How Marin Can Dramatically Boost Renewable Energy And Save Money
In 2005, Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law Executive Order S-3-05 which sets a long term greenhouse gas emission reduction target of 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Reaching this ambitious target will require that California embark on a comprehensive strategy to make aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over the next four decades.
Nationwide, electricity generation is is the second largest contributor to greenhouse gases. It is incomprehensible how the 80% greenhouse gas reduction target could be reached without tremendous amounts of renewable energy and energy efficiency. I am not saying that greenhouse gas reductions and renewable energy are the same but they certainly are not apples and oranges. I’d say they are more like oranges and tangelos. If we want significant greenhouse gas emissions, we’re going to need to ramp up renewable energy and quick.
And nowhere better to start than Marin County - the richest county, in the richest region, in the richest state, in the richest country in the world. If Marin can’t transition to clean local renewable energy, how can we expect the rest of the nation much less the rest of the world to do so.
Fortunately, Marin Clean Energy has a plan called Community Choice Energy. MCE plans to form a Joint Powers Authority for cities and counties to pool the electricity dollars and take over the procurement of power as well as begin building local renewable energy capacity. Their Community Choice Energy plan calls for 50% renewable energy by 2014 and eventually 100% subject to operational and economic constraints. Continuing with the status quo, Marin is likely to get 30-60 MW of renewable energy or enough electricity for about 15-30k homes in the next 15 years. With Community Choice, Marin is likely to get 120-225 MW or enough electricity for 60-122k homes in the next 15 years. That’s 300% higher with Community Choice.
Recently, Supervisor Charles McGlashan spoke at press conference about MCE’s plan to dramatically boost renewable energy in the Marin:
We have an arduous journey ahead of us to make sure that we provide the accurate background and detailed information to our colleagues on every single city council in Marin County. If you may know the background, the Community Choice Aggregation law passed in ‘02 enables your local government to aggregate you into a completely new paradigm of managing and generating your electricity. And frankly one of the things that I like about the policy is that moves one of the core basic goods of our society - our energy production - back from corporate monopolies and buildings far far away into local backyard, our local board rooms, and our local communities. And that has a few very important benefits that i am personally very intrigued with. first of all it keeps a significant amount of revenue available for reinvestment in our own communities so that we can be paying our local green businesses to generate some of our local electricity in our own county. thats great for job creation, its good for low income job opportunities, for people who need jobs, its good for the electrical trades, and its a boost for a our local economy.
With that comes a more democratic process where community members themselves can talk to their local leaders and decide what kind of energy future do we really want. i think right now in the Rose Garden at the White House President Bush is offering another very tepid climate change initiative that might stop the rate of increase of greenhouse gases some time in the next quarter century. And one of the problems that we have at the local level is we keep waiting for national or state leadership that continues to fail to materialize.
So what Marin Clean Energy promises to do is bring back the community choice, the community direction of how we build our energy future together and brings that control to us locally. And some of the upsides, in addition to the job growth, include 350,000 tons a year of avoided CO2 emissions. There’s absolutely nothing we can do at the local level that is more compelling than that. Thats an overall 15-17% reduction in our CO2 emissions below 1990 levels. Theres nothing we can do next year that will come close to that potential.
Over the last five years, as supervisor Brown will mention, we have conducted very arduous homework on the risks and the bonds capabilities, the legal issues involved with forming this. And I am happy to say that the materials we are presenting to our city council colleagues have explored every single one of those risks. And frankly in my view those risks are lower than doing nothing. If we stay and do nothing, we could be subject to the wild fluctuations of natural gas prices, coal burning for electricity, and even the huge reinvestment in the nuclear power plant plants that others claim is green energy.
And so we’re girding for a very intense debate back and forth with a lot of misinformation and assertions made on the other side I believe, and I want to ask the public to do some very hard homework. We have a very detailed set of information for the city council members and their staffs. And nows the time to dig deep and do some very serious homework. In my view, this may be the most important public policy issue that we investigate in the entire decade. Its a huge potential leg up on local renewable power with local economic benefits. And have to now, sit down, get serious and do some very hard analysis to make sure this provides the promise that so far we think it does. Thank you very much.
Hear the audio.
See also the Local Clean Energy Alliance site for information on the Community Choice Energy effort in the East Bay.
Its time to tell the American people that they have been mesmerized by the ads to build totally impractical McMansions when they could push the architectural world to produce practical, geothermal/solar heated, fireproof! yes sweetheart, it’s possible! tornado/hurricane resistant, super-insulated, realistically, not stylishly sized, solar-electric powered, LED lighted, low running cost homes that would help cover the owner’s ass in hard times instead of pushing it into the fire. A small garden, composting unit, and greenhouses could be worthy accessories.
P.S. There should be special asylums for people who cannot live without the roar of multi-cylinder internal combustion engines. The rest of us will make do with Viagra and very fast electric cars charged by desert solar electric power installations feeding the existing grid.
One thing I’ve considered for a long time is that the housing industry in America has no regional competition and consumers / buyers have extremely limited choices. Part of the problem has been the way that, historically, all levels of government have been leveraged by developers and special interests in ways that actually interfere with progress. In the long run, we would all benefit from having homes that are better thought out ergonomically, more energy efficient and build on economies of scale so that people can afford such improvements in relation to what currently exists. Homes could be modular and engineering concepts from many disciplines integrated into their design such that they could be comfortable, safe, weather resilient, easy to maintain, extremely durable, and most important, energy efficient. One future trend that is obvious is that finite resources will become more valuable and therefore more expensive, especially in the context of population growth and therefore increased competition for those resources. We need to work on improved housing NOW while we still have relatively inexpensive liquid fossil fuels to ‘bootstrap’ ourselves into a sustainable economic approach, and into a 21st century that will be a hopeful and dream filled one, not one that becomes a story of self induced crises and economic dead ends. Don’t forget to take into account NET energy and resource usage when considering new investments. It’s certain however, that conservation and efficiency are the first steps to be taken toward sustainability. The time to begin is now!