasibility of offshore wind, and an article in the current Cal Poly Magazine summarizes their findings for this project: potentially huge environmental impacts, and technological challenges yet unsolved. According to the article, existing offshore wind turbines elsewhere are in shallow waters and rest on the sea floor. The offshore site here, however, is in water more than 1,000 feet deep. To mitigate environmental impacts and cut costs the technical solution is floating turbines, something never done before which nobody knows will work. Thus the “moon shot.” The large new solar projects being pushed by MBCP and others are, frankly, more environmentally troubling. They involve the industrial development of vast quantities of remote rural and wild lands, with horrendous environmental impacts for humans, other organisms with whom we share the earth, soils, vegetation, water, air-quality, public health, and the earth’s sustainability. The land is bulldozed, dug up, fenced off, and deep wells dug to pump fossil water to clean solar panels. Concrete is poured, asphalt is laid, buildings and miles of fences are built. This is development of raw land just as destructive as the conversion of farmland to urban uses we see closer to home. It’s happening at a furious rate over a frightful amount of often fragile wild land which may never recover from the damage, at least in human time. Carrizo Plain’s solar installations are familiar. Solar developers there congratulate themselves for leaving “wildlife corridors” for pronghorn, neglecting to add that “antelope,” as the old cowboy songs called them, previously frolicked on all that land and didn’t need confinement to fenced corridors. Further south, in the western Antelope Valley, as of several years ago there were 33 different applications for solar and wind projects. As construction began, residents experienced a sharp rise in valley fever and highways became dangerous from construction-related dust storms. The disturbed earth continues to blow away after construction. Community-improvement promises made by solar developers were broken. The vast desert was being fenced off and overrun, its fragile native flora and fauna destroyed and its human inhabitants made sick. This profligate land abuse adds substantially to humanity’s assault on the earth’s future. “Nature,” comments Jamie Clark, president of the conservation organization Defenders of Wildlife – which acknowledges the seriousness of climate change on wildlife’s future and calls for urgent climate measures, “is unraveling as humans appropriate an ever greater share of our planet’s resources.” Huge solar “farms” for MBCP, as well as for major utilities, hasten this appropriation of the earth. So, one might ask, why in the name of saving the earth do we do things that speed its demise? I think it’s because those who shape solar electric development have their minds stuck in the fossil era: the solar age future is being shaped by coal age thinking. Picture a coal or gas-fired power plant, or a nuke. Huge messy, noisy, dirty, vibrating, high-heat, polluting factories. They are large scale because they only work that way. They’re messy, bad neighbors. You don’t want one next door. You can’t put one in the back yard. They don’t scale down. So utility-minds think power generation should work that way. If you do solar, you do huge solar. A considerable amount of regulatory and political leverage has gone into getting solar built this way even though it’s the wrong way to do solar. Utility-mind thinking ignores the genius of solar, that it is the opposite of coal, gas and nuke generation in nearly every way. Solar is miniaturized power generation. If you look at the little rectangles covering the face of a solar panel, consider that each one is a tiny power plant. If you extracted one and held it in your hand, it wouldn’t burn you, stink, vibrate, spew pollution in your face, hurt your ears or even tickle your palm as it converts sunlight into electricity. Solar is different, so why is its potential for doing good for the earth subverted by treating it like an industrial age relict? It should also be noted there are no economies of scale with solar. None. Like individual drops of water in an ocean, solar adds up -- that’s how solar works. Achieving solar’s potential to improve the world entails a different approach. Solar can be decentralized into a “distributed energy” system, an efficient system where most power is made near its point of use instead of far away. Through use of rooftops, parking lot canopies and the like, land already appropriated for human use can be sufficient to power our needs, without destroying more of nature with massive solar plants in remote places and building massive new transmission lines to carry their power to where it’s used. If the regulatory apparatus provided the same support for distributed solar as it has for large