[Sustain] My Community Choice Primer In SF Bayview

[Eric Brooks]

Hey all,

My opinion/report piece to prime the public on the benefits of Community 
Choice, is now out in the San Francisco BayView. This paper has a wide 
readership in the Eastern neighborhoods of San Francisco.

see below or 
http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=237&Itemid=15

Neighborhood-based electricity for neighborhood-based democracy 	Print 
<http://www.sfbayview.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=237&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=15> 
	E-mail 
<http://www.sfbayview.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=237&itemid=15> 


by Eric Brooks   
Wednesday, 27 June 2007
Click to Enlarge 
<http://www.sfbayview.com/images/stories/20070627/solarpanel1062707.jpg>
Click to Enlarge 
<http://www.sfbayview.com/images/stories/20070627/solarpanel1062707.jpg>
Community Choice will bring solar power to a roof near you and stop 
plans for another polluting power plant in BVHP. Pack the next SF PUC 
meeting Tuesday, July 10, 1:30 p.m., in Room 400, City Hall.
New legislation from the Board of Supervisors could soon help free our 
neighborhoods from corporate, state and federal influence.

On June 19, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed legislation 
that will build enough public solar, wind and energy efficiency projects 
to power San Francisco on 50 percent clean, local, renewable energy 
within the next decade. Called Community Choice, the project also puts 
an end to San Francisco's century long dependence on PG&E for its 
electricity supply, by allowing the City to bypass PG&E and make its own 
energy purchases.

The faster this project is built, the sooner the City will be free from 
state and federal agencies which are forcing us to keep polluting fossil 
fuel power plants belching their toxics in our communities.

For decades, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the 
California Independent System Operator (Cal ISO) have forced San 
Francisco to maintain -- and even plan more -- fossil fuel burning 
electricity plants on the Southeast side of the City under the guise of 
maintaining local independence from the threat of electricity blackouts 
and shortages. While the need for such increased local fossil fuel based 
electricity is highly questionable, the state and federal governments 
have repeatedly gotten away with perpetrating their fiction.

This trickery has enabled Cal ISO and the staff of the San Francisco 
Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) to continue stubborn plans to build 
yet another polluting natural gas power plant in the Bayview, supposedly 
in order to shut down three diesel generators at the Mirant Corp.'s 
nearby Potrero power plant.

However, in the same time that it would take to erect the natural gas 
plant -- which only matches the power capacity of the Mirant generators 
-- the Community Choice project will install non-polluting solar, wind 
and efficiency measures that will have more than twice the capacity of 
those diesel dinosaurs, not only making the new natural gas plant and 
the diesel generators completely unnecessary, but also enabling the 
partial or even total shutdown of the final existing natural gas plant 
in San Francisco, which is also housed at Mirant's Potrero site.

Indeed, the SFPUC commissioners have begun to reconsider -- and lean 
toward halting -- the construction of the new natural gas power plant, 
even in the face of objections from their own petulant staff, the Cal 
ISO and FERC. If we, the people, keep up the pressure on those 
commissioners, we may soon deal a death blow to that ill begotten power 
plant.

But shutting down polluting power plants is not the only benefit of 
Community Choice. The true magic of the renewable energy project is that 
it will decentralize electricity production in San Francisco so that 
much of our electricity comes from solar panels and wind turbines all 
over and around the City. This means that in the case of an earthquake 
or other Katrina-like disaster, entire neighborhoods -- and key 
facilities like hospitals -- will have their own independent power 
supplies, protecting us from some of the worst consequences of such a 
disaster.

And it gets even better. Supervisor Chris Daly is preparing to introduce 
an ordinance that will direct that every time we open up the ground and 
city streets for other purposes, the City will also install public power 
cables and high capacity internet lines, meaning that in the space of 15 
years, every neighborhood will not only have its own solar and/or wind 
power but will also have the wires on which to deliver that power to its 
own people -- and its own public communications lines through which to 
share a strong open democratic dialog.

The implications are powerful. The further Community Choice and the Daly 
measure proceed, the more autonomous San Francisco neighborhoods will 
become in their energy production and use; and while people's socialism 
is not exactly just around the corner in San Francisco, these public 
power measures could lay its foundation. Such autonomy could be a 
platform on which to secure the type of directly democratic neighborhood 
council structures that are at last arising in Venezuela's Bolivarian 
Revolution, to challenge the neo-corporate elites who have been 
dominating marginalized and colonized communities of the world for 
centuries.

With the poor and people of color being driven out of the City in record 
numbers and at record speeds, such autonomy cannot come too soon, and so 
we should do everything we can to accelerate the progress of these 
community energy projects.

But as one might imagine, there is at least one large corporation that 
doesn't agree: PG&E.

Since shortly before the Community Choice project passed, PG&E has begun 
openly manipulating to stop it from succeeding. PG&E knows that the more 
our neighborhoods and cities gain their own panels and power lines, the 
more its toxic profits sink into the dust.

Over the past few months, PG&E has held repeated joint press conferences 
with Mayor Newsom announcing empty renewable energy promises that are 
speculative and tiny compared to the ready-for-action Community Choice 
plan -- all in order to trick the public into believing that we don't 
need Community Choice because PG&E will supposedly give us renewable 
energy. Even more recently, PG&E began spouting the companion fiction 
that if we accept Community Choice, we will pay high prices for our 
electricity.

In reality, we will pay less. PG&E's statewide plans rely heavily on 
power from nine new polluting natural gas power plants that it intends 
to build in California. And because natural gas is running out on this 
planet just as oil is, there will be shortages of -- and wars over -- 
that natural gas, making its price fluctuate wildly and eventually 
skyrocket, continuing to devour our community's tax base as the U.S. 
pays for its perpetual fossil fuel-grabbing war machine.

Our best protection against such a continued grim energy future is the 
clean, cheap solar and wind power that we will gain from projects like 
Community Choice.

So when PG&E starts to sound the false alarm that we will lose money if 
we don't stick with their toxic electricity, simply don't buy its lies.

And instead fix your eyes on a Bolivarian future.

/Eric Brooks is a local grassroots organizer. To learn more about 
Community Choice, visit http://communitychoiceenergy.com./



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