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Jail PG&E Execs Say Protesters At PG&E Federal Criminal Indictment In San Francisco
No Nukes Action, Fukushima Response, United Public Workers For Action joined together at the Federal indictment hearing of PG&E for criminal penalties for the San Bruno gas explosion and deaths. They demanded the closure of PG&E nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon public control of the utilities and energy and criminal prosecution of PG&E executives and managers
Protesters had a press conference in front of the San Francisco Federal building where PG&E was being indicted with felony charges for the gas explosion and deaths in San Bruno. The US attorney is refusing to personally prosecute PG&E corporate executives for their criminal negligence.
The protesters also called for the closure of the Diablo Valley nuclear plant run by PG&E, the public control of our utilities and energy and for the jailing of PG&E executives. These managers and executives have also retaliated against workers who expose health and safety problems and have been getting away with it.
The proposed fines would likely only be paid by the ratepayers and not the executives of PG&E.
PG&E Whistleblower Fingers Diablo Safety Dangers
http://www.slocoastjournal.com/docs/archives/2011/june/pages/fourth_estate/whistleblower396.html
Writer's Name Withheld
I am a resident of San Luis Obispo County, and an employee of Diablo Canyon (DCPP).
I understand that a good many people are very concerned about DCPP after what happened to the plant in Japan. I field questions about our plant almost every day, from neighbors and family members.
Being aware of both the plant design and conditions at the Fukushima plant and DCPP, I am not worried about a similar disaster here. I could go into the specific reasons why I do not believe such a threat is credible, but that is not why I am writing to you.
I do believe DCPP is a threat to our community, but it is not because of the plant's design, or a potential natural disaster. I believe the principle threat is the company that runs the plant, PG&E.
For the past 10 years, I have watched as PG&E upper management gives lip service to safety. In fact, it is our stated number one priority. However, what we say and what we do are radically different. DCPP management routinely breaks a myriad of laws, both federal and state, in an effort to reduce operating costs. Most of the violations are related to labor laws and OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) regulations.
In fact, DCPP recently received three Cal/OSHA violations for unsafe conditions. What makes this unusual is not that we got cited, but that the conditions that caused the citations were identified by workers BEFORE Cal/OSHA became involved as dangerous and illegal. Workers brought this to management, and were rebuffed. This is the typical response to both safety and labor law violations, the company ignores the conditions, and only changes course when forced to do so by law enforcement entities. Does this sound like the actions of management guided by "conservative decision making?"
Most recently, our lab shut off all the emergency showers and eye wash stations for maintenance. While this is not noteworthy, what is noteworthy is that fact that management ordered work in the lab to continue as usual, without taking any precautions in case of an industrial accident. When workers protested the situation, management responded by temporarily hooking up the emergency showers to the hot water supply. If anyone had used the showers in an accident, they would have been burned by 150-degree water. This fact was apparently not made known to the workers in the lab, and when an operations employee found out and tried to stop the work in progress, management overrode the concerns and ordered work in the lab to continue. This is only one example of the "safety culture" that is in effect at the plant.
I have pasted in the contents of an email from one of the operations employees involved. I have not included his name because I did not get permission to use it. This email was sent to Chris Johns and John Conway (of PG&E), and I can guarantee there will be no response.
Mr. Johns,
It is with much regret I have filed yet another complaint with CAL OSHA for blatant safety violations in the workplace.
It does not matter if we raise valid Confined Space concerns, Electrical safety concerns, eyewash and shower concerns, safety at heights concerns, and every one of them having been validated, the company does not see the programmatic problems in the safety at DCPP.
On Friday, April 22, 2011, workers were working in the Primary Laboratory at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant as directed by management with Emergency shower deluge and eyewash stations out of service.
Management had provided an inadequate temporary shower installed and hooked up directly to the hot water system supplied by 153 deg. water supplied by the plants industrial hot water heater.
What makes the incident most egregious to the workforce is for the Primary Laboratory it is a repeat offense. (last time they had no shower or eyewash.) even after again being warned.
DCPP has received three Cal OSHA Citations--two Serious with Fines for similar issues in the last 6 months and yet work continues at the plant unabated, over the written and verbal objections of the workforce.
One week has passed since the incident and to the workforce, management has pretty much dismissed the event, not even instituting interim measures to ensure it does not happen again. The summary investigation has been concluded without talking to key personnel actually involved in the issue.
When a worker who has worked for this company for 23 years cannot shutdown a blatantly unsafe job, where workers are in immediate risk, providing color photographs, copies in hand of corporate policies and CAL/OSHA regulations being violated and workers are directed to continue working, there is something wrong.
When the workforce has sent a signed petition to Darbee two months ago, by over half of the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) represented, Operations workforce in the plant stating they believe their management is acting immorally and unethically with no response, something is wrong.
When the Premier survey continues to decline, with no action plan in place to reverse the trend, something is wrong.
What happened to the company I used to work for?
Production continues to trump safety.
With much regret,
(name withheld),
23 years at PG&E
Do these sound like the actions of a management team you would trust with the responsibility of a nuclear power plant? The "Premier Survey" referenced in the employee's email is a survey that has been done at least three times in the past two years, and it consistently shows that our workforce overwhelmingly does not trust our management.
If the employees don't trust the management, why would the public?
I do believe it is possible to have safe nuclear power, but not with the current management culture of production at the expense of safety.
I would like to remain anonymous, as I have been the target of harassment in the past for bringing up safety concerns.
PG&E whistle-blower's sorry saga
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/PG-E-whistle-blower-s-sorry-saga-3054197.php
SCOTT WINOKUR, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, July 11, 2000
THE heating in my house died on a morning so raw and foggy you'd have thought it was December. The same day, I was at San Francisco's Public Utilities
Commission when an official spoke of brownouts rolling down from the Northwest.
It seemed as if the energy grid was giving up the ghost. I was a happy guy.
I like rusticity and fear technology to the point that I'm not even comfortable with household electrical current. Nickel-cadmium batteries, cell phones and microwave ovens strike me as the devil's work. Anything atomic gives me an anxiety attack.
Near San Luis Obispo, many miles to the south, stands the controversial PG&E nuclear-powered plant called Diablo Canyon. Look at this domed two-unit structure the wrong way, utility critics warn, and it might go nuclear, like a mad monster of Greek myth.
PG&E swears it's safe, despite documented problems. But the bottom line for me is the fact that if Diablo Canyon blows up, melts down or goes sideways, it could be the equivalent of a homicidal next-door neighbor, fallout-wise. Chernobyl comes to mind.
PG&E whistle-blower Neil J. Aiken of Santa Maria is my current hero. For years, Aiken, a licensed senior reactor operator and onetime shift foreman, has battled with his former employer over safety issues. He says the company's bosses put profits first.
A prime example of this unholy tradeoff, Aiken claimed in a recent interview, are the plant's circuit breakers, about 200 sofa-sized contraptions he said assist in delivering emergency power and some operating power to safety-related equipment.
PG&E replaced original General Electric units with cheaper-to-maintain foreign equipment. According to Aiken, the new units are more likely to malfunction in an earthquake or accident.
"You could have multiple failures you wouldn't have experienced with the other circuit breakers," he warned.
So convinced is Aiken of the threat, he attended a shareholders' meeting in 1998 attempting to provide a written account of his concerns. Aiken's report, "Going Critical," which he was blocked from distributing, described a number of potentially grave technical problems and contained some sweeping pronouncements.
It accused the utility of "moral mismanagement" and a reliance on "defective equipment."
PG&E has had a simple, unequivocal response all along. It says Aiken is paranoid - clinically psychotic. It went so far as to hire a psychiatrist who declared the man mentally ill.
Greg Rueger, the utility's top nuclear officer, reaffirmed that position Monday, issuing a statement in which he reminded me that Aiken - who had been "a well-respected . . . employee" - had fared poorly on PG&E's government-mandated "fitness for duty" program.
Aiken was placed on leave - PG&E's kinder, gentler version of the gulag. His career was over. This is what they did to thought criminals in the Soviet Union.
"It floored me," Aiken said. "It's amazing the kind of pressure a corporation can put on you."
Where was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Off somewhere inking its rubber-stamp pad. It is the NRC, of course, that regulates nuclear power in the states, not agencies like the San Francisco or California public utilities commissions.
An NRC investigation, the agency reported May 19, concluded that PG&E's decision to crucify Aiken was "not motivated by retaliation for his having raised concerns." This came after the NRC had upheld more than a third of the over 50 alleged safety violations reported by Aiken.
But the federal government has many voices and the Labor Department also weighed in. Unlike the NRC, it isn't in bed with the people it regulates.
In December, the department ruled that Aiken had been mistreated. The utility had smeared him with "biased and incomplete evidence," it said.
He was entitled to $116,000 in back pay, legal bills and damages. PG&E appealed, then fired Aiken.
But the whistle-blower wasn't whipped. All the while, his 1999 lawsuit in San Francisco for wrongful termination and civil-rights violations was wending its way through court.
Aiken had sued here for two principal reasons, said his attorney, Robert Seldon of Washington, D.C.'s Project on Liberty and the Workplace: San Francisco is PG&E's hometown, and local courts are believed more likely to treat whistle-blowers kindly.
After fighting for months, PG&E backed down, agreeing to a secret settlement. It wrote a check intended to shut Aiken's mouth - a big check, I suspect, because it allowed him to retire at 55.
Aiken says he's history now.
"Don't emphasize what was done to me," he asked. "At this point, it's about current and future employees.
"There's a moral dilemma. If you have an employee who dares to hold them accountable, there's no protection. So people are reluctant to speak up."
Not all, fortunately.
PG&E: Corporate Structure & History
http://www.energy-net.org/1NWO/PGE/1PGE.HTM
Pacific Gas & Electric Company's Executive Summary:
A review of a shameful history
PG&E isn't your average utility company. Up until the mid 1990's it had been the largest privately owned electric utility company in the U.S. with over 4 million customers, covering 2/3rds of California. The company has played a major role in shaping California and its political climate during the 20th century.
Electricity and its development has been the single most important political and technological event in american history. The incorporated version of how the electrification of society should proceed is at the heart of a culture gone awry with its misuse of power.
One hundred years ago, at the dawn of the electrical revolution, the Southern Pacific Railroad company's big four, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford and Colis Huntington had a complete monopoly on the politics and economy of California. They owned the banks, judges, politicians and transportation system of the state. They also held deeds to 1/5 of its arable land.
The Southern Pacific Crowd joined forces with J.P. Morgan and European financiers who were using vast amounts of royalist money to build up and take financial control of America's corporations. This unholy alliance of royalist influence over command and control of corporate structure was also behind the creation of PG&E and its primary roll model, the english controlled General Electric company, which is the largest company in the world today.
This gigantic company hitched its values and vision to the monopolistic agenda of the Southern Pacific Railroad Robber Barrons of the 19th century. These men turned one of the most beautiful places on earth into a haven for huge corporations that have trapped humans into a deadly treadmill of economic servitude.
PG&E and America's privately own electric power industry have been given a very special historical relationship. This is the only industry in America that has been given the right to be a regional monopoly. This historic right is imbedded at the heart of the longest, bitterest ideological battle in American history. The super elite power brokers that own this country had also owned the country's water distribution system at the turn of the century, but lost it when the progressive movement municipalized this indespensible utiity. The battle to do the same thing with electricity and phones also failed.
PG&E's version of the American Dream is to use their wealth and power to dominate the focus and direction of our culture. On page 327 of PG&E's own 1952 biography, they label competition as "destructive". You can be assured that they are talking about anyone or any political movement that might get in the company's century old monopoly over electric power in California.
Most of the documentation here covering PG&E is based upon the barely known historical fact that California was conquered by corporate activists that have ruled this state like no other. The fact that only 4 democrats have ever been elected as governor in its 150 year history, even though they have made up the vast majority of its voters for the last 70 years is a testiment to the economic power that has been wielded here.
Since the death of the original big four (Crocker, Huntington, Hopkins and Stanford) a century ago, the corporate criminals that brutally took this state have gone onto institutionalize their style to the point that elitist corporate values are now considered the norm rather than the perversion they truly are. The California Dream is a state of mind where its citizens have been fed only a portion of the state's corporate controlled history. The part that plays down the huge scandals and poltical war that has been waged upon its workers and average people.
This document opens up a small glimpse into the despicable actions of the Pacific Crowd (Southern Pacific, Pacific Bell and PG&E). focussing on PG&E and how their greedy agenda has shaped this state.
The New Era
But at the dawn of the new millenium their shared plan to escape regulatory "hell" has gone up in flames. After taking over $5 billion in assets out of the state, using the money to buy into the New England electric market, what was left of PG&E in California declared bankruptcy as a result of Enron attempt to take over the state's power market. The shared plan, is the strategic globalization plan that has been pushing government deregulation at the same time the World Trade Organization has been setting up its version of George Bush's New World Order.
PG&E's corporate history, from the moment of its birth up to the present, has been linked to its willingness to do just about anything to protect its self perceived business interests. What made this dispicable agenda possible is the fact that San Francisco was ruled by brutal men whose drive for wealth and power was the only game in town from the 1850's right up to PG&E's formation in 1905.
Much as the 1960's was a reaction to war and cultural stagnancy, the progressive era from 1900 to 1930 was a reaction to the brutal robber barrons that ran California and the country. Decent people here in California could no longer stand idly by as Southern Pacific's Big four and their cronies were creating their own version of a royalist super elite empire.
The very schemers that created PG&E became the centerpiece of change as San Francisco squared off around PG&E's employee Abe Ruef and the rest of the corrupt Southern Pacific crowd. Boss Ruef was put on trial as were hundreds of Pacific insiders after, the just formed, company's gas mains burned 20,000 city blocks down on April 18th 1906. Ruef was the only person to serve time while the rest of SP elite were able to escape prosecution due to its political and economic control over the state and San Francisco.
