Gerald Braun
Can San Diego Drive Electricity Prices Down ...

For-profit California electric utilities charge high prices and take minimal climate action. Three state-regulated for-profits, PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E, charge two to three times more for the electricity they deliver than large city regulated counterparts charge.  The giant for-profits aim for carbon neutrality in 2040 or 2045.  Large locally regulated electric utilities, SMUD and LADWP, aim for carbon neutrality by 2030 or 2035. 

Can San Diego Drive Electricity Prices Down While Neutralizing Carbon?
Energy Transition
Gerald Braun
Integrated Implementation of Community Solar ...

California and other states need a way to capture the environmental and economic benefits of community solar. Other states have found a way. California’s CCE industry should ask the California legislature to consider allowing California CCEs to use all or a portion of annual CPUC mandated PCIA charges to put local renewable projects on an equal economic footing with projects that require new high voltage transmission capacity to deliver electricity locally. This will increase CCE capacity and flexibility to address local energy resilience needs and to provide equitable access locally to the environmental and economic benefits of solar electricity.

Integrated Implementation of Community Solar and Community Choice
Analysis, News, Energy Transition
Gerald Braun
Can Colorado Take Community Choice Energy to ...

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has been tasked by the Colorado legislature to recommend whether and how to implement Community Choice Energy (CCE).

California’s CCE experience has been rich in diversity and local/state decarbonization impact. California CCE generation portfolios are on track to become fully decarbonized in the next few years. The California CCE model was conceived and adopted two decades ago. It exploits economic options available at the time but allows little flexibility to capture economic, environmental and energy resilience benefits of local supply and infrastructure investment.

Nevertheless, Colorado and other states can adapt and expand California’s CCE model to facilitate 21st century energy policy implementation. Specific adaptations can result in greater reliance on local renewable electricity sources and electrification of local transportation. By adopting them Colorado can take CCE to the next level of public benefits and impact.


Can Colorado Take Community Choice Energy to the Next Level?
Op-Ed, Analysis
Gerald Braun
Community Choice Electricity is a Better Way to ...

If Colorado adopts community choice, it should set a high bar for future local energy collaboration and fair cost responsibilities. This will give Colorado communities a much better way to meet energy and climate challenges of the 21st century.

Community Choice Electricity is a Better Way to Meet 21st Century Challenges
Blog, Analysis
Gerald Braun
California Energy Democracy's Last Stand

California has ramped up a seventy-six billion dollar investment in all types of solar generation capacity over the past decade. California’s retail solar industry enabled half of the total investment. Rooftop solar has been a bright spot for California’s renewable energy transition even as state regulators and California utilities continue to make other energy democracy enablers - community choice, community solar, community microgrids - hard or impossible to finance.

Regulators are now considering rule changes that impose punitive “grid access” fees on rooftop solar adoption, plus drastic reductions in compensation for electricity that feeds into the grid from rooftop solar arrays. The future of energy democracy in California hangs in the balance.


[1] The proposed CPUC decision is not accompanied by case studies indicating how it will work out for ratepayers.

California Energy Democracy's Last Stand

Research

State Policies for Local Energy Collaboration

A year ago, IRESN launched a project to identify state policies that would kick-start purposeful city/utility collaboration.  Project advisors pointed out the crucial role counties could play.  So, the project title changed to “local energy collaboration”. The Local Energy Collaboration Project illuminated ten target areas for collaboration, plus some preliminary policy ideas for consideration by states, energy utilities, counties and cities.  A draft report is under review.  For the executive summary, click here.  For the full draft report, click here.  For a webinar and slide deck covering the high points, click here and here. 

Integrated Energy Policy.  We plan to complete the report review process while reaching out to states.  Our first state outreach step was to comment on the scope of California’s Integrated Energy Policy Report.  To read more, click here.

Local Collaboration for Energy Resilience and Sustainability

As the energy sector in the US decentralizes, decarbonizes, democratizes, demonopolizes and digitizes, city/utility collaboration will pay huge dividends.  But there is not yet strong, explicit policy support for it in most states.  State legislatures and agencies have close relationships with state regulated utilities and local jurisdictions.  So, state policy may be the key.  States have the necessary relationships and authorities to set expectations and conditions for city/utility collaboration. 

IRESN's project to inform state policy on the topic is progressing and on track to provide initial recommendations in early 2019.  To read more, click here. 

Net Positive Electricity: Insights from Home, Church and City Projects

Net Positive Electricity: Insights from Home, Church and City Projects

Net zero building retrofits were identified in a Cal-IRES report as a key element of a renewable energy roadmap for Davis, California. In the past year I’ve had opportunities to smoke the devil out of the details of this vision. I purchased a PV system for our home, negotiated a solar electricity power purchase agreement for our church, and worked with a few like-minded colleagues to advocate for applying net zero as a standard for a new residential development in the city. In parallel, in the 2013 legislative session our state senator, Lois Wolk, successfully carried legislation that carved out 20MW for the city in a bill that mandates 600MW of "solar gardens" state-wide.

