Community Choice - what other choice is there?

This week was a very interesting one in terms of activity and dialogue around CCA. First, on Wednesday, the LCEA held their first Oakland CCA workshop, featuring Robert Freehling of Local Power, Jay Hermon of REC Solar and Kriss Worthington from City of Berkeley. We heard 3 good presentations from different viewpoints - environment / economic (Robert), industry / labor (Jay), and political (Kriss) - supporting CCA and urging us to work together to lobby local electeds to make sure it stays on the agenda. The energy in the room was great! Hopefully we will have a video to link to sometime in the next month showing some of the interviews the videographer did for us.

Also, this morning there was a meeting at Apollo Alliance, which I attended, where Robert again spoke in favor of CCA and was followed by Hunter Stern, business representative from IBEW (Electrical Workers) Local 1245, who spoke against it. The dialogue was at times very technical - which it sometimes needs to be, because CCA is complex - but at the same time showed clearly where views diverged. Basically, there is a fundamental mistrust by IBEW (and others) of CCA because of the perceived risk inherent in moving away from the monopolisitic, "stable" model that PG&E has been working under (Stern) to a more "deregulated" model like CCA where power contracting gets outsourced to an outside vendor (Freehling). What was left out of this discussion, in my opinion, is that the outsourced vendor can be "regulated" just like PG&E is, if you simply dictate they must provide a certain percentage of renewable power. Credit to Brian Beverige for bringing up this important point.

Finally, I picked up an article from the Associated Press concerning global warming and new predictions of sea level rise. The University of Arizona studied USGS maps and interviewed 2 dozen scientists to predict the exact effect of a sea level rise in America. They predicted different times - between 50 and 150 years - when global warming will cause sea level to rise 1 meter, threatening the entire coastal economy (think shipping), wetlands, freshwater, and ecosystems. Among other places, Kennebunkport, North Carolina's Outer Banks, and Jamestown would get washed away. This just underscores to me why we need to start "taking a few chances" now on plans like CCA that seem a little radical, but at least offer the opportunity to really blow the doors on the "old way of doing business" in terms of producing energy from fossil fuels.

Vermicomposting videos

I found a really cool video site on vermicomposting. It was co-produced by a guy who volunteered to capture video at a Sierra Club renewable energy event next week - Jay Dedman. Also I learned something - gotta give my worms some sand!

p.s. To run the video, I chose to use the "flash player" plug-in.

Documents on Community Choice Aggregation

In preparation for the upcoming workshop on September 26th about Community Choice Aggregation, I decided to post the draft studies from Navigant Consulting as well as my analysis of them (at least, those which I have had time to read). Here are the documents:

1. Base Case Feasibility Study Part 1, April 2005 (pages 1-70)
2. Base Case Feasibility Study Part 2, April 2005 (pages 71-142)
3. My analysis of the Base Case Feasibility Study (8 pages)
4. Draft Report - East Bay Cities CCA Business Plan, Nov. 2006 (85 pages)

I found it informative to go through the base case feasability study. It does take a lot of the guesswork out of this concept. One myth about CCA, that I realized is untrue, is that CCA is somehow about "privatization" of power. CCA is in fact the opposite: it is about taking authority away from investor-owned utilities. CCA gives power back to the cities, to determine their own energy future, to contract for energy generation, and to structure policy and issue bonding so that small, independent providers are able to "get in the game," by providing energy from renewable sources. In other words, it's a means to create a demand for wind turbines, solar voltaic energy, and other renewable sources.

Alameda Magazine article on worm composting

My friend Wanda Hennig recently contributed an article to Alameda Magazine on worm composting in the area. See if you can find my name in there ....