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

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.

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.