IS THE SUN SETTING ON CALIFORNIA’S SOLAR ROOFTOPS?

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t going away. ~ Elvis Presley 

California has long been the sunniest place in America. Californians have installed solar photovoltaic (PV) panels on 1.3 million of their homes, the largest number of rooftop installations of any state. Hawaii is also sunny, duh; its solar installations are numero uno on a per capita basis. But the Aloha State’s total solar installations represent just 7.4% of California’s.

The Golden State’s solar rooftop expansion began in 2006, when then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law the million solar roof’s initiative. It has been impressively-successful in reducing the state’s production of fossil-fueled greenhouse gases (GHG). But the sun may be dimming soon for solar roofs, just like this picture shows.  

A setting sun for California’s solar rooftops?

In addition to being sunny, California is also one of the most committed states in rectifying economic inequity. One of the latest efforts involves municipalities branching out to plant more trees in “underprivileged” and “low-resource” areas to mitigate inequitable, “racist housing policies.”

Colossal Los Angeles and much-smaller Richmond are but two California cities that have initiated vigorous tree-planting programs that will eventually spread natural shade and coolness across more urban neighborhoods. These are great, greening efforts that will take a long time to produce significant shade.

But there’s no stopping in California with just saplings to alleviate inequity. Nope, in the name of inequity relief, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) soon may significantly cloud the state’s bright efforts that reduce nasty environmental emissions via residential rooftop solar arrays.

How could this be? If it happens, you can thank short-sighted equityists within the CPUC staff and maybe the Commission itself, as well as the state’s private utilities. The utilities have always been dismayed about rooftop solar electricity generation they don’t own and earn no money from.

These solar critics are short-sighted because they see solar’s current NEM (net energy metering) protocols only from the cost side (what customers pay), allegedly harming low-income non-solar rate-payers. The critics entirely dismiss the actual substantial benefits that solar provides communities.

The CPUC will soon decide whether to diminish significantly the incentives for homeowners to install solar. Why? Because the CPUC staff as well as privately-owned electric utilities believe non-solar, low-income electricity customers pay disproportionately more under current California rules than owners of rooftop solar systems. That’s not equitable and thus must go.

I am not a disinterested party to these considerations. We installed solar PV (and thermal) panels on our roof 12 years ago. It’s a modest 2.8kW array (there’s no need for AC cooling here in fog city) that now has probably just paid for our initial investment due to California’s time-of-use NEM mechanism that reduced our electricity bills.

I am very interested in having the PUC recognize that solar NEM’s benefits transcend direct dollars and cents advantages. A principal benefit of solar generation is reduction in GHG emissions that aids everyone, no matter what their income and whether or not they’re a solar customer.

Does the PUC wish now to create disincentives in the name of equality for solar’s continued ascendency? If the CPUC accedes to the utilities’ cynical support of “solar equity,” it will require increased use of natural-gas powered generation. Dirtier kWh will be produced to the benefit of the utilities, with subsequent harm to all.

California’s solar industry is the nation’s largest. It directly provides about 65,000 jobs and produces more energy than nuclear and coal combined in the state.[1] Last year solar rooftops delivered 9% of California’s total electric production, the largest of any renewable resource.

Governor Gavin Newsom has embraced both a renewable energy goal of procuring 50% of retail sales from renewables by 2030 (it’s 33% now), and of reaching 100% renewable energy production by 2045. These goals depend on continued growth in solar rooftop energy production. Neither objective will be achieved if the PUC reduces solar incentives.

The governor’s July 2021 report, California’s Electricity System of the Future states, “solar and wind build rates need to nearly triple” in order to achieve his 2045 100% renewable energy production goal. Solar will never triple production if the CPUC changes its solar NEM rates, as planned.

The CPUC’s proposed plan will shred by over 75% how much residents would get paid for electricity generated from their rooftop panels. In addition, it proposes sharp increases, about $60/month, in grid-access charges for a typical solar customer.

In effect, the plan virtually eliminates the monetary incentives that have continued to support more homeowners’ investing in solar. These investments often require paying thousands of dollars up front to install rooftop PV panels.

So far, Gov. Newsom has shirked his duty to strongly and publicly support continued solar incentives like NEM.

Perhaps he’s scared of upsetting the utilities and the IBEW, the principal electric utility union who’s prominently in favor of reducing rooftop solar incentives. The union wants to cash in on lucrative PV panel installation jobs by the utilities that they don’t enjoy now. Maybe the governor also doesn’t really believe in the environmental goals he’s previously stated were vital.

Do Gov. Newsom and the CPUC want to re-monopolize California’s largest utilities at the expense of environmental degradation to gain a sliver more equality? So far, it seems so.