The creation of PG&E was organized by SP's Crocker family with the intent of taking over the 50 year old San Francisco Gas & Electric Company. California Gas & Electric (CG&E) was formed in 1901 as a consolidation of Crocker and SP utilities from Sacramento to San Jose, with the intent of getting control of the huge San Francisco electric market by swallowing up SFG&E. In just under 4 years this was completed as CG&E took over SFG&E in the fall of 1905, with the new entity to be called PG&E. At the same time PG&E's lawyer Boss Ruef was bribing the S.F. Board of Supervisors around of the cities street light contract. PG&E's newly aquired gas run street lights then proceeded to burn down 20,000 city blocks a couple of months later when the Great `06 quake hit.
What a wonderful start for such a bunch of monsters!
The company's intimate corporate agenda has made the financial empire behind the men at PG&E one of the most brutal around. Its direct ties to the old Southern Pacific empire gave the company its guiding values for its role in California.
In 1937, a depression era congressional investigative committee called the TNEC incorrectly placed control of both Southern California Edison and PG&E in the hands of SP's Crocker Family. They weren't far off. The Crockers did carry out a major role in its formation, but there are much bigger fish that had quietly taken up position in California in 1900.
At the time, the original big 4 of Southern Pacific, that had built the western half of the first transcontinental railroad, taken control of 20% of the states' land, had a complete monopoly of all land and water transportation to California, ruled California's state government and held control of most of the state's financial resources, was dying of old age. The Rockefellers and Morgan empires were eager to come in and take on the financial underwear of the SP and did, when Collis P. Huntington, the last of the SP's big four died in 1900.
As Edward Harriman completed the purchase of SP in 1902, another New Yorker, named NW Halsey initiated the process that led to the formation of PG&E in 1906. By 1916, National City Company was firmly in the driver seat of PG&E. Today National is known as CitiCorp. National had been known as one of John D. Rockefeller's bank. But Teddy Roosevelt had forced John to get rid of the bank, which he gave to his brother, who just happened to be tight buddies with J.P. Morgan.
National went onto to be the star financial front via a series of economic structures set up by Morgan that by 1930 had control over 50% of all electric utility investments in the U.S.
The battle for the heart and soul of California will be set aside for the moment, to briefly describe some of the wonderful civic achievments of PG&E and its honorable men of power.
Here's a list of some of the known scandals:
Abe Ruef Scandal Timeline
SF labor leader Tom Mooney fingered by PG&E Pinkerton
Organized the Greater California League, spending $500,000 in 1922 to kill statewide initiative drive to municipalize utilities.
coalition leader on changing the history in school text books to protect how American's percieved their role in electric power development
The Takeover of Hetch Hetchy Timeline
led the push in reducing the scale of the Central Valley Project,now part of Western Area Power Administration.
The utility gained its huge size by taking over locally owned power companies from Santa Barbara in the South to Eureka in the north.
The agressive takeover of Friant and Shasta dam electricity that had been destined for rural coops in northern california
The coalition leader in developing nuclear power in U.S.
Holds the distinction of being the focus of the first anti-nuclear movement in history, starting in 1958 when they tried to push through 4 nuclear reactors on the epicenter of the 1906 earthquake at Bodeaga Bay.
Its 2nd reactor complex at Humbolt bay was dubbed the dirtiest nuclear reactor in the U.S. and shut down in the late 70's when plutonium was found on children's playground a mile away.
Bribed the Sierra club into allowing the siting of Diablo Canyon at the 2nd to last coastal wilderness in California. The scandal led to David Brower leaving the Sierra Club and forming Friends of the Earth.
Pushed to build over 60 nuclear reactors in its service area. But ended up taking on over 20 years of opposition to its push to build reactors all over the state.
Opposed lifeline electric rates in the state, but failed.
Attempted to take the very law it had helped to pass a few years earlier that limited its ability to construct new reactors in the state, all the way to the U.S. Supreme court, but failed.
Caught in PCB transformer scandals that contaminated a city building and its own workers.
Designed and built the Helms Stored River project, that went nearly 10x's over original budget and killed a score of workers.
Forced to rebuild the Diablo Canyon reactors 3 times, running the cost up from $300 million to $5.8 billion.
A newly hired engineer discovers that PG&E had built the seismic supports for the reactors backwards, just after the Abalone Alliance had completed the largest civil disobedience action in U.S. history.
PG&E is part of a national coalition to permanently privatize a 1920 agreement that would allow municipally owned utilities to bid on over 400 dams nationwide when their 50 operating license came up. The successful campaign ended up giving PGE and SoCalEd over 60 dams here in California.
Ronald Reagan secretly orders the EPA to give the financial strapped utility $2.7 billion to help PG&E finish Diablo Canyon.
The Diablo Canyon operation was allowed to go ahead by Judge Robert Bork. He was famous for being the Nixon's saturday night massacre lawyer that fired the Watergate prosecutor.
Literally every environmental law on the book was waived to allow PG&E to obtain its 2 billion gallon dumping permit into the ocean. The state's regional quality control board refused to allow them to dump water, but was overturned by the state.
The reactors were built near the Hosgri faultline that destroyed Santa Barbara in a 1927 earthquake.
The first time the reactors were turned on, 14,000 Abalone in Diablo Bay were killed. The cove was also home to a sacred Chumash burial area and was the home of the worlds largest oak trees.
In the late 1990's it was disclosed that PG&E had covered up the extent of damages to the coast and Abalone, and was given a $14 million fine. The fine was later reversed.
The company spent $110 million in legal fees to win the Diablo Canyon rate case. The state, which had promised that it would force the utility to eat at least $2 billion of the construction costs settled a deal that gave away the whole house, setting up a $54 billion 30 contract for PG&E.
The 1989 rate settlement led to the steepest rate increases in the country, driving electric costs from 8 cents a kwh to over 14 cents by 1994.
This huge increase led to the revolt of big electric users, that in turn caused the disasterous Wilson deregulation plan.
PG&E was a coalition partner in destroying the grassroots based alternative energy movement in the state that was culminated in their FERC appeal that killed PURPA contracts in the state in 1994.
PG&E took the national lead in the mid 80's, with their U.S. Supreme Court case that killed Citizen Utility Board's across the country. The Nader inspired CUB's had succesfully gained access to PG&E's electric bill here when the CPUC allowed TURN to do inserts.
PG&E's was part of a coalition of California corporations that sponsored the Pacific Legal Foundation and its SLAP suit against the Abalone Alliance that put it out of existance.
PG&E was part of the inside coaliton of organizers, with the help of Palo Based EPRI, in the national agenda to deregulate the electric industry.
The San Diego team of Steve Peace and Governor Wilson led the team plan to give the state's utilities the disasterous deregulation mess. It included a $28 billion bonus to cover all the construction costs of Diablo Canyon and SoCal Eds' SONGS reactors.
Check out the Julia Roberts movie for more scandals that contaminated over 1,000 workers with Chromium contamination
Oh, yes and its spent large amounts of money many many times to defeat public power initiatives in San Francisco and elsewhere
http://www.energy-net.org/1NWO/PGE/1PGE.HTM
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§Daly City Site Draws Anger of Neighbors / Tainted soil being exposed by PG&E , they say
by repost
Sunday Oct 31st, 2010 6:01 AM
Daly City Site Draws Anger of Neighbors / Tainted soil being exposed, they say
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/05/MN79031.DTL
Daly City Site Draws Anger of Neighbors
Tainted soil being exposed, they say
Angelica Pence, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 5, 0
Daly City housing project residents say exposed soil is tainted.
Studies find new test for cervical cancer beats pap smear.
Call for blood donations called "very critical."
Study finds possible genetic cause for high lung cancer risk in women.
Old bull cells found not too old to clone.
(10-19) 04:00 PDT DALY CITY -- Irate residents of a Daly City housing project led a demonstration yesterday to protest nearby construction that they say is the latest example of decades of economic and environmental racism.
More than two dozen people representing Midway Village held up signs and blocked the entrance to a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. construction site during a morning rain. The power company is overturning contaminated soil, which many residents hold responsible for a slew of health problems suffered by the project's 150 low- income families.
Some of the dirt and groundwater being dug up is known to contain the carcinogen polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, or PNAs. Protesters say the pollutant is also buried beneath residents' homes and in nearby Bayshore Park, giving Midway Village residents tumors, breathing problems, bloody noses, rashes and other illnesses.
Lula Bishop, whose home sits only about 10 feet away from the construction site, woke up with feelings of nausea yesterday morning after breathing fumes she said have come from the site since workers began excavation.
``We're in a medical emergency,'' said Bishop, who has lived in Midway Village since 1977. ``Our kids are getting sick. They have rashes our doctors can't explain. We suffer from cancers. Something has to be done.''
The county built the housing complex in 1976 on a parcel of land that included the site of a former PG&E plant, which had deposited coal tar and soot into the soil before closing in 1913. PG&E found the waste in 1980 and a decade later notified county officials that the soil near Midway Village was polluted with suspected carcinogens.
The residents' most recent lawsuit against the San Mateo County Housing Authority and PG&E was dismissed in 1997 after a judge ruled that the residents failed to link the chemical exposure to their maladies.
John Martin, Daly City manager, said more than $160,000 has been spent on safety measures to prevent Midway Village residents from coming into contact with the chemicals during the project, which is to enlarge an outdated storm drainage system.
The state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) is overseeing the cleanup of contaminated soil, according to the department's project manager, Alfred Wanger.
Workers are watering down the work site and covering it with tarps and metal plates at the end of the workday, Wanger said, as well as monitoring the air quality to make sure any contaminated particles in the soil do not become airborne. At Bayshore Park, a 10-foot fence was also erected to keep people from getting too close to the excavation.
The project, which got under way in mid-October, was originally to be completed in three to four weeks, Wanger said. The agency has been forced to push back the completion date in part because of the continuing protests, he said, noting that pickets have blocked trucks sent in to haul away the toxic soil.
State officials also offered to temporarily relocate residents who live directly adjacent to the construction site. But of 16 families eligible for the transfer, only two volunteered to move, said Otis Jackson, spokesman for the department, which is under the California Environmental Protection Agency.
Some Midway Village residents said the offer was too little, too late. For years now, they have been seeking compensation for their ailments and are asking to be permanently moved from the area. They also want any medical expenses incurred as a result of the toxic soil paid for by those responsible.
Demonstrators hope the protest -- the seventh such action in the past few weeks -- will keep the spotlight on the residents' drawn- out battle with PG&E and the county Housing Authority over the soil.
Officials have shown ``a callous disregard for the health and well- being of those who live here,'' said Bradley Angel, spokesman for Greenaction, a health and environmental justice group.
Midway Village residents ``are prisoners of their low-income status,'' he said. ``If this were a rich, white community, do you think they'd be forced to live on toxic soil for generations?''
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...
The protesters also called for the closure of the Diablo Valley nuclear plant run by PG&E, the public control of our utilities and energy and for the jailing of PG&E executives. These managers and executives have also retaliated against workers who expose health and safety problems and have been getting away with it.
The proposed fines would likely only be paid by the ratepayers and not the executives of PG&E.
PG&E Whistleblower Fingers Diablo Safety Dangers
http://www.slocoastjournal.com/docs/archives/2011/june/pages/fourth_estate/whistleblower396.html
Writer's Name Withheld
I am a resident of San Luis Obispo County, and an employee of Diablo Canyon (DCPP).
I understand that a good many people are very concerned about DCPP after what happened to the plant in Japan. I field questions about our plant almost every day, from neighbors and family members.
Being aware of both the plant design and conditions at the Fukushima plant and DCPP, I am not worried about a similar disaster here. I could go into the specific reasons why I do not believe such a threat is credible, but that is not why I am writing to you.
I do believe DCPP is a threat to our community, but it is not because of the plant's design, or a potential natural disaster. I believe the principle threat is the company that runs the plant, PG&E.
For the past 10 years, I have watched as PG&E upper management gives lip service to safety. In fact, it is our stated number one priority. However, what we say and what we do are radically different. DCPP management routinely breaks a myriad of laws, both federal and state, in an effort to reduce operating costs. Most of the violations are related to labor laws and OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) regulations.
In fact, DCPP recently received three Cal/OSHA violations for unsafe conditions. What makes this unusual is not that we got cited, but that the conditions that caused the citations were identified by workers BEFORE Cal/OSHA became involved as dangerous and illegal. Workers brought this to management, and were rebuffed. This is the typical response to both safety and labor law violations, the company ignores the conditions, and only changes course when forced to do so by law enforcement entities. Does this sound like the actions of management guided by "conservative decision making?"
Most recently, our lab shut off all the emergency showers and eye wash stations for maintenance. While this is not noteworthy, what is noteworthy is that fact that management ordered work in the lab to continue as usual, without taking any precautions in case of an industrial accident. When workers protested the situation, management responded by temporarily hooking up the emergency showers to the hot water supply. If anyone had used the showers in an accident, they would have been burned by 150-degree water. This fact was apparently not made known to the workers in the lab, and when an operations employee found out and tried to stop the work in progress, management overrode the concerns and ordered work in the lab to continue. This is only one example of the "safety culture" that is in effect at the plant.
I have pasted in the contents of an email from one of the operations employees involved. I have not included his name because I did not get permission to use it. This email was sent to Chris Johns and John Conway (of PG&E), and I can guarantee there will be no response.
Mr. Johns,
It is with much regret I have filed yet another complaint with CAL OSHA for blatant safety violations in the workplace.
It does not matter if we raise valid Confined Space concerns, Electrical safety concerns, eyewash and shower concerns, safety at heights concerns, and every one of them having been validated, the company does not see the programmatic problems in the safety at DCPP.
On Friday, April 22, 2011, workers were working in the Primary Laboratory at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant as directed by management with Emergency shower deluge and eyewash stations out of service.
Management had provided an inadequate temporary shower installed and hooked up directly to the hot water system supplied by 153 deg. water supplied by the plants industrial hot water heater.
