who has been directly involved with local governments that we're trying to persuade to take control of their energy destiny through a policy you may have heard of here in the bay area called community choice aggregation today the city of san francisco you may have heard is breaking away from p g and e it's seeking to re localize its energy supply through solar wind other technologies to the north and north side of the county also has recently approved the formation of a similar authority under the same law which some people call c c a community choice aggregation now we're here today to really talk about  the movement as it stands in the united states c c s been going on for about fifteen years now and has grown considerably and we've came in come into this  whole problem of climate change through it effort to engage local communities local democratic officials and local bureaucrats to create the critical mass that is necessary for government to make a move like this to break away from a p g and e we want to talk not just about the successes but also some of the frustrations  challenges that we have met and the three of us really have been involved in this struggle to realize the democratic ideal in a sense for a number of years and in julius case she brings a death of experience with with local politics having run a bunch of different local and state campaigns on campaign for proposition two twelve which narrowly lost it was the most radical campaign finance reform measure attempt in the united states that time also ran the national canvas for the purpose the public interest research groups back in the ninety's so she got a lot of experience attempting to organize local communities at the grassroots level people coming in and volunteering people canvassing door to door but also the local government this on the other hand charles schultz is a development director for local power and he in the last couple of years has been intimately involved in working with local officials that are interested in implementing energy localization or greening their power supply becoming community choice aggregators and so he's been very involved both with  the local officials and public hearings making decisions about how they want to to implement but also the local bureaucrats who are in charge of policy definition in many cases are implementing policy and having a lot of control over the outcomes and so he's had a lot of experience with just that specific effort and the nuances and the vagaries of of bringing innovation to cities so  with that you know i'd like to i guess to throw it to you charles i mean just the on the first level you know we've got to clearly a movement and so there's a success there you know and we would want to get to underplay the success of community choice because it has been a success and it sounds pretty interesting i think that you know my experience which is obviously much shorter period of time that i've been working on this than either you or julia i've encountered when you encounter bureaucrats you know before this thing kind of took off and this is probably very common across the country very constrained what they think is possible what they can do so sometimes they get a mandate from the populace that they want to do new things and then they've got sort of no way of achieving any of those goals and there's no outlet for it and so you know specifically one city and illinois they were talking to didn't have the lots of like university town like berkeley had lots of sort of green goals and things like that when i brought up the side the if community choice a we gave seemed just crazy we just you know something that they were interested in and you didn't really even want to invest any time to kind of understand and then you know in eighteen months  there was this kind of huge spread of community choice aviation in illinois not to the point at which in just two years you went from you know a little news story about you know what town  fifteen hundred people and then also oak park i guess you know probably led the way there as well and they had some green some environmental goals as well all of a sudden chicago is a community choice every major metropolitan center in the state is a community choice education so you know about what seven hundred eight hundred cities just in illinois two thirds of the state dept right at least in terms of electrical demand you're higher than that so now you have a situation where all of these new things become possible and that is just brings up different sets of questions that i think this is something that that maybe maybe you know your experience of politics speaks to so you get this victory and then what do you do with it what do you what do you do with the opportunity so it's really it's great to see but that's where you kind of get into the next is there is really in the history of politics there is the history of this stop or you know do you see that in politics how particularly in a grassroots organizing vironment how opportunities if you asked well i think also you can see you referred to jerry brown's campaign and one of the interesting elements of that campaign was that and when you taught me that campaigning for something and then implementing and or governing are two very different ideas and we we ran that campaign in a very localist platform very grassroots  huge amount of involvement but at the point at which jerry was elected the implementation of those ideas was a much more modified and moderated version of what we had actually campaign on and i think as it relates to community choice community choice is not a simple or small idea it's not the sort of idea that is often implemented at the local level in the sense that it's not not at all the same thing is you know putting solar on the roofs of the schools or putting a windmill somewhere it is a fundamental transformation of how energy is distributed in this country it's moving from corporate centralized top down excited about that the activists the people who want to support this to to green your energy supply to control your energy just supplied to remove it from the private corporate sphere into the public sphere is enormously exciting but implementing it even comprehend that there's not in some cases and you know that they can't even see the opportunity that they have because there isn't an idea that they would even have such an opportunity so they so i think sometimes it's very confusing for bureaucrats to imagine what is possible with with the opportunity to have you know we have been at this point a lot of listeners are thinking what is the subject community choice what an deregulation back in the early ninety's the the energy corporations that had formed around pipelines and were authorized under federal law to build  power plants along their gas pipelines got large enough and got conspicuous enough and prestigious enough because of they were they owned all the new power plants that their political influence was sufficient to push deregulation through and this on what i would call going on below allowed for community choice laws to be fielded during that debate and in the states and so today a quarter of the united states is in terms of the energy consumption is under these community choice laws illinois was mentioned but also california ohio new jersey massachusetts and currently five percent of the united states population is being served by these entities so it's  marginal idea anymore but emerged as a marginal idea in our arcane back room invite political and please describe it structure for a moment so in this case for the five percent of america the people that control the decisions about how their energy is procured are now their local elected officials and revenue happening in a boardroom in some corporate headquarters that cetera the locus of those decisions and how the future that deal in token actions often don't mean to beat up on them too much but the the the other part of it is when has this kind of ship happened before in terms of the change in the power supply chains in the franchise the thousand cities are under service covering five percent of population so here we have the basis of a move that if so many energy customers had been switched through some other mechanism i'm sure it would be better known but the fact is that in the cold war america community mission or g is is playing with communist fire and so the politics of it into conflict with utilities and became controversial and in the context of the controversy p g any feel that prop sixteen tried to try to smash community choice two years ago spent seventy million dollars on trying to get it passed failed and so today you have this bay area centric revolt but it isn't just the bay area to it's not just sonoma county marin county and