Community Choice Will Not stop At 51% Renewable -

One again, the Guardian is making a key faulty assumption on this issue.

Community Choice, just in its first phase, will build enough renewables and efficiency to get us to 51% clean, renewable electricity by 2017. However after 2017 the City will still continue building renewables and will eventually get to 100% clean renewable electricity.

Your assumption that renewables installations will somehow magically stop at 2017, as if solar installers will decide to put down their wrenches and no new technologies like improved wind, geothermal, wave power, and tidal power, will not be developed, is totally specious.

Furthermore, the planet does not have a choice. If every industrialized county on Earth does not reduce its carbon emissions to ZERO by 2030 this planet is in deep deep shit form -extremely- serious catastrophic failure of our entire global ecosystem - do you get it?

Our children will live in a literal hell if we don't completely eliminate fossil fuel power immediately, and that of course includes getting -completely- off of fossil fuel driven automobiles by 2030.

Any person with any sense in their head knows that such a task is like climbing mount Everest at its easiest.

And yet your paper continues to argue that we should build a new fossil fuel power plant that might run until 2040 and will set the -incredibly- bad example for the entire extremely endangered planet that it is ok to build fossil fuel power plants.

I don't know what the hell you people are smoking over at the Guardian, but I am glad I'm not smoking it. The planet can't afford such woefully distorted thinking.

Because this proposed fossil fuel power plant -is- such an incredibly ridiculous and dangerous idea, -every- major environmental group in San Francisco is opposing it, and we will win.

Read my lips.

San Francisco will not be building a new fossil fuel plant, ever. Because those of us that are watching the planet die all around us as fast as you can read these words, will make absolutely certain that such stupidity does not happen.

peace

Eric Brooks

Eric,

I know 51 percent is just the beginning, and nowhere in my blog does it say we're going to cap it there. That said, from where are we supposed to come up with difference as our renewable portfolio continues to grow? Is it fair to export our power plants into other communities or should we assume responsibility for the pollution we're creating by keeping it within our city limits?

Community Choice Designed To Continuously Increase Imported Renewables Over Existing Power Lines -

Community Choice was designed with this very dilemma in mind and will also require an aggressively evolving renewable portfolio which will apply to energy imports over power lines, in addition to building in city renewables and efficiency.

Your question is totally valid, and is one of the reasons I and others actually opposed the Transbay Cable as well, because it amounts to little more than transferring our pollution from our own Southeast neighborhoods over to Pittsburg, which isn't any better; -unless- as in Community Choice, specific requirements are placed on those imports and ramped up over time.

There is also a major renewable energy power cable being planned to run from Canada, through the Northwest and all the way into San Francisco, which would enable us to both import and export renewable energy.

This is the kind of forward thinking energy future we should be talking about, not building a fossil fuel power plant.

Pardon my vehemence in the previous post, but we are fighting for the future of the Earth here, and we are damned close to losing it; and I'm getting a bit tired and alarmed at opening the pages of the SF Guardian, a radical paper which I have known and loved for 15 years, and repeatedly and suddenly feeling like I have just phased into some dark universe Twilight Zone episode whenever I read a Guardian editorial about the peaker proposal.

We absolutely must get beyond fossil fuel based thinking, and we must do it now...

peace

Eric

So, both Cal-ISO and the SFPUC tell me San Francisco actually has two dominant peaking times, and one of them is when there isn't any sunshine available.

According to SFPUC staff:

"The City and County of San Francisco has two annually occurring peak electrical demand periods, summer and winter. The summer peak demand months are September through October. The San Francisco summer peak load is typically between the hours of 4:00-5:00 pm. The winter peak load is experienced in December, and occurs during the morning hours of 7:00-8:30 am, and evening 6:00-8:00 pm. These specific San Francisco peak load conditions were verified by PG&E May 6, 2008. These San Francisco load characteristics differ from much of the rest of the PG&E system, but are typical of a coastal California city."

And Cal-ISO's Gregg Fishman told me in an email, "The highest peaks probably still come in the summer on those rare off-shore flow weather days when SF can get into the 90s.

"But we can also see loads almost as high for the city in December when Christmas lights, streetlights, heating load (if its cold), and the fact that retail stores are open later for the holidays, all adds up. SF can see very high demand under those conditions — and when the peak is driven by lighting load — by definition that’s happening late enough in the evening so solar power won’t be producing."