I recommend he have at least one private conversation with CPUC decision-makers encouraging them to relieve some underprivileged customers’ issues without darkening solar’s clear environmental benefits. The benefits he’s counting on to meet his popular environmental goals. Maybe the CPUC could extend these customers’ baseline (low-cost) consumption block to provide relief, or at the very least, adopt a far less extreme reduction in rooftop installations’ incentives.

The Commission might welcome such informal communication because it’s not batting at full strength now. The new CPUC President has been in her job for only 20 workdays and one of the five Commissioner chairs remains vacant.

In any event, the sun must continue to shine on California’s ever-growing solar rooftops for all our sakes.

 

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[1] Speaking of impending environmental challenges, California’s last operating nuclear power station, PG&E’s Diablo Canyon, will begin to shut down late next year. Nuclear, including Diablo Canyon, has many faults and it produces no GHGs. 

 

JUST LIVING WITH COVID

Everybody’s headed for a hole in the ground. ~ Warren Zevon & Duncan Aldrich 

It’s been 25 months and more than 5.5 million global deaths since the insidious Covid-19 pandemic began. The World Health Organization (WHO) properly declared a public health emergency of international concern a month after this virus was first discovered in Wuhan China. How long will the Covid-emergency last? How long should it last? When can we just live with Covid?

Coronaviruses began infecting humans in 1965. They caused the SARS and MERS outbreaks in 2002 and 2012, respectively.

Virologists believe Covid will be with us for a very long time, just like the H1N1 virus that jumped to humans producing the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed 675,000 Americans. The H1N1 virus is still with us; it’s now one of the strains in the seasonal flu virus.

Despite politicians’ and policy-makers’ fervent proclamations that Covid will be “conquered” and “vanquished,” it won’t be. Why? Because it’s a virus, it mutates constantly, forever. It won’t surrender even to our fully-modern medical technology. Like every other infectious disease-producing virus, it’s here for ages. The single exception to this eventuality was the smallpox virus that was eradicated world-wide in 1979, nearly 200 years after a vaccine was first produced, and after killing an estimated 900 million humans during its reign.

As we enter the third year of this pandemic, the question has been raised: how we can learn to live with Covid on an ongoing basis. Other questions include determining what continuing, non-emergency policies will sustain our ability to live, play and work alongside the presence of Covid, like we have done with the flu virus and many others.

Several prominent former members of President Biden’s Covid-19 Advisory Board have recommended creating “New Normal,” non-emergency health policies that will allow us to survive more safely with Covid. Their recommendations essentially involve strengthening the role of US public health agencies by improving and sustaining public health infrastructure. Such strengthening would involve significant, continuing federal and state funding, which, perhaps wisely, they did not enumerate.

The mystery isn’t only about what our Covid policies should become, after suffering so much in this enduring pandemic. There are others as well.

Because they don’t leave any fossils, it remains mysterious as to what viruses really are and have been. Many scientists believe proto-viruses began replicating on Earth several billion years ago. They have a giant head start; the earliest modern homo sapiens have been doing this for perhaps 300,000 years.

These virologists subscribe to the virus-first premise: Long, long ago, viruses evolved from molecules of protein and nucleic acid, before cells first appeared on Earth. Thus ironically, viruses themselves contributed to the development of cellular life.

The first human virus was scientifically identified in 1881, the yellow fever virus. During the past century scientists have changed their minds several times about what viruses are. They were first seen as poisons (the word “virus” is derived from the Latin term for poison, venenum), then as an elementary life-form and finally as biological chemicals.

Virus devaluation to inactive chemicals began 86 years ago, when biochemists determined that viruses are not alive. On their own they cannot produce life-required metabolic functions, such as conversion of food/fuel into energy to run cellular processes.

Viruses’ hosts provide these necessary functions, not the virus itself. Unfortunately, viruses can and have infected virtually every earthly life-form, from humans and insects to tobacco plants and bacteria. Some virologists believe viruses may occupy an enigmatic grey area between living and nonliving. Perhaps similar to what certain Dems believe Trumpists are.

They may not be alive, but the microscopic Covid viruses have affected hundreds of millions of people during the past two years, and will continue to do so all the way to its omega variant (which is 9 variants after omicron, if you never had to memorize the Greek alphabet like I did long ago) and beyond. This virus’s persistence – which, politicians, policy-makers and the rest of us should have previously acknowledged – has precipitated growing relevance for changing short-term, emergency policies to ones that support our need learn how to “live with it” (the Covid virus) over the longer-term.

It can’t be an emergency forever, as an infectious disease expert aptly phrased our current policies.