Can Renewables and Natural Gas (NG) Help Each Other?

Can Renewables and Natural Gas (NG) Help Each Other?

The classical planning view would be that in an electric generation mix, higher capital cost/ lower fuel cost generators and higher fuel cost/ lower capital cost generators complement one another, resulting in a least cost generation mix.  There are also other complementarities, e.g. overlapping science and technology needs (think enhanced geothermal and natural gas fracking).  Likewise, there is a potential at least for shared infrastructure (think injection of bio-methane and later hydrogen from renewable sources into gas pipelines and distribution systems).

What is Renewable Energy Integration?

What is Renewable Energy Integration?

When we use the term “renewable integration” to describe IRESN’s focus, what do we mean? Integration with what?  In what context?  

IRESN has been active in certain major dimensions of renewable integration.  They are:

  • Project integration
  • Infrastructure integration
  • Money integration
  • Societal integration

Without some examples, these terms don’t help much either.  So, for example

Smart Cities and Community Choice Energy

Smart Cities and Community Choice Energy

IRESN Comments to the California Public Utilities Commission Hearing on  Community Choice Aggregation Issues, February 1, 2017

The on-going rapid expansion of Community Choice Energy (Community Choice) in California is a breakthrough opportunity for successful deployment of economic, efficient and environmentally responsible local energy resources into competitive energy markets.

Are Renewable Energy Subsidies an Unprecedented Budget Buster?

Are Renewable Energy Subsidies an Unprecedented Budget Buster?

Subsidies from government to new technologies or industries date back hundreds of years in the U. S. The purpose of subsidies is generally to give exciting new technologies a boost in helping fund the cost of starting up until its’ cost of production is competitive with older, less desirable methods. Subsidies keep prices for consumers below market levels or for producers above market levels, or reduce costs for consumers and producers. Subsidies have also been introduced to increase production of a product whose national need has increased due to war or other national calamity.

Energy Finance: A Brief History

Energy Finance: A Brief History

Looking back through the short history of man's use of and eventually dependence upon electricity illustrates the nature and complexity of this evolution, how it's organized and how it's financed. In California as in the US, mature, centralized electrical energy grid infrastructures exist. Transitioning to clean, climate friendly and smarter electricity systems means bringing innovative, capital intensive, and increasingly decentralized power sector infrastructure on stream.

Integrated Renewable Energy for Communities

Integrated Renewable Energy for Communities

(The following article by Gerry Braun was published on September 1, 2015 in Renewable Energy World.  It included content from the executive summary of an IRESN report entitled Integrated Energy Analysis for Davis, California.  Click here for the Renewable Energy World article and here for a pdf of the full report.)

Thanks to cost-effective rooftop solar electricity, new neighborhoods in California are generating their own electricity from the start.  Likewise, local grids serving settled communities are being strengthened by deployment of local sources, smarter end use, and electricity storage.  Regulators are considering new grid architectures that allow each local grid to be operated according to its unique blend of local and imported supply and evolving usage patterns.

Local Dollars for Local Energy

Local Dollars for Local Energy

In California[1] and the US, mature, centralized energy grid infrastructure exists.  So, does centralized, carbon intensive electricity supply infrastructure.  Transitioning to clean, climate friendly and smarter electricity systems means bringing innovative, capital intensive, and increasingly decentralized power sector infrastructure on stream.  National, state and local policy should recognize and address the implications for finance, particularly the need for investments that capture and optimize local economic benefits.

In this regard, we see an urgent need for policy research that informs movement toward a new balance of planning and investment between centralized (Washington, state capitols and Wall Street) and local.  Lacking local empowerment, we see decentralization occurring anyway as a natural evolution, with trial and error adding cost and extending time frames.

Doing the Work - 2014 Year End Report

Doing the Work - 2014 Year End Report

Set a goal, commit, make a plan, do the work, have fun.  Common sense that reminds me of Integrated Resources Network (IRESN) colleague, Ronnie Holland’s, approach to life.  Everyone, of course, does their work.  Not everyone is purposeful about the other four steps.  In his essay, “Headwork”, Edward Hoagland reflects on the notion of “work”.  He says that “work…can become second nature, and you can’t stop, don’t want to stop, don’t need to know who benefits – continuing with it for its own sake but with the destination of reaching other ears and minds.”

That might just sum up IRESN’s 2014.  We set goals, committed, made a plan, and 2014 was about doing the work.  We had some fun.  Not much time left for IRESN communications.  Making more time for communications will be a 2015 goal.