Fishman added, "That’s not to say it isn’t a valuable resource — it is. It can offset the need to burn fossil fuels — but solar and wind are not necessarily there as 'peaking resources.'"

One can presume we'll be using transmission lines to truck in renewable power from distant places when we can't make it here -- perhaps on that "renewable power" transmission line from Canada you mentioned, Eric, which also happens to be a project of PG&E's, who's hoping for a 30 to 50 percent stake in the profits.

Regional Demand Is What Causes Blackouts, Not San Francisco's Individual Peak -

I've heard the analysis you posted from the SFPUC and there is a big hole in it.

Cal ISO's worst case scenario is based on the -incredibly- unlikely occurrence of the two biggest electrical capacity inputs to San Francisco going down at the same time.

Ask yourself - In history, when has an outage that serious happened?

The answer: When electricity demand becomes incredibly high over the entire regional grid, on extremely hot days, and it pulls so much power that there is not enough.

So the proper question is not - what would we need for reliability at San Francisco's highest peak when the two biggest sources go out - but instead - what will San Francisco's peak demand and peak inputs be when that big failure scenario actually happens because of -actual- increased demand from a heatwave wracked East Bay and Central Valley?

The answer is that there will be plenty of solar on a day like that. And the deeper answer is that we will not just be relying on solar by 2012, but instead on a carefully balanced mix of solar, efficiency, improved demand response, big wind, small wind, battery back-up, and co-generation facilities all interlinked together in a robust distributed generation network.

San Francisco simply does not need fossil fuel generation to meet such a demand moment.

Further, ask yourself when was the last time we had a region wide blackout -caused by excessive peak demand- at night? During Christmas? Spring even?

The answer? Only during 2001 when the power providers were -purposely- withholding electricity from the grid to game the system and gouge profits.

-Demand- based blackouts in California happen because of heat waves - when the sun is in high gear.

But here's the real kicker.. San Francisco's local grid security has no impact on when Cal ISO will call for rolling blackouts anyway. Rolling blackouts are called when the entire regional grid is in trouble, regardless of stability in any given city. San Francisco was included in such blackouts when both Mirant and Hunters point were -running-, when our grid security within the City was therefore supposedly perfectly solid by Cal ISO standards. Yet, we were still included in the blackouts because -California's- grid security was not sufficient. San Francisco's capacity-to-demand had nothing to do with it.

Final analysis:

The only way that we can prevent San Francisco from being subject to blackouts is to build such a strong, self sufficient mix of local efficiency, and diversified backed up distributed generation, that even if the Cal ISO calls blackouts, our grid stays on independently. One large central fossil fuel source is totally unnecessary to achieving that goal.

Eric

So Eric...you are against the Transbay Cable project then, yes? This high-voltage DC cable is designed to bring FOSSIL generated power into the City on a regular basis. In connects, litteraly, into Pittsburg Power Plants switching yard...where Mirant is now positioning itself to build a new combined cycle gas turbine along with PG&Es soon-to-go Gateway Power Plant in Antioch.

The idea that 400 MWs, 600 MWs or more can be met by renewables is simply a sad lie. There are not ANY plans to build this much, seriously, and cheaply, anywhere inside or outside San Francisco.

Need I remind you that the energy crisis of 2000/2001 was a crisis of "price". Speuclating pirate companies, of course, were behind this. But what got people up set was the very high prices utilities had to pay for wholesale power. We were able to get PG&E to eat most of that (causing it to go bankrupt in the process). But the idea that PV is going to get much beyond a few MWs in SF is a pipedream. We need 24 hours/ 7 days a week power and no wind or solar system *around here* is going to make up for the total load in the City.

Secondly, you have a very skewed way of looking at black outs. In fact, seveal of the major black outs in California, including the one during the Earthquake, it was in-city power generation that kept SF going...when the rest of the state went black. Even if SF get's it's own power company, as the Guardian has correctly advocated for decades, reliance on the grid is a must...we are, and will remain, totally integrated with it. As such we need sources of power to maintain both SF and the rest of the ISO jurisdiction. Unfortunatlly, a minimum of fossil will be required in SF to achieve this. But if it is owned by the City, either by building the peaker project, or the much cheaper way by getting Mirant to repower it's 3 peaker units and then take them over down the road, insures grid reliability.

Your plant is pie-in-sky at prices-even-higher.

David Walters