How can policies be changed from considering Covid not as an emergency, but as an ongoing epidemic? Increasing Covid vaccination rates is the most important objective for living with it. Shown below is one of a growing number of pop-up vaccination clinics.  Regrettably, it’s also the most problematic, given the political caste and personal reluctance that now surrounds vaccination. Next in line is widespread use of masks. The fragile nature of some healthcare systems also poses problems.  

A pop-up vaccination clinic in action.

Achieving this objective will be challenging and increasingly expensive. The “easy arms” have already been injected. At the moment, the US has a fully-vaccinated rate of 63%, much below what epidemiologists used to, but no longer talk about in terms of Covid’s Herd Immunity rate might be.

Medical personal directly involved with immunization describe the current process of getting reluctant folks to be inoculated as “a very grinding, slow process” that’s akin to “medical trench warfare.”

This is especially true after the Supreme Court’s misguided decision last week to block government-mandated shots by companies with more than 100 workers, who employ 67% of our labor force. The Supremes can no longer be relied on to support public health, among other issues. Itself a tragedy within a tragedy.

Interim policies that have been recently initiated should increase availability of take-home Covid tests and oral anti-Covid medicines. Other “living with it” policies once hospitalizations stabilize and decline may ultimately include modifying restrictions on: mask usage, isolation periods, travel, public and private meetings, social distancing, K-12 and college closings, restaurants, quarantines and business hours/operations.

To be successful in reducing Covid’s substantial negative externalities, such guidelines require everyone to comply. Those who willingly damage public health by non-compliance of vaccination and eased, non-emergency Covid-mitigation policies should result in added limitations-consequences for those people. Such compliance consequences would be completely consistent with existing, mandated inoculations in order for children to attend day care, pre-K and K-12 schools.

“Living with it” policies will require “get with it” public compliance. Here’s to a brighter, healthier future. 

URBAN TRANSIT, STUCK BEYOND THE SHOULDER

It was a nightmare. The band had to tour Greenland by bus. ~ Fred Schneider, a founder of the B-52s 

Have you ridden a bus, hopped on a subway or taken a train recently? Fewer folks than ever have been using public mass transportation to get places near and far. The resurgent Covid pandemic hasn’t helped. Local bus and rail systems – public mass transit – remain stuck, beyond the shoulder of thoroughfares that count, as both customers and transit drivers have abandoned them.

Mass transit is not a pedestrian matter; its status affects millions, can alter our environment and over time has been influenced by many factors. In econo-speak, mass transit has been considered an inferior good, one whose demand declines as consumers’ income rises. It wasn’t always inferior.

After my mother graduated from the University of Massachusetts during an early stage of the Great Depression, she boarded a Greyhound bus in Boston and over the next six months travelled around the country. To visit friends, she first headed to Florida and then across the deep south and south-western US to Los Angeles, where stayed nearly a month. From LA she took train rides on the Union Pacific, Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads during a 5-day jaunt back to Massachusetts.

At that time, trains and buses were the most popular means of travelling long distances. Greyhound had over 4,800 stations across the US. Railroads’ passenger carriage was more than five (5) times what Amtrak’s is now.

Public transit ridership has never since been higher than it was in 1926. Automobiles were certainly present then, but were not nearly as fast or convenient for a single person undertaking a long, cross-country trip. My mother saw first-hand the sights of America at ground-level, riding Greyhounds and the rails. The picture below shows the classic Scenicruiser bus, designed by Raymond Lowey, that Greyhound operated for about 20 years.

A great deal has changed in mass transit during the past 80 years, most of it unfavorable. Municipal transit systems have been owned and operated by city and regional governments since the 1950s. Greyhound remains the country’s largest inter-city motorcoach operator, but now operates in less than 60% of the cities it did at its peak before WWII.

 

The Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, used from 1954 to the mid-1970s.

Transit ridership essentially plateaued with subsequent gradual declines for decades, as the automobile gained dominance. President Eisenhower’s groundbreaking federal funding of the Interstate highway system in 1956 confirmed the government’s commitment that it needed to meet the increasing challenge of evermore cars on US highways. 

It wasn’t until eight years later that the government first began providing sizeable financial assistance to local transit systems with the passage of the Urban Mass Transportation Act (UMTA) in 1964. The UMTA funding paid for two-thirds of the costs of local transit systems’ equipment and facilities. By the 1970s this federal funding had allowed cities to build new, heavy-rail mass transit systems like the San Francisco Bay area’s BART, Washington DC’s Metro and MARTA (not our first president's wife; it's Atlanta's subway system).

During the 1980s and thereafter many cities built less capital-intensive light-rail transit systems, including Philadelphia, St. Louis, Seattle and San Jose. Light-rail, surface systems operate on dedicated rights-of-way with power provided via overhead wires. These additions to cities’ transit coverage have been helpfully modernizing.