What makes the incident most egregious to the workforce is for the Primary Laboratory it is a repeat offense. (last time they had no shower or eyewash.) even after again being warned.
DCPP has received three Cal OSHA Citations--two Serious with Fines for similar issues in the last 6 months and yet work continues at the plant unabated, over the written and verbal objections of the workforce.
One week has passed since the incident and to the workforce, management has pretty much dismissed the event, not even instituting interim measures to ensure it does not happen again. The summary investigation has been concluded without talking to key personnel actually involved in the issue.
When a worker who has worked for this company for 23 years cannot shutdown a blatantly unsafe job, where workers are in immediate risk, providing color photographs, copies in hand of corporate policies and CAL/OSHA regulations being violated and workers are directed to continue working, there is something wrong.
When the workforce has sent a signed petition to Darbee two months ago, by over half of the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) represented, Operations workforce in the plant stating they believe their management is acting immorally and unethically with no response, something is wrong.
When the Premier survey continues to decline, with no action plan in place to reverse the trend, something is wrong.
What happened to the company I used to work for?
Production continues to trump safety.
With much regret,
(name withheld),
23 years at PG&E
Do these sound like the actions of a management team you would trust with the responsibility of a nuclear power plant? The "Premier Survey" referenced in the employee's email is a survey that has been done at least three times in the past two years, and it consistently shows that our workforce overwhelmingly does not trust our management.
If the employees don't trust the management, why would the public?
I do believe it is possible to have safe nuclear power, but not with the current management culture of production at the expense of safety.
I would like to remain anonymous, as I have been the target of harassment in the past for bringing up safety concerns.
PG&E whistle-blower's sorry saga
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/PG-E-whistle-blower-s-sorry-saga-3054197.php
SCOTT WINOKUR, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, July 11, 2000
THE heating in my house died on a morning so raw and foggy you'd have thought it was December. The same day, I was at San Francisco's Public Utilities
Commission when an official spoke of brownouts rolling down from the Northwest.
It seemed as if the energy grid was giving up the ghost. I was a happy guy.
I like rusticity and fear technology to the point that I'm not even comfortable with household electrical current. Nickel-cadmium batteries, cell phones and microwave ovens strike me as the devil's work. Anything atomic gives me an anxiety attack.
Near San Luis Obispo, many miles to the south, stands the controversial PG&E nuclear-powered plant called Diablo Canyon. Look at this domed two-unit structure the wrong way, utility critics warn, and it might go nuclear, like a mad monster of Greek myth.
PG&E swears it's safe, despite documented problems. But the bottom line for me is the fact that if Diablo Canyon blows up, melts down or goes sideways, it could be the equivalent of a homicidal next-door neighbor, fallout-wise. Chernobyl comes to mind.
PG&E whistle-blower Neil J. Aiken of Santa Maria is my current hero. For years, Aiken, a licensed senior reactor operator and onetime shift foreman, has battled with his former employer over safety issues. He says the company's bosses put profits first.
A prime example of this unholy tradeoff, Aiken claimed in a recent interview, are the plant's circuit breakers, about 200 sofa-sized contraptions he said assist in delivering emergency power and some operating power to safety-related equipment.
PG&E replaced original General Electric units with cheaper-to-maintain foreign equipment. According to Aiken, the new units are more likely to malfunction in an earthquake or accident.
"You could have multiple failures you wouldn't have experienced with the other circuit breakers," he warned.
So convinced is Aiken of the threat, he attended a shareholders' meeting in 1998 attempting to provide a written account of his concerns. Aiken's report, "Going Critical," which he was blocked from distributing, described a number of potentially grave technical problems and contained some sweeping pronouncements.
It accused the utility of "moral mismanagement" and a reliance on "defective equipment."
PG&E has had a simple, unequivocal response all along. It says Aiken is paranoid - clinically psychotic. It went so far as to hire a psychiatrist who declared the man mentally ill.
Greg Rueger, the utility's top nuclear officer, reaffirmed that position Monday, issuing a statement in which he reminded me that Aiken - who had been "a well-respected . . . employee" - had fared poorly on PG&E's government-mandated "fitness for duty" program.
Aiken was placed on leave - PG&E's kinder, gentler version of the gulag. His career was over. This is what they did to thought criminals in the Soviet Union.
"It floored me," Aiken said. "It's amazing the kind of pressure a corporation can put on you."
Where was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Off somewhere inking its rubber-stamp pad. It is the NRC, of course, that regulates nuclear power in the states, not agencies like the San Francisco or California public utilities commissions.
An NRC investigation, the agency reported May 19, concluded that PG&E's decision to crucify Aiken was "not motivated by retaliation for his having raised concerns." This came after the NRC had upheld more than a third of the over 50 alleged safety violations reported by Aiken.
But the federal government has many voices and the Labor Department also weighed in. Unlike the NRC, it isn't in bed with the people it regulates.
In December, the department ruled that Aiken had been mistreated. The utility had smeared him with "biased and incomplete evidence," it said.
He was entitled to $116,000 in back pay, legal bills and damages. PG&E appealed, then fired Aiken.
But the whistle-blower wasn't whipped. All the while, his 1999 lawsuit in San Francisco for wrongful termination and civil-rights violations was wending its way through court.
Aiken had sued here for two principal reasons, said his attorney, Robert Seldon of Washington, D.C.'s Project on Liberty and the Workplace: San Francisco is PG&E's hometown, and local courts are believed more likely to treat whistle-blowers kindly.
After fighting for months, PG&E backed down, agreeing to a secret settlement. It wrote a check intended to shut Aiken's mouth - a big check, I suspect, because it allowed him to retire at 55.
Aiken says he's history now.
"Don't emphasize what was done to me," he asked. "At this point, it's about current and future employees.
"There's a moral dilemma. If you have an employee who dares to hold them accountable, there's no protection. So people are reluctant to speak up."
Not all, fortunately.
PG&E: Corporate Structure & History
http://www.energy-net.org/1NWO/PGE/1PGE.HTM
Pacific Gas & Electric Company's Executive Summary:
A review of a shameful history
PG&E isn't your average utility company. Up until the mid 1990's it had been the largest privately owned electric utility company in the U.S. with over 4 million customers, covering 2/3rds of California. The company has played a major role in shaping California and its political climate during the 20th century.
Electricity and its development has been the single most important political and technological event in american history. The incorporated version of how the electrification of society should proceed is at the heart of a culture gone awry with its misuse of power.
One hundred years ago, at the dawn of the electrical revolution, the Southern Pacific Railroad company's big four, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford and Colis Huntington had a complete monopoly on the politics and economy of California. They owned the banks, judges, politicians and transportation system of the state. They also held deeds to 1/5 of its arable land.
The Southern Pacific Crowd joined forces with J.P. Morgan and European financiers who were using vast amounts of royalist money to build up and take financial control of America's corporations. This unholy alliance of royalist influence over command and control of corporate structure was also behind the creation of PG&E and its primary roll model, the english controlled General Electric company, which is the largest company in the world today.
This gigantic company hitched its values and vision to the monopolistic agenda of the Southern Pacific Railroad Robber Barrons of the 19th century. These men turned one of the most beautiful places on earth into a haven for huge corporations that have trapped humans into a deadly treadmill of economic servitude.
PG&E and America's privately own electric power industry have been given a very special historical relationship. This is the only industry in America that has been given the right to be a regional monopoly. This historic right is imbedded at the heart of the longest, bitterest ideological battle in American history. The super elite power brokers that own this country had also owned the country's water distribution system at the turn of the century, but lost it when the progressive movement municipalized this indespensible utiity. The battle to do the same thing with electricity and phones also failed.
PG&E's version of the American Dream is to use their wealth and power to dominate the focus and direction of our culture. On page 327 of PG&E's own 1952 biography, they label competition as "destructive". You can be assured that they are talking about anyone or any political movement that might get in the company's century old monopoly over electric power in California.
Most of the documentation here covering PG&E is based upon the barely known historical fact that California was conquered by corporate activists that have ruled this state like no other. The fact that only 4 democrats have ever been elected as governor in its 150 year history, even though they have made up the vast majority of its voters for the last 70 years is a testiment to the economic power that has been wielded here.
Since the death of the original big four (Crocker, Huntington, Hopkins and Stanford) a century ago, the corporate criminals that brutally took this state have gone onto institutionalize their style to the point that elitist corporate values are now considered the norm rather than the perversion they truly are. The California Dream is a state of mind where its citizens have been fed only a portion of the state's corporate controlled history. The part that plays down the huge scandals and poltical war that has been waged upon its workers and average people.
This document opens up a small glimpse into the despicable actions of the Pacific Crowd (Southern Pacific, Pacific Bell and PG&E). focussing on PG&E and how their greedy agenda has shaped this state.
The New Era
But at the dawn of the new millenium their shared plan to escape regulatory "hell" has gone up in flames. After taking over $5 billion in assets out of the state, using the money to buy into the New England electric market, what was left of PG&E in California declared bankruptcy as a result of Enron attempt to take over the state's power market. The shared plan, is the strategic globalization plan that has been pushing government deregulation at the same time the World Trade Organization has been setting up its version of George Bush's New World Order.
PG&E's corporate history, from the moment of its birth up to the present, has been linked to its willingness to do just about anything to protect its self perceived business interests. What made this dispicable agenda possible is the fact that San Francisco was ruled by brutal men whose drive for wealth and power was the only game in town from the 1850's right up to PG&E's formation in 1905.
Much as the 1960's was a reaction to war and cultural stagnancy, the progressive era from 1900 to 1930 was a reaction to the brutal robber barrons that ran California and the country. Decent people here in California could no longer stand idly by as Southern Pacific's Big four and their cronies were creating their own version of a royalist super elite empire.
The very schemers that created PG&E became the centerpiece of change as San Francisco squared off around PG&E's employee Abe Ruef and the rest of the corrupt Southern Pacific crowd. Boss Ruef was put on trial as were hundreds of Pacific insiders after, the just formed, company's gas mains burned 20,000 city blocks down on April 18th 1906. Ruef was the only person to serve time while the rest of SP elite were able to escape prosecution due to its political and economic control over the state and San Francisco.
The creation of PG&E was organized by SP's Crocker family with the intent of taking over the 50 year old San Francisco Gas & Electric Company. California Gas & Electric (CG&E) was formed in 1901 as a consolidation of Crocker and SP utilities from Sacramento to San Jose, with the intent of getting control of the huge San Francisco electric market by swallowing up SFG&E. In just under 4 years this was completed as CG&E took over SFG&E in the fall of 1905, with the new entity to be called PG&E. At the same time PG&E's lawyer Boss Ruef was bribing the S.F. Board of Supervisors around of the cities street light contract. PG&E's newly aquired gas run street lights then proceeded to burn down 20,000 city blocks a couple of months later when the Great `06 quake hit.
What a wonderful start for such a bunch of monsters!
The company's intimate corporate agenda has made the financial empire behind the men at PG&E one of the most brutal around. Its direct ties to the old Southern Pacific empire gave the company its guiding values for its role in California.
In 1937, a depression era congressional investigative committee called the TNEC incorrectly placed control of both Southern California Edison and PG&E in the hands of SP's Crocker Family. They weren't far off. The Crockers did carry out a major role in its formation, but there are much bigger fish that had quietly taken up position in California in 1900.
At the time, the original big 4 of Southern Pacific, that had built the western half of the first transcontinental railroad, taken control of 20% of the states' land, had a complete monopoly of all land and water transportation to California, ruled California's state government and held control of most of the state's financial resources, was dying of old age. The Rockefellers and Morgan empires were eager to come in and take on the financial underwear of the SP and did, when Collis P. Huntington, the last of the SP's big four died in 1900.
As Edward Harriman completed the purchase of SP in 1902, another New Yorker, named NW Halsey initiated the process that led to the formation of PG&E in 1906. By 1916, National City Company was firmly in the driver seat of PG&E. Today National is known as CitiCorp. National had been known as one of John D. Rockefeller's bank. But Teddy Roosevelt had forced John to get rid of the bank, which he gave to his brother, who just happened to be tight buddies with J.P. Morgan.
National went onto to be the star financial front via a series of economic structures set up by Morgan that by 1930 had control over 50% of all electric utility investments in the U.S.
The battle for the heart and soul of California will be set aside for the moment, to briefly describe some of the wonderful civic achievments of PG&E and its honorable men of power.
Here's a list of some of the known scandals:
Abe Ruef Scandal Timeline
SF labor leader Tom Mooney fingered by PG&E Pinkerton
Organized the Greater California League, spending $500,000 in 1922 to kill statewide initiative drive to municipalize utilities.
coalition leader on changing the history in school text books to protect how American's percieved their role in electric power development
The Takeover of Hetch Hetchy Timeline
led the push in reducing the scale of the Central Valley Project,now part of Western Area Power Administration.
The utility gained its huge size by taking over locally owned power companies from Santa Barbara in the South to Eureka in the north.
The agressive takeover of Friant and Shasta dam electricity that had been destined for rural coops in northern california
The coalition leader in developing nuclear power in U.S.
Holds the distinction of being the focus of the first anti-nuclear movement in history, starting in 1958 when they tried to push through 4 nuclear reactors on the epicenter of the 1906 earthquake at Bodeaga Bay.
Its 2nd reactor complex at Humbolt bay was dubbed the dirtiest nuclear reactor in the U.S. and shut down in the late 70's when plutonium was found on children's playground a mile away.
Bribed the Sierra club into allowing the siting of Diablo Canyon at the 2nd to last coastal wilderness in California. The scandal led to David Brower leaving the Sierra Club and forming Friends of the Earth.
Pushed to build over 60 nuclear reactors in its service area. But ended up taking on over 20 years of opposition to its push to build reactors all over the state.
Opposed lifeline electric rates in the state, but failed.
