Either the mayor is naive — or we should all be worried
By Tim Redmond
FEBRUARY 10, 2015 – Mayor Ed Lee said this afternoon that he supports CleanPowerSF and wants to get the project underway by the end of the year. But he also said he wants to “work with” Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and didn’t rule out partnering with the giant private utility.
“I think even PG&E knows that they need to be greener,” he told reporters after Question Time today. “If we encourage them to develop new products we can work together.”
That’s either alarming or naïve, depending how you look at it.
The point of CleanPowerSF, from the start, was to offer an alternative to PG&E. The utility has never come close to reaching even the state’s modest goals for renewable energy. More important, the greatest improvements in renewables may well come from what we call “behind the meter” generation – that is, individual solar projects on homes and businesses.
PG&E can’t and won’t support that kind of effort. You do enough small-scale distributed generation in San Francisco, and much of the revenue from PG&E’s largest and most profitable territory goes away. An investor-owned utility with management that has to keep stock prices up has to try to avoid that outcome with any tools possible.
A publicly owned utility has no such incentive.
CleanPowerSF could, if it’s developed properly, turn into a municipally owned electric generation (and eventually, distribution) system. That would be competition for PG&E.
In fact, as Marin and Sonoma are successfully demonstrating, there’s a chance that local clean-energy efforts could in the long term change the system of electricity sales in California, making the old legacy investor-owned utilities pretty close to obsolete.
So there’s no way PG&E will “work with” the city or do anything but try to undermine a real long-term plan for municipal power.
Unless, of course, the company wants to make sure that CleanPowerSF remains a very modest effort that doesn’t pose a threat to the utility monopoly. It might be that PG&E tries to sell power to CleanPowerSF; Lee didn’t rule that out.
He just said, in his Ed Lee way, that he has been talking to “all stakeholders” and that everone had a role to play in the new system.
I asked Sup. John Avalos about the mayor’s comments, and he told me that “CleanPowerSF as conceived of by the Board of Supervisors needs leadership independent of PG&E… I remain cautiously optimistic and my eyes are wide open to obstacles big and small.”
I also asked the mayor what the city can do to make sure that the owner of the building that burned at 22nd and Mission expedites rebuilding so that the displaced tenants can return to their rent-controlled apartments. “We are pursuing that with the owner in an aggressive way,” he said. He said he’s asked the Department of Building Inspection to fast-track permits to rebuild and that he’s asking landlords to help find homes for the displaced tenants, some of whom have been living in the building for almost 30 years and are paying way below-market rents.
I asked him if he would ask Airbnb to “share” some housing with the tenants. “We are talking to everyone,” he said.
But I haven’t heard the sharing-economy folks come through with an offer to, you know, share.
Outside the board meeting, a huge rally was taking place to raise awareness of violence against trans people. In the wake of a study showing that the LGBT community faces startling levels of violence in this supposedly tolerant city, and the killing of Taja DeJesus.
I’ve been to lots of rallies on the steps of City Hall for lots of causes, and this was one of the biggest I’ve seen in years. Hundreds of people. A die-in. Speakers in English and Spanish talking about the fear that so many trans people feel just walking around the streets.
David Campos called it a “crisis that we have to deal with,” and it is. And for a couple of hours, everyone who passed by or went into City Hall got the message.
