Time To Break Up With The Monopoly Grid?

Queue the break-up songs (and rooftop solar + storage).

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I been thinking a lot about break-ups lately (no, not that kind).

Specifically, how to break up - and break up with - the fossil-fueled monopoly utilities holding back the energy transition. And how to convince people to begin this process now, using cheap, 100% clean rooftop solar and storage. Especially in California, with our crazy sky-high $.50/kWh electric rates (three times the national average)

More on this to come, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts (just respond to this email).

Meantime, here’s an op-ed I published this week in Berkeleyside, my local online news site, based on my recent discovery of one library’s $500k/year utility bill:

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Opinion: Time for Berkeley to break up with PG&E and Ava

By Dave Margulius

Are you tired of paying skyrocketing PG&E and Ava Community Energy bills? Good news: We don’t have to anymore. We can break up with the overpriced grid monopoly and save millions using rooftop solar, storage and energy efficiency. And reduce our emissions dramatically.

I recently requested four years’ worth of PG&E bills from the city of Berkeley, and just one building tells the shocking rate-increase story. Believe it or not, the city will pay PG&E/Ava $500,000 for the main public library this year. That’s up from $325,000 last year and $203,000 in 2021.

PG&E hiked their rates almost 30% this year and has effectively doubled their rates in the Bay Area since 2019. State regulators keep letting our monopoly utilities pass along seemingly whatever costs they want: for work they should already have done to upgrade their fragile network (like wildfire protection), for lobbyists to fight against rooftop solar, and most of all, for protecting their profit margins (PG&E had record profits of $2.2 billion in 2023).

But it’s not just PG&E. Ava, formerly East Bay Community Energy, has essentially raised its rates in lockstep with PG&E. About half the central library’s $500,000 bill this year will come from what PG&E charges for its wires (electricity delivery) and half from Ava’s charges (electricity ‘generation). Taken together, we’re paying them over 50 cents per kilowatt hour, almost four times what it would cost to install a typical commercial rooftop solar system.

There’s enough roof space on the central library for a solar plus storage system big enough to slash this crazy half-million dollar PG&E/Ava annual bill by two-thirds, if not eliminate it. Yet the city’s current spec for replacing the building’s aging HVAC system won’t leave roof space for that. And it doesn’t even specify a modern heat pump system to eliminate the building’s gas heating system.

You’d think the city of Berkeley (and BUSD) would be racing to make our biggest buildings and schools self-sufficient with rooftop solar. But instead, we’re dragging our feet, just doing a couple of smaller projects here and there.

Why?

Because Berkeley’s leaders don’t understand how much rooftop solar and storage costs have dropped lately and how much the capabilities have improved.

And because we think our grid energy is already 100% renewable (via Ava). It isn’t: While California’s grid has gotten greener, the backbone is still methane gas. So 35% or more of the electrons Berkeley actually consumes come from gas-burning plants in Hayward and Martinez. 

In fact, decarbonizing in time to avoid the worst global climate impacts will require much more distributed (rooftop) solar much more quickly; most grid experts agree on this. There are just too many obstacles to building grid-scale renewables and transmission connections fast enough.

Ava claims to want to help cities install rooftop solar, but it doesn’t seem to be putting much muscle into it. Its core mission, after all, is to help cities buy grid energy, not to enable them to ditch the grid with cheaper rooftop energy.

So, Berkeley has a huge opportunity to be a leader here. 

Imagine a fully-electrified and decarbonized, rooftop-powered, energy efficient, locally resilient Berkeley with ultra-cheap electricity. Imagine Berkeley’s biggest buildings slathered with solar and generating more power than they need. And our corporation yard with a huge solar array powering a fully electrified city fleet.

Upgrading buildings is hard work. And yes, you have to fight the monopoly grid bureaucracy. But with today’s technology, it’s totally doable and promises a quick return on investment, given PG&E/Ava’s skyrocketing rates.

So let’s read the bills, do the math, go much faster on rooftop solar plus storage, break up with the grid monopoly, and save all those millions. And help save the planet in the process.