Despite this sizeable public investment, the share of US workers commuting by public transportation fell from 12.1% in 1960 to about 5% in 2019. Annual growth in public transit ridership is a minute 0.6% since 2000. Adding to urban transit’s miseries, current ridership now is less than one-half of what it was pre-Covid.

Transit advocates advise that the costs of urban driving are too low and need to increase if transit is to recover ridership. This could involve instituting congestion fees, increasing parking costs and pumping up state and local gasoline taxes.

Manhattan, NY now appears to be edging back onto the roadway for implementing substantial congestion fees. It may work in Manhattan, but it’s not clear there are many politicians willing to brave public resistance to elevating driving-related fees and taxes. Travelling that political pathway to change decades of commuting behavior is likely to be a fully pothole-filled trail.

In November, President Biden signed the $1.2 trillion (T) Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This legislation’s fiscal largesse will be spread wide and far. Confusingly, this trillion-dollar number is not the amount of actual new infrastructure spending. Nope. The large, legislative budget number also includes typical annual expenditures for public roads, bridges, ports, railroads and water infrastructure, such as filling potholes, replacing worn-out pipes and equipment and operations & maintenance expenses.

New expenditures in the bipartisan Infrastructure Act sum to about $550 billion (B). This hefty number represents only 46% of the Act’s total $1.2T sticker-price. It’s these new outlays, not pothole-filling, that the president and Dems proclaim will significantly improve America’s transit infrastructure and consequently its citizens’ lives.

Such efforts will hopefully benefit many folks in many ways, which is a good thing. But this confusing reporting of funding level is an example of how Congress swells the apparent significance of its legislative efforts. Dems believe bigger is clearly better, even though it’s misleadingly stated. So it goes.

Public transit is due to receive $39B, 7.1% of new infrastructure expenditures. This tidy sum will serve to upgrade our 2,200 public urban and rural transit systems nationwide. The Act will also provide money to create new bus routes, electrify bus fleets and assist in making public transit more accessible to seniors and disabled Americans. Interestingly, urban rail lines are already reported to be at least 90% handicap-accessible; buses are 99% accessible.

Berkeley has its own ideas for improving its bus system. The City Council is considering a program that will offer free AC Transit bus rides in a portion of the city. If the Council approves, if they find funding for it and if AC Transit (the bus operator) agrees, one bus route that travels through several low-income neighborhoods will be renewed and fare-free on Sundays for a year. That’s three very big “ifs,” especially the last one. The Council believes this program would remedy in part systemic inequalities that Berkeley, being Berkeley, is very attuned to.

Among several issues with the program, picking Sunday as the free-fare day is regrettable. Sunday has the lowest ridership of any day of the week, and excludes virtually all commuters and students, the bulk of bus riders in Berkeley. Sundays are not a representative day of transit usage for most systems, including Berkeley’s.

The number of Berkeleyans who use buses regularly to commute to work is quite small, less than 8%. It’s not because bus fares are too high. Transit takes much longer to get places and ridership does not depend that much on fare level.

AC Transit studies indicate that reducing bus fares will not produce a significant or proportionate increase in ridership. Factors that promote bus ridership include the lack of a car for personal use, a positive assessment of buses relative to autos and close proximity to the bus route from one’s residence.

Unfortunately for transit, folks have become increasingly wary of traveling where crime and Covid may occur. As elsewhere, Bay Area residents are voting with their steering wheels to lower these risks, opting to drive and not use buses. AC Transit’s ridership dropped precipitously, 70% during the year ending April 2020. Now, its ridership is down a mere 60%.

Free fares are not going to solve these significant issues. It’s hard to imagine how this program will produce worthwhile information that could be useful beyond the one bus route that’s involved. But that’s not likely the true purpose of the program.

The Berkeley City Council has few qualms about undertaking this program that it’s not going to directly pay for. It could follow the Council’s well-established predilection of hurling other organizations’ money at issues like those facing underprivileged people in the hope that something useful might happen eventually.

With enough time, effort and searching, money will likely be found for this interim program. Possible funding sources include the American Rescue Plan Act and the new infrastructure Act. California expects to receive nearly $9.5B from the new Act to improve public transit infrastructure across the state. Berkeley stands ready to claim some.

However, AC Transit, who would have to implement the program, does not favor it as currently proposed by the city. Being very aware of the surrounding politics, AC Transit is on record supporting the idea of a free-fare program, just not this one. So far, Berkeley’s free-fare transit program, like public urban transit itself, seems parked far beyond the shoulder of transportation priorities.