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&Itemi... 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./