Attempted to take the very law it had helped to pass a few years earlier that limited its ability to construct new reactors in the state, all the way to the U.S. Supreme court, but failed.
Caught in PCB transformer scandals that contaminated a city building and its own workers.
Designed and built the Helms Stored River project, that went nearly 10x's over original budget and killed a score of workers.
Forced to rebuild the Diablo Canyon reactors 3 times, running the cost up from $300 million to $5.8 billion.
A newly hired engineer discovers that PG&E had built the seismic supports for the reactors backwards, just after the Abalone Alliance had completed the largest civil disobedience action in U.S. history.
PG&E is part of a national coalition to permanently privatize a 1920 agreement that would allow municipally owned utilities to bid on over 400 dams nationwide when their 50 operating license came up. The successful campaign ended up giving PGE and SoCalEd over 60 dams here in California.
Ronald Reagan secretly orders the EPA to give the financial strapped utility $2.7 billion to help PG&E finish Diablo Canyon.
The Diablo Canyon operation was allowed to go ahead by Judge Robert Bork. He was famous for being the Nixon's saturday night massacre lawyer that fired the Watergate prosecutor.
Literally every environmental law on the book was waived to allow PG&E to obtain its 2 billion gallon dumping permit into the ocean. The state's regional quality control board refused to allow them to dump water, but was overturned by the state.
The reactors were built near the Hosgri faultline that destroyed Santa Barbara in a 1927 earthquake.
The first time the reactors were turned on, 14,000 Abalone in Diablo Bay were killed. The cove was also home to a sacred Chumash burial area and was the home of the worlds largest oak trees.
In the late 1990's it was disclosed that PG&E had covered up the extent of damages to the coast and Abalone, and was given a $14 million fine. The fine was later reversed.
The company spent $110 million in legal fees to win the Diablo Canyon rate case. The state, which had promised that it would force the utility to eat at least $2 billion of the construction costs settled a deal that gave away the whole house, setting up a $54 billion 30 contract for PG&E.
The 1989 rate settlement led to the steepest rate increases in the country, driving electric costs from 8 cents a kwh to over 14 cents by 1994.
This huge increase led to the revolt of big electric users, that in turn caused the disasterous Wilson deregulation plan.
PG&E was a coalition partner in destroying the grassroots based alternative energy movement in the state that was culminated in their FERC appeal that killed PURPA contracts in the state in 1994.
PG&E took the national lead in the mid 80's, with their U.S. Supreme Court case that killed Citizen Utility Board's across the country. The Nader inspired CUB's had succesfully gained access to PG&E's electric bill here when the CPUC allowed TURN to do inserts.
PG&E's was part of a coalition of California corporations that sponsored the Pacific Legal Foundation and its SLAP suit against the Abalone Alliance that put it out of existance.
PG&E was part of the inside coaliton of organizers, with the help of Palo Based EPRI, in the national agenda to deregulate the electric industry.
The San Diego team of Steve Peace and Governor Wilson led the team plan to give the state's utilities the disasterous deregulation mess. It included a $28 billion bonus to cover all the construction costs of Diablo Canyon and SoCal Eds' SONGS reactors.
Check out the Julia Roberts movie for more scandals that contaminated over 1,000 workers with Chromium contamination
Oh, yes and its spent large amounts of money many many times to defeat public power initiatives in San Francisco and elsewhere
http://www.energy-net.org/1NWO/PGE/1PGE.HTM
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§Daly City Site Draws Anger of Neighbors / Tainted soil being exposed by PG&E , they say
by repost
Sunday Oct 31st, 2010 6:01 AM
Daly City Site Draws Anger of Neighbors / Tainted soil being exposed, they say
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/05/MN79031.DTL
Daly City Site Draws Anger of Neighbors
Tainted soil being exposed, they say
Angelica Pence, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 5, 0
Daly City housing project residents say exposed soil is tainted.
Studies find new test for cervical cancer beats pap smear.
Call for blood donations called "very critical."
Study finds possible genetic cause for high lung cancer risk in women.
Old bull cells found not too old to clone.
(10-19) 04:00 PDT DALY CITY -- Irate residents of a Daly City housing project led a demonstration yesterday to protest nearby construction that they say is the latest example of decades of economic and environmental racism.
More than two dozen people representing Midway Village held up signs and blocked the entrance to a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. construction site during a morning rain. The power company is overturning contaminated soil, which many residents hold responsible for a slew of health problems suffered by the project's 150 low- income families.
Some of the dirt and groundwater being dug up is known to contain the carcinogen polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, or PNAs. Protesters say the pollutant is also buried beneath residents' homes and in nearby Bayshore Park, giving Midway Village residents tumors, breathing problems, bloody noses, rashes and other illnesses.
Lula Bishop, whose home sits only about 10 feet away from the construction site, woke up with feelings of nausea yesterday morning after breathing fumes she said have come from the site since workers began excavation.
``We're in a medical emergency,'' said Bishop, who has lived in Midway Village since 1977. ``Our kids are getting sick. They have rashes our doctors can't explain. We suffer from cancers. Something has to be done.''
The county built the housing complex in 1976 on a parcel of land that included the site of a former PG&E plant, which had deposited coal tar and soot into the soil before closing in 1913. PG&E found the waste in 1980 and a decade later notified county officials that the soil near Midway Village was polluted with suspected carcinogens.
The residents' most recent lawsuit against the San Mateo County Housing Authority and PG&E was dismissed in 1997 after a judge ruled that the residents failed to link the chemical exposure to their maladies.
John Martin, Daly City manager, said more than $160,000 has been spent on safety measures to prevent Midway Village residents from coming into contact with the chemicals during the project, which is to enlarge an outdated storm drainage system.
The state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) is overseeing the cleanup of contaminated soil, according to the department's project manager, Alfred Wanger.
Workers are watering down the work site and covering it with tarps and metal plates at the end of the workday, Wanger said, as well as monitoring the air quality to make sure any contaminated particles in the soil do not become airborne. At Bayshore Park, a 10-foot fence was also erected to keep people from getting too close to the excavation.
The project, which got under way in mid-October, was originally to be completed in three to four weeks, Wanger said. The agency has been forced to push back the completion date in part because of the continuing protests, he said, noting that pickets have blocked trucks sent in to haul away the toxic soil.
State officials also offered to temporarily relocate residents who live directly adjacent to the construction site. But of 16 families eligible for the transfer, only two volunteered to move, said Otis Jackson, spokesman for the department, which is under the California Environmental Protection Agency.
Some Midway Village residents said the offer was too little, too late. For years now, they have been seeking compensation for their ailments and are asking to be permanently moved from the area. They also want any medical expenses incurred as a result of the toxic soil paid for by those responsible.
Demonstrators hope the protest -- the seventh such action in the past few weeks -- will keep the spotlight on the residents' drawn- out battle with PG&E and the county Housing Authority over the soil.
Officials have shown ``a callous disregard for the health and well- being of those who live here,'' said Bradley Angel, spokesman for Greenaction, a health and environmental justice group.
Midway Village residents ``are prisoners of their low-income status,'' he said. ``If this were a rich, white community, do you think they'd be forced to live on toxic soil for generations?''
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...
For more information:
http://nonukesaction.wordpress.com/
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SAN BRUNO EXPLOSION: PG&E pleads not guilty to felony safety violation charges-Protesters Demand Criminal Charges
http://www.ktvu.com/videos/news/san-bruno-explosion-pge-pleads-not-guilty-to/vCYDfq/
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. pleaded not guilty Monday to a dozen felony charges stemming from alleged safety violations in a deadly 2010 natural gas pipeline explosion that leveled a suburban neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area.
http://www.ktvu.com/videos/news/san-bruno-explosion-pge-pleads-not-guilty-to/vCYDfq/
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. pleaded not guilty Monday to a dozen felony charges stemming from alleged safety violations in a deadly 2010 natural gas pipeline explosion that leveled a suburban neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area.
For more information:
http://www.ktvu.com/videos/news/san-bruno-...
IBEW 1245 Shills For PG&E In Opposing SF Plan For Renewable Energy
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-to-get-cleaner-energy-and-a-battle-4323664.php
S.F. to get cleaner energy - and a battle
Neal J. Riley
Published 6:18 pm, Saturday, March 2, 2013
San Francisco is months away from launching a program that would allow residents to purchase their energy from renewable sources - at a premium.
The hard-fought program, which has been debated for decades, was approved last year, but some worry that before the greener energy grid can even start, it will be derailed.
Later this month, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission may adopt rates for the program, which is called CleanPowerSF. One scenario would have those customers paying twice as much as those who remain with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. The PUC also expects this month to get the results of a customer survey that will help determine which neighborhoods are most receptive to paying more for green energy when the program begins in October.
But frustrated members of the Board of Supervisors are worried that while the details are still being worked out, the PUC's $1.4 million outreach campaign, which was approved last month, isn't doing enough to respond to attacks against CleanPowerSF.
The Stop the Shell Shock campaign, funded by an electrical workers union, has mailed out flyers, made robocalls and set up a sleek website urging San Franciscans to rethink the five-year, $19.5 million contract with Shell Energy North America for 100 percent renewable power.
"I'm worried right now that we're actually looking kind of flat-footed," said Supervisor John Avalos at a recent meeting of the Local Agency Formation Commission, which is working with the city to create a public power program. "We have to do everything we can to make sure we do have that customer base. There's a lot at stake."
The deal approved by supervisors to lay the groundwork for city-owned renewable power generation includes $13 million in public funds set aside as reserves, some of which would be paid to Shell if customer demand weakens.
About half the city's 375,000 residential energy customers will automatically be enrolled in the new program by October, but can opt out. The program needs 90,000 customers to remain viable.
"We are progressing as planned - we're on time," said Barbara Hale, the PUC assistant general manager for power at the LAFCO meeting. "We will begin our notification and education program throughout the summer."
But that wasn't good enough for some supervisors, who requested a meeting with PUC communications staff to discuss countering the campaign against CleanPowerSF.
"I'm very frustrated right now. ... We should've been doing this months ago," said Supervisor Eric Mar. "I think what we're up against is a really sophisticated propaganda campaign that's spreading tremendous misinformation out there."
Mar called the Stop the Shell Shock website "very well done, with graphics and lots of information." Meanwhile, the CleanPowerSF Twitter account hasn't been updated since November and the program's Facebook page appears to have been taken down.
"They've framed it early on, and it's going to be very hard to raise awareness and counter that," Mar said of the efforts by CleanPowerSF opponents.
PUC spokesman Charles Sheehan said the supervisors' comments are being taken seriously and that the PUC will be meeting with community groups and updating the CleanPowerSF website to counter "misinformation." There will also be an advertising campaign and a door-to-door education effort starting in April or May.
"It's not surprising that we're seeing this flow of information out there," he said. "We will work just as hard to set the record straight."
Supervisor David Campos said he wants customers to know that Shell already sells energy to PG&E.
"The difference between our program and theirs is that we're buying energy from Shell with the idea of eventually building an infrastructure that allows us to create our own energy," he said.
Just how far the city can go in pushing back against the Stop the Shell Shock campaign is another strategic factor. LAFCO legal counsel Nancy Miller said the city is prohibited from participating in a political campaign.
"This is kind of a pseudo-campaign," Miller said. "But you can provide facts and information."
Campos also suggested that the city look into whether PG&E, which is effectively having its decades-old monopoly on electricity ended by the program, is illegally coordinating with the union on the campaign, though Campos said he had no proof.
Hunter Stern, president of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, which is funding the Stop the Shell Shock campaign, said he doesn't want PG&E anywhere near the union's efforts. The union, which opposes CleanPowerSF in part because some electrical workers it represents could lose their jobs once the program takes effect, has not yet publicly documented how much it has spent on outreach. Stern said the amount is less than $100,000 and can't compete with the $1.4 million that the PUC has to spend.
"We will continue to use wise, cost-effective methods to make sure people know our information," he said. "The facts are the facts - this is a contract with Shell Energy."
Neal J. Riley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: nriley [at] sfchronicle.com Twitter: @realdealneal
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-to-get-cleaner-energy-and-a-battle-4323664.php
Corporate Shill For PG&E, IBEW 1245 Attacks "Clean Power" IBEW 1245 Opposed SF Labor Council Campaign For Public Power
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2013/02/pge-union-ibew-local-1245-continues-fight-against-cleanpowersf
PG&E union IBEW Local 1245 continues fight against CleanPowerSF
By: Chris Roberts | 02/18/13 7:36 PM
S.F. Examiner Staff Writer | Follow On Twitter @Cbloggy
COURTESY PHOTO
Logo for the Stop San Francisco Shell Shock campaign, who are working to stop the CleanPowerSF program the Board of Supervisors already approved.
A once-fine city besmirched with viscous, oily pollution, and a populace forced to shell out hard-earned green for filthy energy.
The picture painted by opponents of CleanPowerSF — a government program that will allow current PG&E electricity customers to purchase alternative, renewable power from Shell Energy North America — is not pretty.
The City is in the final stages of hashing out a $19.5 million deal with Shell that promises local power customers the ability to purchase costlier but cleaner energy from that company instead of PG&E. Residential electricity bills are projected to be between $11.54 and $94.10 more expensive per month.
The program has been fought tooth and nail by PG&E and its union, IBEW Local 1245, which has shown no sign of letting up despite the program’s approval.
“The Board of Supervisor’s [sic] plan to go into business with Shell to create ‘CleanPowerSF’ is a dirty deal that won’t create one new watt of green energy, will raise our power bills and send our local dollars to Shell in Houston,” claims online campaign Stop San Francisco Shell Shock, an effort of Local 1245 to sway public opinion against CleanPowerSF.
In September, the board approved the program in an 8-3 veto-proof vote, but it could be in jeopardy if too few San Franciscans sign up. Shell is due a $15 million payout if the contract is terminated within five years.
As of Monday, the Shell Shock campaign page had collected more than 1,300 supporters on Facebook and another 5,377 on its Change.org petition page.
