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

Words Do Matter

In a drawer of my closet is pretty pastel green T-shirt decorated with images of a wind turbine and a bicyclist and the words “alternative energy”.  I keep it because it was a gift from a family member who knew of my work in renewable energy.  I want to honor the loving thought.  I don’t wear it, because it conveys a message I don’t want to endorse.

Companies don’t market their products as the next best thing to someone else’s.  The association with the term “alternative lifestyles” was probably intended by whoever coined “alternative energy”. Alternative energy would be associated with the peculiar choices of a small, harmless minority.

The American public is generally unaware of the explosive growth of the global renewable energy industries over the past decade.  These industries invest in factories and jobs, and as we are quite well aware, factories, local businesses and jobs are not an alternative in the current economy.  Quite possibly the term continues to be used because it is how certain industries want us to think about energy sources that would reduce their market share.

I suggest that renewable energy advocates stop using the term alternative energy.  We should do so as a matter of reducing the impediments facing a whole spectrum of industries that needs to coalesce and stay on a fast growth curve, if they are to ultimately win the economic competition with politically powerful incumbents.  Those who prefer a more “in your face” approach could start using the term “non-destructive” as a more accurate substitute for “alternative energy”.

I’ve become more conscious of the negative images created by terms used by renewable energy opponents.  Each needs its own discussion.  Future blogs will take them on one by one.

– Gerry Braun

© 2012 The IRES Network

Smart, Clean and Local Energy Technologies for Davis

Smart, Clean and Local Energy Technologies for Davis

California leads the US in deploying smaller renewable power systems.  The economics are shifting to make the smaller systems cost competitive with the large “utility-scale” generators that have long dominated the power grid. Global market trends now favor decentralized renewable energy deployment, featuring thousands and even millions of individual renewable generators and energy storage devices. 

This transformation is forming the basis of a 21st century electricity system that will be increasingly decentralized, enabling local jurisdictions like Davis to have great flexibility.  We’ll be able to determine our sources and uses of energy so as to achieve our sustainability goals while keeping energy costs affordable. 

Community Choice: More Than Excellent?

Community Choice: More Than Excellent?

With a majority of eligible cities moving forward, Community Choice Energy In California has the vague feel of a third party movement, or even perhaps an insurgency.  As yet there is no acknowledged problem to which it presents an obviously necessary solution.  As yet there is no clearly articulated statement of the opportunity it creates both the state and its communities.  What is local jurisdiction mobilization to decarbonize local energy infrastructure needed?

Problem and opportunity.  Best to start looking at both sides of the coin.

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.

The Climate Emergency

The Climate Emergency

Terrorist attacks in Paris.  Climate talks in Paris.  Which got saturation level media coverage?  The terrorist attacks, of course.  They were about life and death. 

And yet, so were the climate talks.  A lot more lives.  A lot more deaths.  Just not good fodder for action movies and the daily news cycle.

What I know about the Paris conference I learned from colleagues who participated. 

Imagining Global Climate Action: The Patchwork Project

Imagining Global Climate Action: The Patchwork Project

We immediately notice, not one integrated project, but a lot, hundreds, thousands, of aspirational initiatives scattered about.  Generally, they aim to reduce “carbon footprints”.  For example, some California jurisdictions and agencies have goals to achieve some dimension of “carbon neutrality” by 2050, e.g. in the electricity sector.  Many local California jurisdictions have “climate action plans” targeting vehicle miles traveled and other transportation metrics.  In the buildings sector, California is working on “net zero” standards that would be applied to new residential buildings as soon as 2020. 

Poetry and Solar Energy

Poetry and Solar Energy

I realized it would have to be people individually choosing solar that would propel solar forward.  At the time solar resonated with people because they could imagine it as part of their lives, i.e. as an improvement.  My company was a monopoly.  It would get along just fine without improvements.  Yes, of course it could imagine changes in its business environment and needing to navigate them, but it couldn’t imagine actually initiating or creating the changes. 

Sustainability is Not an "Upgrade"

Sustainability is Not an "Upgrade"

VCAC representatives pointed out that on its current trajectory, The Cannery development will add significantly to the City’s carbon footprint unless a large percentage of initial home buyers opt for necessary upgrades.  They further pointed out that, while net zero energy can be cost-effectively achieved during initial construction, later retrofits aiming for net zero will be practically and economically unrewarding.  Incremental owner initiated solar array upgrades will be as much as two or three times more costly on a unit energy basis than their cost as part of the new construction process.

Let's Take Davis's Energy Future Seriously

Let's Take Davis's Energy Future Seriously

Last year the Davis City Council funded work to evaluate the city's long-term electricity service options.  The matter was tabled as the June election drew near.  Then this summer the city commissioned a resident satisfaction survey that, among other questions, asked if the city should form a municipal utility and purchase PG&E’s distribution system.[1] 46.5 percent of respondents said yes, 34.5 percent said no, and 19 percent were undecided. This result suggests it is time to resume serious public discussion of Davis’s energy future, based on relevant factual information and insights.

For and Against

For and Against

Some friends and I recently had a conversation about the future of a volunteer group we helped create.  We are concerned about environmental issues, and our group is part of a larger organization that has a much broader and diverse set of concerns.  So, how to proceed?  Advocate for specific action on specific issues, and someone in the larger group is inevitably going to see the issue another way.  Busy ourselves with innocuous individual good-doing, and the group loses cohesion if not a reason to exist.

I offered an observation that might be a good guideline if judiciously applied.  My friend, Mike Eckhart, created and developed the American Council on Renewable Energy into a broad based and politically potent coalition.  He led the effort according to a principle which flies in the face of our gut political instincts. 

Both/And

Both/And

Ten years ago, Susan Davis introduced me to the notion of “both/and”, or “both…and”.  It may be a measure of cultural imprinting, or a slow paced intellect, that it took me some time to grasp the full meaning.  “Both, and…” says don’t settle for the best of both sides of an either/or choice; rather recognize that there are other best sides to incorporate as well.  It is another way of saying, “You are both right”, an observation Solarex CEO, Harvey Forest, was fond of making in the midst of heated debates among his management team members.  But it goes further.  It is essentially a call to integrate, not differentiate.  Not surprisingly, you’ll find the call pervasive in Buddhist teaching, and in some Christian teaching as well, as in “We are many parts; we are all one body.”

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.