The Burlingame Voice

ECR: The Big Dig schedule eases into next year

The massive project to "fix" El Camino Real known around town as The Big Dig after the Boston tunnel project has slipped to a Fall 2025 start with the PG&E part slipping into 2026.  The Axeman still cometh for 90% of the eucalyptus, but it looks like they may live to see another winter.  Finalizing the easements from ECR property owners is causing the slippage.  Per the DJ piece

There are two major elements to the project. One, a Caltrans effort to repair the road, sidewalk and street lights that will span from Millbrae to San Mateo, may begin work by fall of this year, however, that construction may start in one of the other cities first. 

The second aspect of the project is a Burlingame-specific push for PG&E to underground utilities. The construction start date for that work has been delayed to the second quarter of 2026, Okada said. 

Delays to Caltrans’ work on the road revamp are being caused in part by the need for signed reconciliations that affirm property owners are aware if their driveways, gardens and retaining walls in the public right-of-way will need to be removed to make way for sidewalk work.

The city has committed to paying for the reconstruction of those facilities if property owners allow them to be temporarily removed, Burlingame Councilmember Donna Colson said, but has still run into trouble obtaining all of the necessary documentation of the easements.

Slipping timelines equate to slipping funding and budgets even though inflation is moderating.  Thus, this uncertainty could be concerning as the undergrounding of the power lines is where the hidden problems like 1920's buried fuel tanks and other obstructions surface.

On the PG&E side, the paperwork for procuring a contractor has been delayed, Okada said. 

The count of trees to be removed is also a moving target.  It's still a lot of big, beautiful trees, but how many appears to have changed

The tree removal aspect of the project has long been controversial in Burlingame, which is well-known for its forestry. Plans to take down 382 trees, plant 429 and retain more than 193 trees have slowly come together with input from groups like the Burlingame Historical Society.

While we wait for the Big Dig to start perhaps Caltrans could throw us a bone and fix the potholes?  The City should formally request a Spring patch along the whole stretch.  I would also like to see the surviving trees be marked as such well before the project begins.  That's just good transparency.  A constant finding in talking to B'gamers is very few have any idea that hundreds of trees are on the chopping block.

Travis AFB: Hypocrisy meter hits 100

My hypocrisy meter pegged at 100 yesterday reading the SF Comicle article about possibly using Travis AFB near Sacramento as an ICE detention center.  Forget about the proposed use, who proposed it or where it is and all the other stuff that people will endlessly disagree about in the political realm without changing anyone's mind.  My H-meter spiked because of this:

Federal officials have been looking for months for detention facilities in Northern California and other Western states that could have 850 to 950 detention beds.  Reps. John Garamendi, D-Fairfield, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and Mike Thompson, D-Napa, told Hegseth in a May 5 letter that they were “deeply frustrated” and “gravely concerned” about using Travis as a migrant detention center.

Why might you ask?

They want the Pentagon to explain how building a detention center would affect Travis’ water and energy infrastructure.

Sure, filling 950 beds in an established major facility that has housed people since 1942 kicks off concerns about water and electricity.  But building thousands of units that have 2-4 beds in every city and town up and down the state?  Don't worry, there will be plenty of water, sewer capacity, electricity, parking, school capacity, police and fire--fergettaboutit.  Just don't use natural gas.  If you are a big-time Federal politician, you can just throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.  Try that as a regular resident and you are a NIMBY using zoning codes and CEQA as a weapon.  Want to avoid big residential construction on the B'game Bayfront because it lacks said infrastructure?  Too bad.  From the DJ:

New and proposed state housing laws could mean housing on the Bayfront without specific city standards, despite the city’s intent to limit such development there in its general plan.  New housing was zoned for the north end of Burlingame, near Bay Area Rapid Transit, not on the Bayfront — though proposals for changing zoning there have been floated several times over the years.  The Burlingame City Council and Planning Commission, meeting April 29, in a joint session expressed that the laws will severely undermine the city’s ability to effectively plan its own new housing and undercut its environmental and safety goals.

Councilmembers expressed frustration that the state was continuing to remove local control from the city’s development process, citing its recent endeavors to meet its state-mandated housing requirements by building out housing in the North Rollins Road area.

The hypocrisy needle is pinned to the top of the meter.

Spanish solar blackout: Will we ignore the warning?

The usual critique of solar energy is that the sun doesn't shine all the time--and that's certainly true.  But millions of Spaniards, Portuguese and some French people spent hours without any electricity Monday as the over reliance on solar bit them in the culo.  You had to read widely to even hear about it in California since the Green agenda doesn't want to talk about these things.  The WSJ noted:

Life changed for Spaniards at noon on Monday. With the sun at its peak, the country’s largely solar-powered electrical grid shut down. Mere days before, Spain’s government had announced that its grid had for the first time run entirely on renewable power, with new records set almost daily for solar. Breathless declarations of victory flowed, in service of the government’s promise to phase out reliable nuclear power plants with many years of remaining service life. As in Germany, this promise is now the Spanish politicians’ nightmare.