It’s unclear how heavily the union is backing the effort to sway public opinion. The campaign has not filed financial statements with either the Ethics Commission or the secretary of state, both of which monitor political spending. Local 1245 did not respond to requests for comment.
croberts [at] sfexaminer.com
Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2013/02/pge-union-ibew-local-1245-continues-fight-against-cleanpowersf#ixzz2LMyPRYhf
Local 1245 Helps Defeat San Francisco Power Propositions
http://www.ibew.org/articles/02journal/0201/p5_1245.htm
January/February 2002 IBEW Journal
A major effort by Local 1245 members played a role in close victories over two ballot questions that would have municipalized San Franciscos power delivery system.
Im very proud of our members for the effort they made, said Local 1245 Business Manager Perry Zimmerman. They proved that our union will not just stand by when our jobs are threatened.
On Election Day, November 6, voters narrowly rejected Measure I, which would have created a Municipal Utility District to include San Francisco and nearby Brisbane.
But it took a close count of absentee ballots to confirm the defeat of Proposition F to create a San Francisco power authority. Proposition F called for the city takeover of Pacific Gas & Electric, which declared bankruptcy nearly a year ago. Proposition F would also have folded Local 1245 members into city unions.
Local 1245 leaders attributed the come-from-behind victory to the hard work of the members, many of whom would have lost jobs or would have been subject to demotions and lost benefits if the measures were successful.
We were three-to-one behind when we got into it, said Assistant Business Manager Jim McCauley. Were pretty proud of ourselves.
Throughout the campaign against Proposition F, Local 1245 members emphasized that the cost of acquiring PG&E would likely increase customer rates and jeopardize service reliability and worker safety. In addition to a thorough grassroots campaign among union members, the public parts of the campaign included placing billboards around town, appearing at news conferences and radio shows, distributing literature and visiting newspaper editorial boards.
McCauley, who coordinated the Local 1245 effort, successfully persuaded members of central labor councils not to endorse Proposition F and Measure I. McCauley said San Franciscos Local 6 was also a key ally. Local 1245, based in nearby Walnut Creek, used the Local 6 union hall in San Francisco for meetings and grassroots coordination.
They loaned us their hall and anything we needed, they did for us, said McCauley, adding that 1245 members used the Local 6 hall for phone banks and meetings before precinct walking.
San Francisco's Green Power Plan Still Stalled by Corporate Interests a Decade Later
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18347-considered-a-national-example-san-franciscos-green-power-plan-has-struggled-for-a-decade-to-overcome-opposition-from-monopoly-corporate-interests
Friday, 23 August 2013 00:00
By Darwin Bond Graham, Truthout | News Analysis
CleanPowerSF initially called for investing over a billion dollars in energy efficiency upgrades and publicly-owned renewable energy assets at thousands of sites in San Francisco. The plan's huge public popularity and technical authority have not protected it from attack and subversion.
In 2004, San Francisco committed itself to a revolutionary economic and environmental rejuvenation project centered on complete overhaul of the city's energy system. Or did it?
Back then, the plan called for investing more than a billion dollars in energy efficiency upgrades and publicly-owned renewable energy assets at thousands of sites within city limits. Voters authorized the issuance of revenue bonds to fund an unprecedented public energy investment program. The money for this gargantuan green energy and local jobs fund was to be sourced from the utility bills of ratepayers, a few pennies a month no longer siphoned off by the investor-owned utility as private profits.
Called CleanPowerSF, the idea was a reinvention of a municipal utility for San Francisco, a perennial sky's-the-limit goal of the city's progressives, but reinvented with new legal authority and new technologies that would not require the public to take control of costly and crumbling transmission lines and pipelines. Instead, the public would simply take over energy purchasing, and ratepayer funds, leaving the corporate utility in place to deliver the juice at a strictly regulated rate.
Then nine long years of war between environmentalists, labor, politicians, and the region's 800-pound gorilla utility corporation, PG&E, ground down the vision of San Francisco as a post-carbon, green jobs mecca into what might be a fatally compromised plan.
Instead of purchasing actual renewably generated electrons, San Francisco's proposed green power program, through several revisions, became heavily reliant on using opaque market credits that supposedly offset the pollution created by the electricity's true source: mostly gas-fired power plants. Instead of generating local jobs, the energy would be imported from distant sources, possibly exploiting non-union labor. This has not sat well with environmentalist and unions, two key constituencies in San Francisco's power structure.
On August 13, the local and truly green potential of CleanPowerSF was dealt its most recent body blow. Three of the city's five Public Utilities Commission (PUC) members voted down a proposal to set CleanPowerSF's rates. "Without set rates, the program can't move forward," Charles Sheehan, a spokesperson for the PUC, bluntly stated. What was supposed to be a mere regulatory decision based on technical judgment ended up being a political decision, and the balance of political power once again fell against green energy and local jobs.
But even with all these setbacks, the original vision of San Francisco's municipal power program is slowly coming back into focus, say advocates who have fought for the plan for over a decade. Grassroots activists say that regardless of its flaws, CleanPowerSF will still be the largest municipal green energy and local jobs project of its kind in the nation. Many see it as a model for other communities, a real path away from fossil fuels, and centralized, corporate-owned power plants.
That's if the political obstacles can be overcome.
Community Choice Aggregation - CCA
"San Francisco is kind of a litmus test for this thing," said Paul Fenn, president of Local Power, Inc., a consulting firm that helps cities devise clean energy plans. The "thing" Fenn refers to is community choice aggregation, a little-known authority that allows cities and counties to lump their residents into one pool to purchase bulk energy on the open market at the cheapest rates possible.
Community choice aggregation (CCA) is probably the most boring and benign-sounding name possible for one of the most radical policy mechanisms actually within reach today. Aggregation cuts middlemen utilities out of the process of deciding where electrical, gas, and heat energy come from. Most importantly, aggregation programs allow local communities to determine how ratepayer surpluses will be spent. Fitting the nonprofit, public purpose of aggregation, ratepayer surpluses are usually refunded as consumer savings. However, according to Fenn and other energy policy experts, the real transformative benefits of CCA - the litmus test, if you will - depends on whether ratepayer surpluses can be channeled into investments that are intended to green and localize the energy supply.
Community choice aggregation was Paul Fenn's brainchild. Deregulation of energy markets in the late 1990s wreaked havoc on states like California, but Fenn saw something few others did. Beneath the procorporate agenda that allowed companies like Enron to capture billions of dollars from the public and crash the power grid was a window of opportunity to create a radically democratic reorganization of the economy. It would require subverting the big energy corporations and utilities, however.
In the darkness of California's rolling blackouts, Fenn wrote Assembly Bill 117, California's CCA law, which was approved in 2002. The nation's largest corporate utilities were just then counting their record profits from a ruthless campaign attacking California's homeowners and businesses with "megawatt laundering" and "overscheduling" scams.
In 2007, Fenn incorporated his company, Local Power, as a vehicle to advocate for the transformative CCA vision. Fenn has become an evangelist of CCA's potential to eliminate carbon and nuclear energy sources, and to spur the creation of thousands of jobs through what he called the local buildout of renewable energy assets. His team at Local Power, Inc. frequently gives presentations to cities and rural communities considering aggregation and has been influential in Illinois and Ohio, where hundreds of municipalities have embraced the concept, including Chicago, the largest CCA in the nation. None of these aggregation authorities, however, are using their ratepayer surpluses to build local, green publicly-owned assets.
That's part of the reason CCA advocates have staked so much on San Francisco's public power plan. The logic goes like this: If San Francisco can't do it, who can? When it comes to exercising the full potential of the CCA model, no other city has been remotely as ambitious as the West Coast metropolis of 800,000 residents. At the same time, no other city has seen as bruising a political battle over its aggregation program as San Francisco.
Power Politics
"In theory, you have the political will to do this in San Francisco," said Fenn. "We also have critical mass of technical providers. Elsewhere, you don't have the strong grassroots political base, nor do you have the real agency to push it forward."
However, even with this political will and strong grassroots support, CleanPowerSF has faced enormous opposition. America's energy and utilities corporations, which are possibly the most potent forces in national and local politics, have seen CCA as an existential threat from the very beginning and have sought to kill the idea by any means. They have spared few resources in their anti-CCA campaign.
Eric Brooks, an organizer with Our City, is one of the grassroots advocates who has pushed the original vision of CCA in San Francisco since the mid-2000s. According to Brooks, there have been some allies in government, but many of the city's most powerful offices have tried to kill the municipal energy plan from the start.
"The reality is some of the staff that were in place at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission started opposing CleanPowerSF back in 2004, right as it was getting off the ground," said Brooks. "Much of the staff at that point had been put in place by Willie Brown," he added.
Brown, the former Speaker of the California State Assembly, ran San Francisco from 1996 until 2004. He was one of the most powerful mayors in the city's history, and still today exerts enormous influence behind the scenes, and through the legacy of his appointees and former staff, many of whom are still in government.
Among Brown's many corporate supporters while he was a state legislator, and especially while he presided over San Francisco, was PG&E. In the late 1980s, Brown steered PG&E to do business with favored firms owned by his friends, according to a 1995 report in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's not clear what the company got in return at the time, but throughout his tenure, Brown staunchly supported the utility and stacked the city's government with its allies.
In theory, PG&E is a strictly regulated monopoly overseen by California's Public Utilities Commission and by city agencies like San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission. In reality, these state and local commissions are characterized by regulatory capture, a process in which the tables are turned and the company obtains power over its government watchdogs. San Francisco Bay Guardian reporter Rebecca Bowe describes "social and professional ties running deep within California's insular energy community" that result in "cozy relationships" between regulators and industry executives.
PG&E also cultivates a vast web of political allies through its corporate-controlled foundation. PG&E distributes tens of millions annually to nonprofits and local governments. For example, in 2011 PG&E granted $23,000 to environmental organizations in Avila Beach to fund "marine education" programs. Avila Beach is just a few miles down the Pacific Coast from the company's nuclear power plant. PG&E has funded the select labor unions that have opposed CleanPowerSF and related green energy ballot propositions. In 2010, PG&E paid the San Francisco Fire Fighters $25,000, according to the PG&E Foundation's tax documents. In 2008, the Fire Fighters union campaigned against Proposition H, a bond initiative meant to fund clean energy investments through CleanPowerSF, with mailers claiming it would cause energy bills to "increase $400 a year, on average, for 30 years."
PG&E's energy supplies come primarily from gas-fired power plants and the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, although the company also controls an extensive network of hydroelectric power stations. PG&E's major energy generation investment to fulfill future demand is a 586-megawatt natural gas-fired station planned to come online in 2016, according to the company's most recent annual report. In 2012, PG&E booked $800 million in profit, and its stockholders received $746 million in dividends. With this kind of cash flow, the company and its executives aggressively lobby regulators and state and local legislators, especially in San Francisco.
Since CleanPowerSF was first approved in 2004, PG&E has showered $69 million in campaign contributions, mostly to fund ballot initiatives that would protect its monopoly position, but also to buy the support of various California politicians.
In a town with more than a few billionaires and tycoons, PG&E's executives and board members are comfortably among the city's elite. PG&E's board of directorsincludes representatives of America's largest and most powerful corporations and banks, including Pepsico, AT&T, Spectra Energy and the Rothschild banking firm. PG&E's CEO Anthony Earley, Jr. was paid $9.9 million in 2012, while the company's president, Christopher Johns, was paid $5.1 million, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
After Willie Brown was termed out of the mayor's office in 2004, PG&E retained him for "consulting services," with a quarter million-dollar contract. Purchasing Brown's long-term allegiance was the same as purchasing a portion of the city's sprawling bureaucracy of employees, especially those in the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the city's energy regulator to which the mayor appoints commissioners.
"Most people in the city understand that in some ways Willie Brown is still the mayor of San Francisco," said Brooks. "When Brown made appointments to decide who would lead the city's Public Utilities Commission, he made certain decisions based on what PG&E wanted. Mayor Newsom had the same staff as Brown and also made PG&E friendly-appointments, and the current mayor, Ed Lee, carried over many of Newsom's staff."
In 2010, Brown joined PG&E in an effort to pass Proposition 16. Prop 16 would have gutted the state law that allows cities to form CCAs. The same year, PG&E's corporate foundation made a $15,000 donation to the Willie L. Brown Center on Politics and Public Service, a nonprofit policy think tank set up by Brown a few years prior. Proposition 16 was PG&E's biggest political expenditure of all time. According to data from the California Secretary of State, the company spent $46 million on the effort. In spite of Willie Brown's assistance and the corporation's millions in advertising, the ballot initiative failed on election day.
Bruce Brugman, former publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the city's progressive newspaper and one of the main proponents of municipal power since 1969, calls Willie Brown the "ally and mentor" of current mayor Ed Lee. Brugman was one of the first to expose Brown's $200,000 deal with PG&E and has closely followed the city's political alliances as they morph over time. Lee, who has been in office since January of 2011, strongly opposes CleanPowerSF.
Eric Brooks believes this dynasty of mayors beholden to Willie Brown and PG&E has been the main impediment to CleanPowerSF.
"PG&E hates CleanPowerSF and wants to kill it," said Brooks.
In the Shell of the Old
As if PG&E's vehement attempt to destroy CleanPowerSF wasn't enough, the program's own proponents have had a difficult time crafting a plan they can all agree on.
Many advocates of the CCA concept who helped to establish CleanPowerSF have since become skeptics. They are increasingly wary of supporting CleanPowerSF as staff in the city's Public Utilities Commission have steered it away from a local buildout of renewables and toward a program that relies on renewable energy credits (RECs) and power purchases from large energy corporations, often sourcing "green" energy from industrial plants located hundreds of miles away.
