By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
On the last day of April, Elon Musk introduced residential and commercial versions of the Tesla battery for the storage of excess electricity, and a lot of things started to change. Or more precisely, things that were already changing started changing faster.
The increasing attractiveness of rooftop solar power -- already pretty darn attractive at less than 20 cents a kilowatt hour – has increased some more.
The “utility death spiral” has gotten steeper. That’s the phenomenon whereby customers decide rooftop solar makes sense and flee the monopoly system of electricity generated at centralized locations and dispatched over long distances, so utilities hike the rates on their shrinking customer base, so more customers flee….
And a certain kind of letter to the editor will, we can hope, stop appearing in The Tribune. You know the one. It shows up every few months and goes like this: Alternative energy can never do the job/will never catch on because: the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow, natural gas doesn’t emit as much greenhouse gas as coal, the grid will collapse unless it’s dominated by always-on baseload power, etc. Remix, rehash, serve lukewarm.
A variation on that message is routinely dished up by those folks who insist that nuclear power is the way and the light, and if we had a few trillion dollars with which to build a thousand nuclear plants based on a yet-to-be commercialized technology that won’t send radioactive plumes around the globe in the event of an accident, hey, we could start reducing carbon emissions to acceptable levels... in a decade or so.
The senders of that message have been cleverly avoiding studies from The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Mark Jacobson’s Stanford study, the work of the Rocky Mountain Institute, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and others that have charted various paths to energy futures in which coal, natural gas, oil and nukes can either be sharply curtailed or completely replaced, and all life on Earth will be better off for it.
The renewables-can’t-cut-it message has also been immune to the reality of cities and regions and entire countries around the world that are well on the way to shifting their economies to a mix of renewable energy, conservation and energy efficiency, or are already there. This argument is coming to sound especially out of touch in California, where localized clean energy is happening in a big way and is the focus of the Sierra Club’s My Generation campaign. See the recent remark my Michael Picker, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, in response to Governor Brown’s announced target of 50% renewables by 2030: “We could get to 100 percent renewables,” Picker said. “Getting to 50 percent is not really a challenge.”
The end of those letters to the editor probably won’t come overnight. They represent deeply held convictions and heavily entrenched belief systems that die hard – like mastodons entrenched in tar pits.
All homes and businesses won’t go solar and install battery systems overnight, either. But as of last Thursday, that became a very real option for a lot of potential customers. And at the moment that happened, if you were listening carefully, you could hear the cry of a sinking mastodon, quickly lost in a rising wind.
UPDATE: Mr. Picker’s problem.
And now, a crucial lesson in “don’t do as I do, do as I say,” and a real life, made-to-order demonstration of the fact that in the debate over renewables vs. fossil fuels & nuclear, it’s not about technology, and it is all about policy.
When the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station shut down, the California Public Utilities Commission set about the task of replacing the power formerly generated by the power plant. Instead of just letting the utility scamper off to order up more gas-fired power power – their default mode – the CPUC’s administrative law judge agreed with the My Generation campaign and others that alternative energy providers should be allowed to submit bids. Less polluting energy sources are the state’s preferred providers for new energy generators, and are supposed to be the first choice for utilities adding power to their portfolios.
Then PUC President Picker, the same guy you saw five paragraphs ago planting the flag for 100% renewable energy in California, ignored that ruling and endorsed the utility getting its replacement power from a big new gas plant instead, available renewable energy and storage be damned.
On Thursday, the PUC will meet in San Francisco to deliberate on the choice before them.
Will they:
- Divert up to $2.6 billion from fossil fuels to clean energy,
- Avoid constructing a major new power plant that will pollute for decades, and
- Create a road map for replacing nuclear with clean, renewable energy and using clean energy to maintain a reliable, cost-effective and resilient grid…
or will they say “Nahhh.”
This article gives background and detail.
You can submit comments to the PUC by email. Here’s how.