san francisco county but have already built into their sort of planning documents and and that's where there's already a different stages of discussion about you know making this happen in a place like moderate santa cruz sampl becomes not will this happen something really we only imagine that someday maybe the bay area would would do so becomes a service well now it is becoming that but what are they going to do with it you know and we're going to get localize the energy supply they have just put out received bids and approved a short list of suppliers from east coast utilities to and to sort of sell a green product they're expecting rate parity or discount for this green or more local service that's a revolution that's not something that happens anywhere ok it's happening here now that's very important and so no but just announced this news last week the city of san francisco which initially lead this effort is now really mired in controversy with strong opposition from p g and e which is headquartered in san francisco and views it as a kind of if you want to call it a a losing face and has really fought against community choice there but there again the approach is what they call the local build out which means localization not just greening but it's also focused on allowing customers to own their power to to open the utility service to customer ownership not just a physical localization not just to community based service not just to convey a community service or a green service greener power across the board at a competitive price or to choose a green premium product where they're paying some supplier a premium for one hundred percent renewable electricity but they're not offering ownership they're not significantly localizing they are building renewables in california and they're building a small amount of photovoltaics in maren they say they're going to localize in the future more and that's their goal to do opportunity on the table politically for the bay area and for california through a disruption of the utility system not through regulation of the utility system but competitive by pas to innovate and not incremental around energy and it's this opportunity that we want to explore and today and in particular our next segment will be getting into  the some of the difficulties faced in the opportunity but at the national level you have in comparison  and a total failure of policy so we are in a sense in the center here in the bay area of but that might be able to perform  other related pollution and other problems relating to the central production generation and distribution of electricity meant that it would be very very difficult to confront that entity in an either an international a national or in the case of california even a state level because of how co opted those levels of government are by the very money that is made by electricity industries from from selling electricity and so the localist approach was meant to be a way in which you could work within arena of human scale as much as you could a human scale government level where you're taking on a corporation which is generally done you know behind closed doors at much higher levels involving only only you know exchange of money often but at a local face to face level where there were many many hearings in marin county where p g and e officials were you know sitting face to face with all the activists and having these battles which were not really common for them and so we felt that that was in a reno in which we could compete that was number one number two was that we also did something a little bit different again which i referred to earlier which was that we were trying actually to to come up with a solution that was at the highest possible scale that we could reach we're not talking about a small solution we're talking about directly competing with a corporation like coming up with an alternative and taking over an electricity supply which is like which would be like san francisco building a bridge itself you know you're the hoover dam you know these are huge large scale projects if you convert the whole energy supply of san francisco and or a portion of it into a local generation where you're building you know hundreds and hundreds of miles of right solar panels and wind mills and huge energy efficiency and conservation measures there it was this those were sort of the two things i think we really looked up when we were trying to think about ok what level of government and what appropriate skilled approach can we have to to deal with the huge scale problem of climate change the clarity was really important for me actually when i and you guys weren't quite a long time but when i met both of you that feeling of ok there's this crisis or series of crises right that we're dealing with  looking at how it is you can stop the bad actor so to command and control regulate regulate regulate p g market solutions better be better be better and or if you're looking for a proactive or what you could call a positive dialectic approach where you're trying to create something what his often created by the environmental movement is often a very superficial solution that you know some nice green thing but is not a fundamental  i know i'm not talking about the frustration i'm talking about that this was the opportunity of community choice the opportunity is that we created an actual alternative to corporate control we weren't trying to just stop the genie i mean we're trying to do kind of the small scale we can be happy about but really not you know something that was going to solve the problem but actually we were competing we were coming up with an alternative an alternative completely alternative method which is called community choice and so that was just the third thing as the opportunity that we saw to create this other method not just to control p g d not to do superficial things but the substantial alternative competitive alternative that's one based upon local democratic and opportunity that unique in history because of the inherent conflict of interest that energy companies have against demand reduction and so the top that was mentioned is the opportunity to start over that is today a p g any would it tries to green its products or build solar or implement if energy efficiency it suffers waffles losses of revenue losses  sales and this is a classic problem for public and private utilities that reducing throughputs reducing energy use through better light bulbs better insulation better heating building automation on site generation component control over power from the utility and allow the city to bid that out the city doesn't own assets the city isn't have existing revenue streams it will not suffer any loss by implementing localization it won't suffer a loss by reducing demand therefore it has an unlimited capability with an economic feasibility to do so we've put great effort into making this happen for the last twenty years and to put this opportunity in front of the cities and of course the elected officials being sensitive to public opinion which is you know ninety five percent support green power i mean higher support than jesus christ and the buddha combined so no politician is going to say no i'm against green power and so you know on the talk level lots of support lots of enthusiasm and one of the conclusions of the whole effort with one of the wow a thousand cities that was shockingly easy to create a quote movement right not difficult to get them to do it but as we'll get into in the next segment the hard part was getting them to do it well and getting them to focus on the opportunity of a clean slate and the challenge really that we face today with the bay area c c s as well is this pressure to imitate the utility is this sort of intellectual intimidation and a resistance to the change even by the elected officials even by the bureaucrats in some cases even by the activists themselves it's a very fascinating problem and we wanted to get into and explain to you listening audience why you should care about this five percent the united states may not say it sound really big but it actually is so again there is this opportunity objective lee among all these communities to to make a big change we've got it in front of  the bay area cities who in their rhetoric want the big change but will they take it or will they just fall down the slippery slope of mediocrity into imitating the utility   essentially imitate utility speak and utility throwing cake that it's just of innovation is a real challenge for our society as it's mired in market fundamentalism and it's intimidated industrially by large corporations we're going to get into that our next show so encourage you to please come back and see it so want to thank you julian charles and look for the next