"They have negotiated a contract with Shell Energy for a 30-megawatt purchase of renewable power on the open market," said Al Weinrub, coordinator of the Local Clean Energy Alliance. "This is not the kind of deal CCA advocates were in favor of back in 2004." Although Weinrub is unhappy with the current CleanPowerSF plan, he remains a firm believer in the potential of CCAs. Weinrub's organization is the hub of dozens of groups seeking to proliferate CCAs and other renewable energy development mechanisms across California. He worries that CleanPowerSF is being set up to fail.
CleanPowerSF's contract with Shell Energy North America, a subsidiary of the giant oil corporation, would supply the city's public power CCA with part of its total energy portfolio for a few years until the ambitious local buildout and efficiency upgrades are enough to fully support the city's energy needs. According to Brooks, the contract with Shell only accounts for around 5 percent of the energy that will ultimately be procured by CleanPowerSF through a local buildout. "The peak load in San Francisco is 800 to 900 megawatts," said Brooks. "Shell was just for 20-30 megawatts. It's a tiny piece of the program."
Even so, the prospect of paying Shell $19.5 million has many progressives bristling. They point to Shell's dismal human rights abuse record in Africa and elsewhere and Shell's full-blown commitment to developing oil and gas supplies that will destroy the planet's climate system (for example Shell's major Canadian tar sands mines) as just two reasons why doing business with the company runs counter to CleanPowerSF's goals.
"We have asked staff to find a comfortable compromise with this program in order to address the various concerns that have emerged from labor, to the various power mix, to the affordability of this program," said Francesca Vietor, a commissioner of the city's PUC, and strong supporter of CleanPowerSF. Part of that compromise is purchasing power from Shell, something Vietor has seemed no more eager to do than staunch critics of CleanPowerSF. Vietor and other proponents say, however, that it's a temporary means to an end.
"The key point here is that CleanPowerSF is going to use Shell as a bridge - the private outfit will deliver power generated at renewable facilities to the city's power operation, which will resell it to customers . . . for a while," explained Tim Redmond, the former editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, in a blog post last year about the program's political obstacles.
"The goal is to use the revenue stream from the sales of power to back bonds that will allow the city to build its own renewable energy system. Five, maybe 10 years down the road, San Francisco will have solar generators on city property (including large swaths of Public Utilities Commission property in the East Bay), wind generators, maybe at some point tidal generators, and will be able to sell cheap, clean local power to customers."
"Shell will be gone," concluded Redmond.
By extension so would PG&E, except for its role in upkeeping the wires and pipelines through which a portion of the total energy supply moves.
"We approved the contract knowing full well we were contracting with Shell. It was for a short term, a four and a half-year term to initiate CleanPowerSF," said San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos. Avalos, a progressive politician with strong support from labor and environmental groups, has championed CleanPowerSF. He is often seen around town at rallies urging action to address climate change, including a recent street protest during an Obama fundraising visit, organized by opponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
If CleanPowerSF is sabotaged and unable to launch a local buildout beyond the Shell contract, say activists like Weinrub, it could spell the end of the city's CCA experiment as residents and businesses opt out of the plan and stick with PG&E.
Because of this nexus of obstacles blocking the launch of CleanPowerSF, progressives have mobilized to keep the pressure on the city's Public Utilities Commission. According to Weinrub, a coalition of activists in the Bay Area convinced the city to hire Fenn's company, Local Power, Inc. to produce a detailed business plan based on CCA's original goals of local buildout. That plan, built on an incredible quantity of data, is about the most granular and complete map of CCA's radical potential to transform a city's energy footprint as has ever been produced.
For months the plan got no traction with PUC staff. Weinrub said the city just sat on it. When pressed by Weinrub and other grassroots organizations, the city's Public Utilties Commission expressed skepticism of the viability of CleanPowerSF.
Todd Rydstrom, chief financial officer of the city's Public Utilities Commission, has repeatedly warned city officials that he sees enormous risks in Local Power Inc.'s business plan for CleanPowerSF. Rydstrom believes that the billion-dollar local buildout will be bogged down by its own sheer scale, in particular, by the requirement that the city build the solar energy equivalent of 24 more Sunset Reservoir projects over 10 years. Sunset Reservoir is a 5-megawatt solar array, one of the largest municipal renewable resources in the United States, built atop one of San Francisco's water facilities. CleanPowerSF, as planned by Local Power, Inc., would also require construction of about 2,000 wind turbines in and around the city.
In March of 2013, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission let their contract with Local Power expire, leaving key parts of the plan unfinished. Even so, Fenn's last presentation to the city that month spelled out the basics of CleanPowerSF: $1.3 billion in purchases of 100 percent renewable energy on the market over 10 years. A $1 billion local buildout of renewable energy resources, mostly through small, distributed solar installations and efficiency upgrades, many of them "behind the meter." Being behind the meter means energy would be produced across thousands of rooftops and stretched through countless building and infrastructure upgrades, stored in batteries, distributed, and smartly transferred across the grid at peak demand moments.
"Balanced resources," said Brooks, describing the plan. "That's the vision. Every six months to a year we have to just keep hammering on the SFPUC staff."
Hammering didn't seem to be working when the city dropped Local Power's contract. Earlier this year, CleanPowerSF seemed to have been completely gutted of the local buildout originally at its center. PG&E meanwhile was recovering from its disastrous San Bruno pipeline explosion, which killed 8 and injured dozens in a small city just south of San Francisco. Emboldened again, the company was doing all it could to convince city officials to further water down CleanPowerSF. Meanwhile PG&E pressed the California PUC to approve its competing green energy program. That program, dubbed PG&E's "Green Option," would allow customers to pay a slight premium on their monthly bills for the privilege of claiming their lights and heat come from 100 percent renewable sources.
According to Weinrub, PG&E's green option relies on RECs, which are not only not green, but also would undermine the goal of building real renewable resources.
"This PG&E proposal is likely to inhibit the development of new renewable generating sources," said Weinrub. "For example, if ratepayers are lead to believe that a small price premium will result in 100 percent renewable electricity, they will not support pursuit of other truly renewable energy developments, such as the local energy efficiency and the new generation planned for CleanPowerSF’s nascent Community Choice program."
Instead, according to Weinrub, PG&E will purchase RECs to greenwash electricity it otherwise generates from natural gas power plants, large hydroelectric damns and its nuclear plant.
And while PG&E is pushing full bore to gain regulator approval for its Green Option, the electricians' union, allied with PG&E, has been busy plastering the city with ads claiming that CleanPowerSF will cause homeowners' utility bills to double. Calling this "San Francisco Shell Shock," the union launched a web site and online petitioncalling for CleanPowerSF to be nixed. PG&E and its allies have seized fully on CleanPowerSF's power purchase agreement with Shell as a propaganda weapon to destroy the program before it even begins.
After 10 years, San Francisco's green energy and local jobs vision never seemed so far away.
Crisis
The roller coaster of San Francisco energy politics took another unexpected turn during an August 3 public meeting, at which the city's new director of CCA programs, Kim Malcolm, gave a presentation that seemed to embrace the original vision of CleanPowerSF as a municipal green and local energy development engine. She told commissioners that she hoped to use the city's bonding authority to issue upward of $200 million in debt to finance a local renewables and efficiency buildout.
"They appear to be adopting Local Power's core recommendations - to build renewable generation and energy efficiency starting from the launch of the program," said Charles Schultz, a colleague of Fenn's. Schultz noted that $200 million is far below a billion, but he said it's ballpark of the kind of thinking that's required to make good on CCA's promise. "The public still thinks this is still just a Shell program," he added.
Malcolm, a former administrative law judge at the California Public Utilities Commission, took over CleanPowerSF earlier this year. "I think she came in and read all the work that's been done, the draft financial models, the risk reports, and she probably thought, this makes a lot of sense," said Fenn, who admitted he was surprised by her recommendations.
All of which may explain the next jostling turn on the roller coaster. On August 13, San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission voted three to two against setting rates for CleanPowerSF, effectively blocking it from moving forward with Malcom's stripped down, but significant, $200 million local buildout at its center.
Commissioners voting against the plan cited concerns about local jobs and higher utility bills as their major reasons for stalling CleanPowerSF. Angelo King, a member of San Francisco's environment commission verbalized these concerns in a public comment to the PUC just before their vote: "You need to make sure the metrics of your program show the economic impact and show jobs to those people that don't drive Priuses, that don't buy organic foods." King urged the city's Public Utilities Commission to block CleanPowerSF and force it back to the drawing board. "This program here, what we have now, is a downgrade from where the original stated goals were. When we originally looked at it, we said there were going to be jobs, in-city generation."
After the vote, various local newspapers described CleanPowerSF as being caught in limbo, stalemated in spite of the popularity of the idea and in spite of the veto-proof majority the city's Board of Supervisors used to approve the program last year.
The PUC's vote led supervisor John Avalos, to exclaim that the commissioners have precipitated a "constitutional crisis."
"It’s the whole political establishment coming down against public power," said Avalos. He added that he suspects the "invisible hand" of PG&E is behind the effort to delay the launch of CleanPowerSF, and he said that the Public Utilities Commission's unwillingness to green-light the program has created a conflict in which the will of the city's ultimate authority, the Board of Supervisors, is being blocked by a bureaucracy influenced too much by the city's wealthy corporate community.
The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce's CEO Bob Linscheid opined after the vote that "It is time to rethink the CleanPowerSF program," meaning to cancel it. A vice president of PG&E is on the Chamber's board of directors, and PG&E has long funded the business lobbying group.
"We all understand the politics of the situation," said Supervisor Avalos in a statement issued before the Public Utilities Commision's rate-setting vote. "The board of supervisors and every major environmental group in the city supports this plan. The mayor, PG&E, and its union oppose it. We can't afford any further political gamesmanship in an attempt to kill this program."
All Eyes on San Francisco
Advocates believe that CleanPowerSF will be a model for other cities to follow. Before casting her vote in favor of setting CleanPowerSF's rates, PUC commissioner Vietor called the program "an opportunity to lead the nation by example."
"The whole world is waiting for the us to get our act together," said Eric Brooks. San Francisco is the most important city right now for fighting the climate crisis because we have this opportunity to do the community buildout of green energy through CCA."
Officials outside of California concur.
"What San Francisco is doing is a really big deal," said Catherine Hurley. "The model of doing bonding to do the local buildout actually makes a lot of sense." Hurley is the sustainability programs coordinator for the city of Evanston, Illinois, and runs the city's CCA program. Evanston began aggregating its energy purchases in 2012, producing immediate savings for city residents. Ratepayer bills dropped 38 percent below what Constellation Energy, the region's corporate utility, charged. But Evanston isn't building local renewable assets.
According to Hurley, the Evanston CCA uses RECs ostensibly to provide customers with 100 percent renewable energy, even though much of the wattage is actually produced by coal-fired plants. That's true with virtually every existing CCA in the nation.
"I think this discussion of what role the local government should and could play in greening local energy supply is super interesting," said Hurley. "The San Francisco program could impact us. Our alderman, who are more green and progressive, they'll see it, and if it succeeds out there, they'll want to do it here.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-to-get-cleaner-energy-and-a-battle-4323664.php
S.F. to get cleaner energy - and a battle
Neal J. Riley
Published 6:18 pm, Saturday, March 2, 2013
San Francisco is months away from launching a program that would allow residents to purchase their energy from renewable sources - at a premium.
The hard-fought program, which has been debated for decades, was approved last year, but some worry that before the greener energy grid can even start, it will be derailed.
Later this month, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission may adopt rates for the program, which is called CleanPowerSF. One scenario would have those customers paying twice as much as those who remain with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. The PUC also expects this month to get the results of a customer survey that will help determine which neighborhoods are most receptive to paying more for green energy when the program begins in October.
But frustrated members of the Board of Supervisors are worried that while the details are still being worked out, the PUC's $1.4 million outreach campaign, which was approved last month, isn't doing enough to respond to attacks against CleanPowerSF.
The Stop the Shell Shock campaign, funded by an electrical workers union, has mailed out flyers, made robocalls and set up a sleek website urging San Franciscans to rethink the five-year, $19.5 million contract with Shell Energy North America for 100 percent renewable power.
"I'm worried right now that we're actually looking kind of flat-footed," said Supervisor John Avalos at a recent meeting of the Local Agency Formation Commission, which is working with the city to create a public power program. "We have to do everything we can to make sure we do have that customer base. There's a lot at stake."
The deal approved by supervisors to lay the groundwork for city-owned renewable power generation includes $13 million in public funds set aside as reserves, some of which would be paid to Shell if customer demand weakens.
About half the city's 375,000 residential energy customers will automatically be enrolled in the new program by October, but can opt out. The program needs 90,000 customers to remain viable.
"We are progressing as planned - we're on time," said Barbara Hale, the PUC assistant general manager for power at the LAFCO meeting. "We will begin our notification and education program throughout the summer."
But that wasn't good enough for some supervisors, who requested a meeting with PUC communications staff to discuss countering the campaign against CleanPowerSF.
"I'm very frustrated right now. ... We should've been doing this months ago," said Supervisor Eric Mar. "I think what we're up against is a really sophisticated propaganda campaign that's spreading tremendous misinformation out there."
Mar called the Stop the Shell Shock website "very well done, with graphics and lots of information." Meanwhile, the CleanPowerSF Twitter account hasn't been updated since November and the program's Facebook page appears to have been taken down.
"They've framed it early on, and it's going to be very hard to raise awareness and counter that," Mar said of the efforts by CleanPowerSF opponents.
PUC spokesman Charles Sheehan said the supervisors' comments are being taken seriously and that the PUC will be meeting with community groups and updating the CleanPowerSF website to counter "misinformation." There will also be an advertising campaign and a door-to-door education effort starting in April or May.
"It's not surprising that we're seeing this flow of information out there," he said. "We will work just as hard to set the record straight."
Supervisor David Campos said he wants customers to know that Shell already sells energy to PG&E.
"The difference between our program and theirs is that we're buying energy from Shell with the idea of eventually building an infrastructure that allows us to create our own energy," he said.