scale solar, this would happen. Distributed energy isn’t a new idea. It’s been discussed as a land conservation measure, as an antiterrorism measure (solar farms, like nukes, are great targets, distributed rooftops not so much), as an economy measure, as a way to reduce transmission losses, as a faster way to transition to renewables. Evidence suggests the public has long understood this. After Sacramento Municipal Utility District shut down its faulty Rancho Seco nuke in 1989, it asked customers to volunteer rooftops for distributed solar to replace the nuke, and got more offers than it needed. If people got it then, why don’t new age electric providers – and their cheerleaders like our city council -- get it now? Adding to the attractiveness of distributed energy, it’s fast to implement. Rooftop solar typically takes only an electrical permit, which is a semi-automatic permit; no lengthy planning and environmental approvals or protracted public controversy as with raw land conversion. This is the solar future; developing huge solar “farms” is the past. Outfits like MBCP should be leading this change by rounding up rooftops in their service area instead of developing rural and wild land. Underlying our city’s salvation theology – that switching to MBCP will avert environmental disaster – is what should be obvious by now: this theology is carney-barker bunk. Underlying it is distorted thinking -- that to save the earth all we have to do is “de-carbonize,” to fill our lives with more stuff, like pricey induction cooktops and electric cars, that we can continue to live just like we do today, but electrically, and everything will be ducky. This is dangerous fantasy, and believing it drags us deeper towards the point of environmental no return, towards destroying the earth’s productivity and the collapse of complex ecosystems that make human life itself possible. While climate destabilization due to increases in atmospheric carbon threatens our survival, it is hardly the only such threat. We, and the way we live, are the cause – all of us. We cannot pretend we’re absolved just because we have solar panels and electric cars, or opt for 100% renewable power from MBCP. We consume too much of the earth’s resources. We can’t have our planet and eat it too. We are also the only earthly beings, so far as we know, who can understand this and fix it. There’s a simple metric for illustrating the extent of our consumption greed’s impact on the earth called the ecological footprint (EF). The EF measures the ecological assets of the earth consumed by a population’s lifestyle. These assets are broadly defined: food, fiber, minerals, energy, air and oxygen, absorption of wastes, etc. Carbonization of the atmosphere, for example, is one example of waste absorption assets becoming overloaded. EF oversimplifies: it assumes everything on earth’s for humans, and doesn’t consider the needs of other species. That means an EF analysis is even scarier than it sounds since we need other organisms to survive. To do the simplest EF calculation, we total the earth’s productive surface and divide it by the earth’s population. The resulting “share” for each human – not accounting for the needs of other species -- is about 4 acres. Americans take more than 20 acres. How do we justify this? Can we tell others, like the 2 billion people who live on the equivalent of $2 per day or less, that they owe this to us? Can we tell aspiring nations like China and India they can’t live like us? We’ve got a problem that isn’t in the least addressed by purchasing power from MBCP. Our city’s preaching that is a distraction from truth. EF analysis shows 80% of the world’s people live in nations that exceed their EF share. Globally humans already consume resources equivalent to those of 1.7 earths. If everyone lived like Americans it would take nearly 5 earths to support humanity. We can borrow against the earth’s natural capital for a time, but if we don’t quickly back off and repay our debts, we’ll bring our whole earthly system crashing down. And, as we are learning from climate change, we may reach a tipping point, or a point of no return, before realizing it. Our singular cultural preoccupation with climate anxiety leads us to ignore that climate problems are but a symptom of the larger existential environmental crash-down our greed is bringing upon ourselves – and that much of what we propose to do about climate makes other problems worse. Ruben Anderson was quoted recently on Treehugger: “Solar panels, windmills, electric cars! There is no need to change anything, in fact, we can all have more stuff!… There is only one route out of this, and we are going down that road whether we like it or not. We will use less stuff, we will have less stuff, and we will use less energy.” What cannot go on forever doesn’t. What’s so hard for our well-meaning city council to understand about that?