Eric Brooks, a local activist and supporter of CleanPowerSF who helped draft Proposition H, said resistance from the SFPUC delayed progress for years. "Quite frankly, we have had to drag them kicking and screaming into this project," he said.
According to former SFPUC general manager Dick Sklar, who also served as a commissioner, city staffers' anxiety about CCA stemmed from holes in the program's business plan — such as whether the city could hold on to enough customers to make CCA financially viable, and how the program's large portfolio of renewable energy could be kept affordable for residents and businesses. "I just couldn't get answers to the basic questions," Sklar said. "I think that a lot of folks become enamored of their game, rather than their objectives. It's become bureaucratic battles, mayor-Board battles, Paul Fenn advocacy battles."
Josh Edelson
LAFCo chairman Ross Mirkarimi discussed green-power proposals with consultant Paul Fenn on Dec. 12.
The city has developed a brochure for CleanPowerSF, which will be circulated this year.
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This conflict has not abated as CleanPowerSF has moved closer to becoming reality. Some basic aspects of the program are still the subject of dispute between LAFCo's consultants and SFPUC staff. One lingering area of disagreement is how aggressively the city should pursue construction of its own municipally owned energy sources within the boundaries of San Francisco.
In the name of reduced dependence on the outside world, the current CleanPowerSF plan calls for rapid construction of solar panels, wind turbines, and other green-energy equipment within the city. (Fenn's tidal power facility falls into this category.) Fenn still supports that goal, while the SFPUC's Hale said one way to lower the program's cost could be to relax the timeline for such projects, relying during the interim on wholesale purchases from the energy market.
The facilities would be built using $1.2 billion in revenue bonds that San Francisco residents authorized for the construction of renewable-energy sources through a 2001 ballot initiative. This is another potential impact of CleanPowerSF, and one that could be felt by all of the city's taxpayers — even those who choose to opt out of the program.
Revenue bonds of the kind that officials plan to use to build the city's green-energy facilities are loans guaranteed by the promise of future income. If CleanPowerSF fails to generate a large enough stream of revenue — for instance, if large business customers abandon the program en masse — creditors could in theory attack the city's general fund, which is filled by tax dollars.
Fenn insists that the city would be legally shielded from this ominous outcome. The reality, given the ongoing freeze in the credit markets, is that the financiers who underwrite San Francisco's CCA infrastructure will be calling the shots. Analysts in Oakland actually believe lenders would require that loans for CCA facilities be backed up by other sources of cities' revenue, given the untested nature of the programs, said Susan Kattchee, environmental services manager at the Oakland Public Works Agency. This was one factor behind the East Bay recommendation to drop Community Choice.
"If the city goes out and borrows money to build infrastructure, we've got to pay it back," said Rob Black, vice president for public policy at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which opposes CleanPowerSF. "We would be on the hook for that [$1.2 billion]. That's a lot of money."
One of the few local examples of what such huge sums of cash would buy can be found downtown, on top of Moscone Center. The convention center's roof is home to the largest renewable-energy facility in the city, an array of more than 5,000 solar panels that, on sunny days, gleam like silver scales. If CleanPowerSF moves ahead, San Franciscans can expect to see many more of these panels: The plan calls for at least 31 megawatts of solar power to be generated within the city, an amount almost 46 times the maximum output of the Moscone array.
On a recent afternoon, Lori Mitchell, a renewable-energy specialist with SFPUC, gave a tour of the facility with two colleagues — energy-generation specialist James Andrews and communications official Jim Marks — and Fenn. Atop the roof beneath a hazy December sky, Mitchell explained that in-city solar power on the scale called for by CleanPowerSF, while a worthy ideal, will not be easily achieved.
Photovoltaic panels can't be relied on to steadily generate power, and thus require backup facilities to feed electricity to customers at night or on overcast days. Ironically, greater reliance on solar power could bring with it the need for more gas-fired "peaker" plants — so called because they gear up only during peak hours of energy use in the afternoon and evening — and the accompanying spew of ozone-depleting exhaust. "It's tough, because solar is an intermittent resource," Mitchell said.
The day of the tour was a case in point. Mitchell said that the Moscone solar array had been producing only 150 kilowatts of its full 675-kilowatt capacity that morning because of hazy skies. Dreams of a sun-powered city notwithstanding, the convention center's massive rooftop installation currently accounts for only 3 percent of the electricity the building consumes annually.
Andrews, on the way downstairs, stopped to take a look at the facility's power meter. Mid-afternoon, the panels were still producing only 150 kilowatts. "That's not that much," he observed, and smiled. "Don't write that down."