Just how far the city can go in pushing back against the Stop the Shell Shock campaign is another strategic factor. LAFCO legal counsel Nancy Miller said the city is prohibited from participating in a political campaign.
"This is kind of a pseudo-campaign," Miller said. "But you can provide facts and information."
Campos also suggested that the city look into whether PG&E, which is effectively having its decades-old monopoly on electricity ended by the program, is illegally coordinating with the union on the campaign, though Campos said he had no proof.
Hunter Stern, president of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, which is funding the Stop the Shell Shock campaign, said he doesn't want PG&E anywhere near the union's efforts. The union, which opposes CleanPowerSF in part because some electrical workers it represents could lose their jobs once the program takes effect, has not yet publicly documented how much it has spent on outreach. Stern said the amount is less than $100,000 and can't compete with the $1.4 million that the PUC has to spend.
"We will continue to use wise, cost-effective methods to make sure people know our information," he said. "The facts are the facts - this is a contract with Shell Energy."
Neal J. Riley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: nriley [at] sfchronicle.com Twitter: @realdealneal
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-to-get-cleaner-energy-and-a-battle-4323664.php
Corporate Shill For PG&E, IBEW 1245 Attacks "Clean Power" IBEW 1245 Opposed SF Labor Council Campaign For Public Power
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2013/02/pge-union-ibew-local-1245-continues-fight-against-cleanpowersf
PG&E union IBEW Local 1245 continues fight against CleanPowerSF
By: Chris Roberts | 02/18/13 7:36 PM
S.F. Examiner Staff Writer | Follow On Twitter @Cbloggy
COURTESY PHOTO
Logo for the Stop San Francisco Shell Shock campaign, who are working to stop the CleanPowerSF program the Board of Supervisors already approved.
A once-fine city besmirched with viscous, oily pollution, and a populace forced to shell out hard-earned green for filthy energy.
The picture painted by opponents of CleanPowerSF — a government program that will allow current PG&E electricity customers to purchase alternative, renewable power from Shell Energy North America — is not pretty.
The City is in the final stages of hashing out a $19.5 million deal with Shell that promises local power customers the ability to purchase costlier but cleaner energy from that company instead of PG&E. Residential electricity bills are projected to be between $11.54 and $94.10 more expensive per month.
The program has been fought tooth and nail by PG&E and its union, IBEW Local 1245, which has shown no sign of letting up despite the program’s approval.
“The Board of Supervisor’s [sic] plan to go into business with Shell to create ‘CleanPowerSF’ is a dirty deal that won’t create one new watt of green energy, will raise our power bills and send our local dollars to Shell in Houston,” claims online campaign Stop San Francisco Shell Shock, an effort of Local 1245 to sway public opinion against CleanPowerSF.
In September, the board approved the program in an 8-3 veto-proof vote, but it could be in jeopardy if too few San Franciscans sign up. Shell is due a $15 million payout if the contract is terminated within five years.
As of Monday, the Shell Shock campaign page had collected more than 1,300 supporters on Facebook and another 5,377 on its Change.org petition page.
It’s unclear how heavily the union is backing the effort to sway public opinion. The campaign has not filed financial statements with either the Ethics Commission or the secretary of state, both of which monitor political spending. Local 1245 did not respond to requests for comment.
croberts [at] sfexaminer.com
Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2013/02/pge-union-ibew-local-1245-continues-fight-against-cleanpowersf#ixzz2LMyPRYhf
Local 1245 Helps Defeat San Francisco Power Propositions
http://www.ibew.org/articles/02journal/0201/p5_1245.htm
January/February 2002 IBEW Journal
A major effort by Local 1245 members played a role in close victories over two ballot questions that would have municipalized San Franciscos power delivery system.
Im very proud of our members for the effort they made, said Local 1245 Business Manager Perry Zimmerman. They proved that our union will not just stand by when our jobs are threatened.
On Election Day, November 6, voters narrowly rejected Measure I, which would have created a Municipal Utility District to include San Francisco and nearby Brisbane.
But it took a close count of absentee ballots to confirm the defeat of Proposition F to create a San Francisco power authority. Proposition F called for the city takeover of Pacific Gas & Electric, which declared bankruptcy nearly a year ago. Proposition F would also have folded Local 1245 members into city unions.
Local 1245 leaders attributed the come-from-behind victory to the hard work of the members, many of whom would have lost jobs or would have been subject to demotions and lost benefits if the measures were successful.
We were three-to-one behind when we got into it, said Assistant Business Manager Jim McCauley. Were pretty proud of ourselves.
Throughout the campaign against Proposition F, Local 1245 members emphasized that the cost of acquiring PG&E would likely increase customer rates and jeopardize service reliability and worker safety. In addition to a thorough grassroots campaign among union members, the public parts of the campaign included placing billboards around town, appearing at news conferences and radio shows, distributing literature and visiting newspaper editorial boards.
McCauley, who coordinated the Local 1245 effort, successfully persuaded members of central labor councils not to endorse Proposition F and Measure I. McCauley said San Franciscos Local 6 was also a key ally. Local 1245, based in nearby Walnut Creek, used the Local 6 union hall in San Francisco for meetings and grassroots coordination.
They loaned us their hall and anything we needed, they did for us, said McCauley, adding that 1245 members used the Local 6 hall for phone banks and meetings before precinct walking.
San Francisco's Green Power Plan Still Stalled by Corporate Interests a Decade Later
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18347-considered-a-national-example-san-franciscos-green-power-plan-has-struggled-for-a-decade-to-overcome-opposition-from-monopoly-corporate-interests
Friday, 23 August 2013 00:00
By Darwin Bond Graham, Truthout | News Analysis
CleanPowerSF initially called for investing over a billion dollars in energy efficiency upgrades and publicly-owned renewable energy assets at thousands of sites in San Francisco. The plan's huge public popularity and technical authority have not protected it from attack and subversion.
In 2004, San Francisco committed itself to a revolutionary economic and environmental rejuvenation project centered on complete overhaul of the city's energy system. Or did it?
Back then, the plan called for investing more than a billion dollars in energy efficiency upgrades and publicly-owned renewable energy assets at thousands of sites within city limits. Voters authorized the issuance of revenue bonds to fund an unprecedented public energy investment program. The money for this gargantuan green energy and local jobs fund was to be sourced from the utility bills of ratepayers, a few pennies a month no longer siphoned off by the investor-owned utility as private profits.
Called CleanPowerSF, the idea was a reinvention of a municipal utility for San Francisco, a perennial sky's-the-limit goal of the city's progressives, but reinvented with new legal authority and new technologies that would not require the public to take control of costly and crumbling transmission lines and pipelines. Instead, the public would simply take over energy purchasing, and ratepayer funds, leaving the corporate utility in place to deliver the juice at a strictly regulated rate.
Then nine long years of war between environmentalists, labor, politicians, and the region's 800-pound gorilla utility corporation, PG&E, ground down the vision of San Francisco as a post-carbon, green jobs mecca into what might be a fatally compromised plan.
Instead of purchasing actual renewably generated electrons, San Francisco's proposed green power program, through several revisions, became heavily reliant on using opaque market credits that supposedly offset the pollution created by the electricity's true source: mostly gas-fired power plants. Instead of generating local jobs, the energy would be imported from distant sources, possibly exploiting non-union labor. This has not sat well with environmentalist and unions, two key constituencies in San Francisco's power structure.
On August 13, the local and truly green potential of CleanPowerSF was dealt its most recent body blow. Three of the city's five Public Utilities Commission (PUC) members voted down a proposal to set CleanPowerSF's rates. "Without set rates, the program can't move forward," Charles Sheehan, a spokesperson for the PUC, bluntly stated. What was supposed to be a mere regulatory decision based on technical judgment ended up being a political decision, and the balance of political power once again fell against green energy and local jobs.
But even with all these setbacks, the original vision of San Francisco's municipal power program is slowly coming back into focus, say advocates who have fought for the plan for over a decade. Grassroots activists say that regardless of its flaws, CleanPowerSF will still be the largest municipal green energy and local jobs project of its kind in the nation. Many see it as a model for other communities, a real path away from fossil fuels, and centralized, corporate-owned power plants.
That's if the political obstacles can be overcome.
Community Choice Aggregation - CCA
"San Francisco is kind of a litmus test for this thing," said Paul Fenn, president of Local Power, Inc., a consulting firm that helps cities devise clean energy plans. The "thing" Fenn refers to is community choice aggregation, a little-known authority that allows cities and counties to lump their residents into one pool to purchase bulk energy on the open market at the cheapest rates possible.
Community choice aggregation (CCA) is probably the most boring and benign-sounding name possible for one of the most radical policy mechanisms actually within reach today. Aggregation cuts middlemen utilities out of the process of deciding where electrical, gas, and heat energy come from. Most importantly, aggregation programs allow local communities to determine how ratepayer surpluses will be spent. Fitting the nonprofit, public purpose of aggregation, ratepayer surpluses are usually refunded as consumer savings. However, according to Fenn and other energy policy experts, the real transformative benefits of CCA - the litmus test, if you will - depends on whether ratepayer surpluses can be channeled into investments that are intended to green and localize the energy supply.
Community choice aggregation was Paul Fenn's brainchild. Deregulation of energy markets in the late 1990s wreaked havoc on states like California, but Fenn saw something few others did. Beneath the procorporate agenda that allowed companies like Enron to capture billions of dollars from the public and crash the power grid was a window of opportunity to create a radically democratic reorganization of the economy. It would require subverting the big energy corporations and utilities, however.
In the darkness of California's rolling blackouts, Fenn wrote Assembly Bill 117, California's CCA law, which was approved in 2002. The nation's largest corporate utilities were just then counting their record profits from a ruthless campaign attacking California's homeowners and businesses with "megawatt laundering" and "overscheduling" scams.
In 2007, Fenn incorporated his company, Local Power, as a vehicle to advocate for the transformative CCA vision. Fenn has become an evangelist of CCA's potential to eliminate carbon and nuclear energy sources, and to spur the creation of thousands of jobs through what he called the local buildout of renewable energy assets. His team at Local Power, Inc. frequently gives presentations to cities and rural communities considering aggregation and has been influential in Illinois and Ohio, where hundreds of municipalities have embraced the concept, including Chicago, the largest CCA in the nation. None of these aggregation authorities, however, are using their ratepayer surpluses to build local, green publicly-owned assets.
That's part of the reason CCA advocates have staked so much on San Francisco's public power plan. The logic goes like this: If San Francisco can't do it, who can? When it comes to exercising the full potential of the CCA model, no other city has been remotely as ambitious as the West Coast metropolis of 800,000 residents. At the same time, no other city has seen as bruising a political battle over its aggregation program as San Francisco.
Power Politics
"In theory, you have the political will to do this in San Francisco," said Fenn. "We also have critical mass of technical providers. Elsewhere, you don't have the strong grassroots political base, nor do you have the real agency to push it forward."
However, even with this political will and strong grassroots support, CleanPowerSF has faced enormous opposition. America's energy and utilities corporations, which are possibly the most potent forces in national and local politics, have seen CCA as an existential threat from the very beginning and have sought to kill the idea by any means. They have spared few resources in their anti-CCA campaign.
Eric Brooks, an organizer with Our City, is one of the grassroots advocates who has pushed the original vision of CCA in San Francisco since the mid-2000s. According to Brooks, there have been some allies in government, but many of the city's most powerful offices have tried to kill the municipal energy plan from the start.
"The reality is some of the staff that were in place at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission started opposing CleanPowerSF back in 2004, right as it was getting off the ground," said Brooks. "Much of the staff at that point had been put in place by Willie Brown," he added.
Brown, the former Speaker of the California State Assembly, ran San Francisco from 1996 until 2004. He was one of the most powerful mayors in the city's history, and still today exerts enormous influence behind the scenes, and through the legacy of his appointees and former staff, many of whom are still in government.
Among Brown's many corporate supporters while he was a state legislator, and especially while he presided over San Francisco, was PG&E. In the late 1980s, Brown steered PG&E to do business with favored firms owned by his friends, according to a 1995 report in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's not clear what the company got in return at the time, but throughout his tenure, Brown staunchly supported the utility and stacked the city's government with its allies.
In theory, PG&E is a strictly regulated monopoly overseen by California's Public Utilities Commission and by city agencies like San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission. In reality, these state and local commissions are characterized by regulatory capture, a process in which the tables are turned and the company obtains power over its government watchdogs. San Francisco Bay Guardian reporter Rebecca Bowe describes "social and professional ties running deep within California's insular energy community" that result in "cozy relationships" between regulators and industry executives.
PG&E also cultivates a vast web of political allies through its corporate-controlled foundation. PG&E distributes tens of millions annually to nonprofits and local governments. For example, in 2011 PG&E granted $23,000 to environmental organizations in Avila Beach to fund "marine education" programs. Avila Beach is just a few miles down the Pacific Coast from the company's nuclear power plant. PG&E has funded the select labor unions that have opposed CleanPowerSF and related green energy ballot propositions. In 2010, PG&E paid the San Francisco Fire Fighters $25,000, according to the PG&E Foundation's tax documents. In 2008, the Fire Fighters union campaigned against Proposition H, a bond initiative meant to fund clean energy investments through CleanPowerSF, with mailers claiming it would cause energy bills to "increase $400 a year, on average, for 30 years."
PG&E's energy supplies come primarily from gas-fired power plants and the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, although the company also controls an extensive network of hydroelectric power stations. PG&E's major energy generation investment to fulfill future demand is a 586-megawatt natural gas-fired station planned to come online in 2016, according to the company's most recent annual report. In 2012, PG&E booked $800 million in profit, and its stockholders received $746 million in dividends. With this kind of cash flow, the company and its executives aggressively lobby regulators and state and local legislators, especially in San Francisco.
Since CleanPowerSF was first approved in 2004, PG&E has showered $69 million in campaign contributions, mostly to fund ballot initiatives that would protect its monopoly position, but also to buy the support of various California politicians.
