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

Local Gas and Electric Collaboration

Local Gas and Electric Collaboration

It is time to recognize that a successful transition to a future decarbonized and more secure and resilient local infrastructure can’t be done at the state level or in silos at any level.  It will depend on the expertise and capacities of both natural gas and electric utilities and their collaboration with counties and cities if it is to proceed as the fastest possible pace. 

Natural gas utility collaboration with cities and counties must receive policy attention at least comparable to collaboration involving electric utilities.  Current levels of reliability and resilience provided by natural gas utilities must carry forward continuously as hydrogen emerges as an enabler of the energy sector transition of the 21st Century. 

A Collaborative Vision for Clean Local Energy  

In case you missed it, collaboration is in vogue these days, despite, or perhaps because of, partisan divides. 

Collaboration among public institutions is essential when change is required.  Especially when the institutions are mutually dependent. For example, if counties and cities encourage the adoption of new technologies that use or produce energy locally, planning and delivery of energy utility services is affected. If energy utilities offer programs that engage their customers in changing the energy infrastructure inside buildings or vehicles, local governments must account for these changes in their code enforcement, project permitting, and non-energy infrastructure planning and maintenance activities.

What’s seems to move the local carbon footprint needle best and fastest is the cumulative effect of a lot of individual decisions US families and businesses are mostly free to make.  At a minimum they require good credit and modest, prudent initiative.  Local governments and energy utilities can make such decisions easier or harder.  Easier if they collaborate.  Much harder if they don’t.  What would local energy collaboration look like if it became the norm across the US?  To read more, click here.

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.

The Gathering Storm

The Gathering Storm

What is the best mix of locally generated and imported energy from the perspectives of cost and resilience?  The answer will be different for every community.  Should we wait for the long-promised “smart electricity grid”?  Or should our counties and cities take up the task of making local infrastructure not only smart but technically and economically well-integrated?  If so, they will be wise to collaborate with incumbent energy utilities.  And with local families and businesses as well.

Doom and Hope

Doom and Hope

The brilliant scientists who created nuclear weapons were appalled by what they had made possible.  Nuclear war.  During the Cold War, they saw humanity inching steadily toward self-annihilation.  They started a movement among themselves to lobby for nuclear sanity.  They used the image of a clock showing minutes to midnight to make plain the imminence of existential risk.  It was on the cover of every issue of their monthly magazine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The minute hand moved back a bit when disarmament negotiations showed progress.  It moved forward when tensions rose, or nuclear sabers rattled.  We called it the Doomsday Clock.  Clearly, humanity was in uncharted territory, master of its own fate and hostage to its worst instincts.

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. 

Local Energy Collaboration: An Emerging Priority

Local Energy Collaboration: An Emerging Priority

There is anecdotal evidence of the need for collaboration. For proponents of local clean energy resources there is an even more basic question. Why energy resources that are both clean and local? The case is compelling.

Simply put, local¹ clean energy resources are happening, unevenly around the world, mostly, except for California, outside the US. They come in many sizes. So do utilities. So do cities. Maybe we need a common denominator if we are to connect dots more strategically and less anecdotally.

Cities and Utilities: Removing Obstacles to Collaboration

Cities and Utilities: Removing Obstacles to Collaboration

In an era of big data, the trade-off between local economic optimization and utility system-wide optimization can be readily informed by data-driven economic analysis. There is no motivation to do the analysis now because no adjustments are possible. But if local energy franchise agreements were mandated by the state to consider the possibility of city/utility collaboration on local economic and carbon footprint reduction goals, the parties would be motivated to engage.

In California, state regulators are starting to assert jurisdiction over Community Choice business planning, citing the need for consistency between the supply plans of all energy service providers. Does this solve a real, on-going problem?

Community Choice: Shaping Future Energy Ecosystems?

Community Choice: Shaping Future Energy Ecosystems?

(The following article is based on a presentation by Gerry Braun at the California CCA Forum in Los Angeles California on May 19, 2015)

Decentralized energy technologies will transform the electricity sector over the next couple decades.  Community choice aggregators (CCAs) can be leading agents of the transformation to the extent they push for, and secure, the freedom to transform themselves.  The extent to which they evolve to take a more and more integrative role may determine whether local clean energy resources are developed or held back. 

States lacks the capacity to account for decisive and locally specific factors affecting on-site and community based energy supply.  Meanwhile increasing numbers of local jurisdictions are aiming for sustainability and resiliency in their goals and plans.  In order to follow through they must have policies and programs in place that are responsive to on-the-ground energy trends and opportunities in their communities.

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.

Fork in the Road

Fork in the Road

People who want change have two options, and the “obvious” one gets a lot of attention.  If you see a big problem and its bothering you, it’s natural (obvious is probably not the right word) to hope or want a powerful organization to use its capacity to solve it.  This rarely works, because big organizations, including and especially our national and state governments, already have plenty of problems to work on.  They already outsource most of their problems to smaller organizations.

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).

Advocacy and Integration

Advocacy and Integration

Ten years ago, Susan Davis introduced me to the notion of “both…and”, aka “both/and”.  It may be a measure of cultural imprinting, or a slow paced intellect, that it took me some time to fully grasp the full meaning.  “Both, and…” 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.  And wouldn’t it be a relief just now if our Congress started to do a little more integrating and a little less differentiating.