REMINDER: Crucial LAFCo Hearing today for CleanPowerSF! 2pm, SF City Hall, Rm 250 PRE-MEETING STRATEGY SESSION: 1pm, Celtic Coffee 142 McAllister Street @ Hyde (near Civic Center BART - see http://www.celticcoffeecompany.com/ for directions) SEE EMAIL BELOW FOR TALKING POINTS: previously I wrote: Hi all, Sorry in advance for this being a little long, but it is very important that you all clearly understand what is going on with San Francisco's CleanPowerSF project, which is now close to a final contract, but is in immediate jeopardy, and is one of the -top- reasons that PG&E placed Prop 16 on the ballot. The meeting last night with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission was, to put it bluntly, unreal. The SFPUC once again showed itself to be utterly incapable of delivering a valid workable contract and project plan for CleanPowerSF, at or below PG&E prices, making it absolutely clear that CleanPowerSF will fail unless the LAFCo (Local Agency Formation Commission - where we have Supervisor allies) takes a much stronger role this Friday, and hires Local Power to do the heavy lifting on the design of the contract and final work plan. Among the many outrageous points that the SFPUC presented to us last night were: 1) The SFPUC does not intend to deliver a contract to the Board of Supervisors until June 8th, which is of course far too late to get any possible fast track approval of a signed contract, before the public votes on Prop 16! 2) The SFPUC has not mandated local renewable and efficiency installations in the contract at all, and instead intends to pursue separate independent contract bids for any actual installation projects. This will make it nearly impossible for CleanPowerSF to be well designed enough to properly pay for itself, and deliver large scale renewables and efficiency with the thousands of local green jobs that come with these, all rapidly enough to combat the climate crisis. It is very important to note, in the seven years that the SFPUC has spent pulling every trick in the book to delay the 360 megawatt roll-out of the CleanPowerSF program; that over the same time period, using weak independent separate contract bids, the SFPUC has installed only 10 megawatts of electricity generation, and all of that was in overly expensive stand alone solar projects, over half of these privately owned, which have collectively failed to meet strong local hiring standards for green jobs. 3) The SFPUC intends to roll out CleanPowerSF with an outrageous 8% rate increase for each year in the first three years of the program! This is absolutely absurd and would mean that no commercial customers would join the program, causing it to completely fail. Very strangely, even though we have now gotten the SFPUC to agree to pursue a -20- year contract/payback period in order to greatly lower program start up costs, the charts that the SFPUC staff showed us last night to justify a whopping 8% rate increase were based on a -15- year, not 20 year, pay back period... 4) The SFPUC once again stated the desire to phase in the customer base of the program a little bit at a time; a suggestion which almost all other independent contractors and grassroots organizations have told the SFPUC over and over for the last 7 years straight is not an acceptable strategy for CleanPowerSF, and will likely make it economically too weak to survive. This poor strategy would also allow PG&E to much more easily target specific groups of customers receiving opt out notices with negative advertising, and if Prop 16 passes, would enable PG&E to force all customers who are not included in the program at the beginning (likely 80% of them) to face an impossible two thirds public vote to join CleanPowerSF. 5) The SFPUC made clear that it has completely failed on multiple fronts to use a strong project financing strategy which will allow CleanPowerSF to roll out at the start with a full renewables and efficiency portfolio which will deliver clean electricity at the same or lower rates than PG&E (instead of rates that are 8% higher per year). The SFPUC revealed last night: a) It has still not designed the program to be built with the self funding renewable energy revenue bonds that were passed by San Francisco voters in 2001 (known as 'H' bonds) and which were specifically designed to enable the rapid construction of projects like CleanPowerSF; this even though contractors and organizers have repeated over and over again for 7 years that these bonds are -fundamental- to the success of the program. b) In 2007 the law firm Nixon Peabody informed the the SFPUC and the LAFCo that it had discovered a mechanism for delivering the -very- low cost power which San Francisco generates at the Hetch Hetchy dam -directly- to San Francisco electricity customers instead of having to expensively wheel that power through PG&E's for-profit delivery mechanism. This would save the entire CleanPowerSF project huge amounts of money; savings that would make it much easier for the program to meet or beat PG&E prices. And yet the SFPUC revealed last night that it has not pursued this obvious winning strategy at all. c) The SFPUC has still failed to do the diligent work necessary to get the California PUC to transfer -from- PG&E -to- the City, local control of key energy efficiency funds (millions already paid for by San Francisco customers) so that they can be used to build large scale energy efficiency projects in the CleanPowerSF program. This too would make it -much- easier for CleanPowerSF to succeed and the SFPUC has completely failed to secure these funds for the City. It is very important to note that on all of the fronts noted above, the group Local Power (which is headed by clean energy guru Paul Fenn and which -created- the model for CleanPowerSF called Community Choice Aggregation) has presented the solutions to these problems to the SFPUC -repeatedly- throughout the entire 11 year history of pursuing CleanPowerSF, and the SFPUC has both utterly failed to listen and repeatedly failed to bring Local Power on board, to work out these and other vital aspects of the program. I and others at last night's meeting called out all of these shortcomings in the SFPUC 's plan, and then indicated that we could no longer trust SFPUC staff to get this right (especially with less than three weeks to go before the election) and stated emphatically that the SFPUC -must- therefore allow the LAFCo and Local Power to now step in and take the lead on the contract process in order to get it back on track. The SFPUC staff's only response to this demand was to make a legal claim that the LAFCo cannot force them to include Local Power in the contract negotiation process. They essentially said "You can't make us..." Those of you who haven't been following this process closely for the last several years should know two key points; 1) the LAFCo can -indeed- bring Local Power, as an advisor to its own staff, fully into the contract negotiations, and 2) this has been done before at -crucial- moments in the history of the fight to pass CleanPowerSF; most notably- Five years ago, when the SFPUC staff (even after being expressly directed to do so by the SF Board of Supervisors) was refusing to draft a full implementation plan for CleanPowerSF, Local Power -for free- drafted the massive visionary project plan and gave it to the LAFCo, and this led to the official plan for CleanPowerSF which was unanimously passed in 2007 by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. and- Last year, when the SFPUC was about to release a call for CleanPowerSF contract bids that would have completely left out the local renewable energy and efficiency components of the program as -optional- Local Power was hired to step in and re-write the call for bids so that it gave mandatory favorable bid points for companies including large scale renewables and efficiency in the program from the start. Now, the new and even more profound crisis of the SFPUC's total failure to design a strong contract, and one with mandated local renewables, efficiency, and local green jobs, -demands- that we once again bring in Local Power to take the lead in the contract negotiations. It is absolutely crucial that we as organizers go to the SF LAFCo meeting this Friday, 2pm, at San Francisco City Hall room 250 to insist that the LAFCo put the SFPUC in its place, and again hire Local Power to assume the -strongest- possible role in the contract negotiations from this point on. We should also insist that the LAFCo send an official communication to the SFPUC that the LAFCo in the firmest possible terms expects the SFPUC staff to follow the advice of the LAFCo and allow Local Power to lead the contract negotiation process. This is our best shot at getting the large scale local clean energy and green jobs which have been fought so hard for since 1999 in San Francisco. I'll send a hearing minder about LAFCo tomorrow morning so you have that info in a short email. peace and solidarity Eric Brooks 415-756-8844