In a town with more than a few billionaires and tycoons, PG&E's executives and board members are comfortably among the city's elite. PG&E's board of directorsincludes representatives of America's largest and most powerful corporations and banks, including Pepsico, AT&T, Spectra Energy and the Rothschild banking firm. PG&E's CEO Anthony Earley, Jr. was paid $9.9 million in 2012, while the company's president, Christopher Johns, was paid $5.1 million, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
After Willie Brown was termed out of the mayor's office in 2004, PG&E retained him for "consulting services," with a quarter million-dollar contract. Purchasing Brown's long-term allegiance was the same as purchasing a portion of the city's sprawling bureaucracy of employees, especially those in the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the city's energy regulator to which the mayor appoints commissioners.
"Most people in the city understand that in some ways Willie Brown is still the mayor of San Francisco," said Brooks. "When Brown made appointments to decide who would lead the city's Public Utilities Commission, he made certain decisions based on what PG&E wanted. Mayor Newsom had the same staff as Brown and also made PG&E friendly-appointments, and the current mayor, Ed Lee, carried over many of Newsom's staff."
In 2010, Brown joined PG&E in an effort to pass Proposition 16. Prop 16 would have gutted the state law that allows cities to form CCAs. The same year, PG&E's corporate foundation made a $15,000 donation to the Willie L. Brown Center on Politics and Public Service, a nonprofit policy think tank set up by Brown a few years prior. Proposition 16 was PG&E's biggest political expenditure of all time. According to data from the California Secretary of State, the company spent $46 million on the effort. In spite of Willie Brown's assistance and the corporation's millions in advertising, the ballot initiative failed on election day.
Bruce Brugman, former publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the city's progressive newspaper and one of the main proponents of municipal power since 1969, calls Willie Brown the "ally and mentor" of current mayor Ed Lee. Brugman was one of the first to expose Brown's $200,000 deal with PG&E and has closely followed the city's political alliances as they morph over time. Lee, who has been in office since January of 2011, strongly opposes CleanPowerSF.
Eric Brooks believes this dynasty of mayors beholden to Willie Brown and PG&E has been the main impediment to CleanPowerSF.
"PG&E hates CleanPowerSF and wants to kill it," said Brooks.
In the Shell of the Old
As if PG&E's vehement attempt to destroy CleanPowerSF wasn't enough, the program's own proponents have had a difficult time crafting a plan they can all agree on.
Many advocates of the CCA concept who helped to establish CleanPowerSF have since become skeptics. They are increasingly wary of supporting CleanPowerSF as staff in the city's Public Utilities Commission have steered it away from a local buildout of renewables and toward a program that relies on renewable energy credits (RECs) and power purchases from large energy corporations, often sourcing "green" energy from industrial plants located hundreds of miles away.
"They have negotiated a contract with Shell Energy for a 30-megawatt purchase of renewable power on the open market," said Al Weinrub, coordinator of the Local Clean Energy Alliance. "This is not the kind of deal CCA advocates were in favor of back in 2004." Although Weinrub is unhappy with the current CleanPowerSF plan, he remains a firm believer in the potential of CCAs. Weinrub's organization is the hub of dozens of groups seeking to proliferate CCAs and other renewable energy development mechanisms across California. He worries that CleanPowerSF is being set up to fail.
CleanPowerSF's contract with Shell Energy North America, a subsidiary of the giant oil corporation, would supply the city's public power CCA with part of its total energy portfolio for a few years until the ambitious local buildout and efficiency upgrades are enough to fully support the city's energy needs. According to Brooks, the contract with Shell only accounts for around 5 percent of the energy that will ultimately be procured by CleanPowerSF through a local buildout. "The peak load in San Francisco is 800 to 900 megawatts," said Brooks. "Shell was just for 20-30 megawatts. It's a tiny piece of the program."
Even so, the prospect of paying Shell $19.5 million has many progressives bristling. They point to Shell's dismal human rights abuse record in Africa and elsewhere and Shell's full-blown commitment to developing oil and gas supplies that will destroy the planet's climate system (for example Shell's major Canadian tar sands mines) as just two reasons why doing business with the company runs counter to CleanPowerSF's goals.
"We have asked staff to find a comfortable compromise with this program in order to address the various concerns that have emerged from labor, to the various power mix, to the affordability of this program," said Francesca Vietor, a commissioner of the city's PUC, and strong supporter of CleanPowerSF. Part of that compromise is purchasing power from Shell, something Vietor has seemed no more eager to do than staunch critics of CleanPowerSF. Vietor and other proponents say, however, that it's a temporary means to an end.
"The key point here is that CleanPowerSF is going to use Shell as a bridge - the private outfit will deliver power generated at renewable facilities to the city's power operation, which will resell it to customers . . . for a while," explained Tim Redmond, the former editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, in a blog post last year about the program's political obstacles.
"The goal is to use the revenue stream from the sales of power to back bonds that will allow the city to build its own renewable energy system. Five, maybe 10 years down the road, San Francisco will have solar generators on city property (including large swaths of Public Utilities Commission property in the East Bay), wind generators, maybe at some point tidal generators, and will be able to sell cheap, clean local power to customers."
"Shell will be gone," concluded Redmond.
By extension so would PG&E, except for its role in upkeeping the wires and pipelines through which a portion of the total energy supply moves.
"We approved the contract knowing full well we were contracting with Shell. It was for a short term, a four and a half-year term to initiate CleanPowerSF," said San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos. Avalos, a progressive politician with strong support from labor and environmental groups, has championed CleanPowerSF. He is often seen around town at rallies urging action to address climate change, including a recent street protest during an Obama fundraising visit, organized by opponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
If CleanPowerSF is sabotaged and unable to launch a local buildout beyond the Shell contract, say activists like Weinrub, it could spell the end of the city's CCA experiment as residents and businesses opt out of the plan and stick with PG&E.
Because of this nexus of obstacles blocking the launch of CleanPowerSF, progressives have mobilized to keep the pressure on the city's Public Utilities Commission. According to Weinrub, a coalition of activists in the Bay Area convinced the city to hire Fenn's company, Local Power, Inc. to produce a detailed business plan based on CCA's original goals of local buildout. That plan, built on an incredible quantity of data, is about the most granular and complete map of CCA's radical potential to transform a city's energy footprint as has ever been produced.
For months the plan got no traction with PUC staff. Weinrub said the city just sat on it. When pressed by Weinrub and other grassroots organizations, the city's Public Utilties Commission expressed skepticism of the viability of CleanPowerSF.
Todd Rydstrom, chief financial officer of the city's Public Utilities Commission, has repeatedly warned city officials that he sees enormous risks in Local Power Inc.'s business plan for CleanPowerSF. Rydstrom believes that the billion-dollar local buildout will be bogged down by its own sheer scale, in particular, by the requirement that the city build the solar energy equivalent of 24 more Sunset Reservoir projects over 10 years. Sunset Reservoir is a 5-megawatt solar array, one of the largest municipal renewable resources in the United States, built atop one of San Francisco's water facilities. CleanPowerSF, as planned by Local Power, Inc., would also require construction of about 2,000 wind turbines in and around the city.
In March of 2013, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission let their contract with Local Power expire, leaving key parts of the plan unfinished. Even so, Fenn's last presentation to the city that month spelled out the basics of CleanPowerSF: $1.3 billion in purchases of 100 percent renewable energy on the market over 10 years. A $1 billion local buildout of renewable energy resources, mostly through small, distributed solar installations and efficiency upgrades, many of them "behind the meter." Being behind the meter means energy would be produced across thousands of rooftops and stretched through countless building and infrastructure upgrades, stored in batteries, distributed, and smartly transferred across the grid at peak demand moments.
"Balanced resources," said Brooks, describing the plan. "That's the vision. Every six months to a year we have to just keep hammering on the SFPUC staff."
Hammering didn't seem to be working when the city dropped Local Power's contract. Earlier this year, CleanPowerSF seemed to have been completely gutted of the local buildout originally at its center. PG&E meanwhile was recovering from its disastrous San Bruno pipeline explosion, which killed 8 and injured dozens in a small city just south of San Francisco. Emboldened again, the company was doing all it could to convince city officials to further water down CleanPowerSF. Meanwhile PG&E pressed the California PUC to approve its competing green energy program. That program, dubbed PG&E's "Green Option," would allow customers to pay a slight premium on their monthly bills for the privilege of claiming their lights and heat come from 100 percent renewable sources.
According to Weinrub, PG&E's green option relies on RECs, which are not only not green, but also would undermine the goal of building real renewable resources.
"This PG&E proposal is likely to inhibit the development of new renewable generating sources," said Weinrub. "For example, if ratepayers are lead to believe that a small price premium will result in 100 percent renewable electricity, they will not support pursuit of other truly renewable energy developments, such as the local energy efficiency and the new generation planned for CleanPowerSF’s nascent Community Choice program."
Instead, according to Weinrub, PG&E will purchase RECs to greenwash electricity it otherwise generates from natural gas power plants, large hydroelectric damns and its nuclear plant.
And while PG&E is pushing full bore to gain regulator approval for its Green Option, the electricians' union, allied with PG&E, has been busy plastering the city with ads claiming that CleanPowerSF will cause homeowners' utility bills to double. Calling this "San Francisco Shell Shock," the union launched a web site and online petitioncalling for CleanPowerSF to be nixed. PG&E and its allies have seized fully on CleanPowerSF's power purchase agreement with Shell as a propaganda weapon to destroy the program before it even begins.
After 10 years, San Francisco's green energy and local jobs vision never seemed so far away.
Crisis
The roller coaster of San Francisco energy politics took another unexpected turn during an August 3 public meeting, at which the city's new director of CCA programs, Kim Malcolm, gave a presentation that seemed to embrace the original vision of CleanPowerSF as a municipal green and local energy development engine. She told commissioners that she hoped to use the city's bonding authority to issue upward of $200 million in debt to finance a local renewables and efficiency buildout.
"They appear to be adopting Local Power's core recommendations - to build renewable generation and energy efficiency starting from the launch of the program," said Charles Schultz, a colleague of Fenn's. Schultz noted that $200 million is far below a billion, but he said it's ballpark of the kind of thinking that's required to make good on CCA's promise. "The public still thinks this is still just a Shell program," he added.
Malcolm, a former administrative law judge at the California Public Utilities Commission, took over CleanPowerSF earlier this year. "I think she came in and read all the work that's been done, the draft financial models, the risk reports, and she probably thought, this makes a lot of sense," said Fenn, who admitted he was surprised by her recommendations.
All of which may explain the next jostling turn on the roller coaster. On August 13, San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission voted three to two against setting rates for CleanPowerSF, effectively blocking it from moving forward with Malcom's stripped down, but significant, $200 million local buildout at its center.
Commissioners voting against the plan cited concerns about local jobs and higher utility bills as their major reasons for stalling CleanPowerSF. Angelo King, a member of San Francisco's environment commission verbalized these concerns in a public comment to the PUC just before their vote: "You need to make sure the metrics of your program show the economic impact and show jobs to those people that don't drive Priuses, that don't buy organic foods." King urged the city's Public Utilities Commission to block CleanPowerSF and force it back to the drawing board. "This program here, what we have now, is a downgrade from where the original stated goals were. When we originally looked at it, we said there were going to be jobs, in-city generation."
After the vote, various local newspapers described CleanPowerSF as being caught in limbo, stalemated in spite of the popularity of the idea and in spite of the veto-proof majority the city's Board of Supervisors used to approve the program last year.
The PUC's vote led supervisor John Avalos, to exclaim that the commissioners have precipitated a "constitutional crisis."
"It’s the whole political establishment coming down against public power," said Avalos. He added that he suspects the "invisible hand" of PG&E is behind the effort to delay the launch of CleanPowerSF, and he said that the Public Utilities Commission's unwillingness to green-light the program has created a conflict in which the will of the city's ultimate authority, the Board of Supervisors, is being blocked by a bureaucracy influenced too much by the city's wealthy corporate community.
The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce's CEO Bob Linscheid opined after the vote that "It is time to rethink the CleanPowerSF program," meaning to cancel it. A vice president of PG&E is on the Chamber's board of directors, and PG&E has long funded the business lobbying group.
"We all understand the politics of the situation," said Supervisor Avalos in a statement issued before the Public Utilities Commision's rate-setting vote. "The board of supervisors and every major environmental group in the city supports this plan. The mayor, PG&E, and its union oppose it. We can't afford any further political gamesmanship in an attempt to kill this program."
All Eyes on San Francisco
Advocates believe that CleanPowerSF will be a model for other cities to follow. Before casting her vote in favor of setting CleanPowerSF's rates, PUC commissioner Vietor called the program "an opportunity to lead the nation by example."
"The whole world is waiting for the us to get our act together," said Eric Brooks. San Francisco is the most important city right now for fighting the climate crisis because we have this opportunity to do the community buildout of green energy through CCA."
Officials outside of California concur.
"What San Francisco is doing is a really big deal," said Catherine Hurley. "The model of doing bonding to do the local buildout actually makes a lot of sense." Hurley is the sustainability programs coordinator for the city of Evanston, Illinois, and runs the city's CCA program. Evanston began aggregating its energy purchases in 2012, producing immediate savings for city residents. Ratepayer bills dropped 38 percent below what Constellation Energy, the region's corporate utility, charged. But Evanston isn't building local renewable assets.
According to Hurley, the Evanston CCA uses RECs ostensibly to provide customers with 100 percent renewable energy, even though much of the wattage is actually produced by coal-fired plants. That's true with virtually every existing CCA in the nation.
"I think this discussion of what role the local government should and could play in greening local energy supply is super interesting," said Hurley. "The San Francisco program could impact us. Our alderman, who are more green and progressive, they'll see it, and if it succeeds out there, they'll want to do it here.
For more information:
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-...
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