The Financial Times had some of the numbers that lead to the collapse of the grid:

About 55 percent of Spain's supply was from solar sources when 15 gigawatts of electricity generation disconnected from the grid within just five seconds.  Several European experts said Spain appeared to lack enough firm power--readily available, reliable energy supply from sources such as fossil fuels or nuclear that can be reduced or raised--to kick in when the grid's frequency dropped sharply...an oversupply of electricity might have initially caused the problem.  Normally, the grid operator would have managed this by asking traditional plants to moderate their output but this was not possible because so few plants were on line.  Of the scheduled 26 GW of electricity supply on Monday, just 5GW came from non-intermittent sources.

About a fifth of the country's power normally comes from solar power, but hey, the government wanted to set a new Green record--and they have.  Traffic lights, electric trains, home medical equipment, internet access, ATMs---all of it down for hours.  My part of B'game was out for 50 hours two years ago during the big storms.  We have enough weather and vehicle accident-driven outages without adding more risk by virtue signaling.  As the Journal concluded:

Events will inevitably test any electrical system’s limits. A rational system should be designed to handle such events. Spain’s system was engineered politically, not rationally. It’s the latest lesson in how not to make energy policy. Will anyone learn from it?

Moss Landing battery fire: don't waste a good crisis?

With all of the focus on CO2 it's easy to forget there are a lot of other, way more dangerous pollutants being released during emergencies.  The Moss Landing lithium-ion fire adds hydrogen fluoride to the list.  Where's my college chemistry book when I need it?  The various wildfires over the last four years have spewed mega tons of particulate matter ("smoke") and who knows what else from burning cars, houses and businesses.  But all the Sacramento and local government focus has been on our cars, stove tops, BBQs and water heaters.

Only now is our camera hound governor is calling for an investigation into the massive Moss Landing battery plant fire even though it is either the fourth or fifth fire there in the last four years.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A fire at the world’s largest battery storage plant in Northern California smoldered Friday after sending plumes of toxic smoke into the atmosphere, leading to the evacuation of up to 1,500 people. The blaze also shook up the young battery storage industry.

The fire at the Vistra Energy lithium battery plant in Moss Landing generated huge flames and significant amounts of smoke Thursday but had diminished significantly by Friday, Fire Chief Joel Mendoza of the North County Fire Protection District of Monterey County said.

Brad Watson, Vistra’s senior director of community affairs, said two “overheating events” happened at the battery plant in 2021 and 2022 because the batteries got wet. A third incident happened in 2022 in the neighboring Elkhorn battery plant that is owned by PG&E, he said.

I'm all for huge, grid-based battery storage.  We need it if we have any hope for stability

California was an early adopter of battery storage and leads the nation with more than 11 gigawatts of utility-scale storage online, which can meet nearly half of the demand on the state’s main grid for four hours per day.

But like first-generation EV chargers that fail regularly, the devil is in the details.  As Rahm Emanuel said "you never want a good crisis go to waste".  That's the order of the day.

 

  

Pain plugging in: Electric rates burn holes in wallets

The Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO) is out with details regarding something we all know from paying PG&E every month.  Costs are up, up, up.  Specifically:

California’s electricity rates are among the highest in the country,” the Legislative Analyst’s Office reported. On average, residential electricity rates in California are close to double those in the rest of the nation.  Average residential electricity rates in California have grown faster than inflation in recent years, rising by about 47% over the four-year period from 2019 through 2023 compared to overall growth in prices of about 18%,” according to the report.  Only Hawaii has higher electricity rates than California, the report determined.

The LAO pins this on:

• Increasing stringency of greenhouse gas emission reduction laws for the electricity grid.
• Accommodating more electricity demand from electrification.
• Growing demand for funding to support state climate policies. 
• Wildfire-related costs.

One of the preeminent energy economists in the world, Bjorn Lomborg, who we profiled here is also back with an update in the WSJ titled "Green energy costs a bundle" that notes a study of 70 countries' costs shows:

In a country with little or no solar and wind, the average electricity cost is about 12 cents a kilowatt-hour (in today’s money). For every 10% increase in solar and wind share, the electricity cost increases by more than 5 cents a kilowatt-hour. This isn’t an outlier; these results are substantially similar to 2019, before the effects of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Germany has installed so much solar and wind that, on sunny and windy days, renewable energy satisfies close to 70% of Germany’s needs—a fact the press eagerly reports. But the press hardly mentions dark and still days, when these renewables deliver almost nothing. Twice in the past two months, when it was cloudy and nearly windless, solar and wind delivered less than 4% of the daily power Germany needed.  Current battery technology is insufficient. Germany’s entire battery storage runs out in about 20 minutes.

The SF Chronicle looked at the other side of the story last week as new buy-back rates from PG&E et al take a bite out of green ambitions in California:

In late 2022, state regulators voted to slash the level of that payment by around 75% to bring it closer to market prices. With the electricity they produce worth far less, rooftop panels suddenly didn’t make as much financial sense.

Beyond the impact on customers’ pocketbooks, the change devastated California’s solar industry when it went into effect in April 2023, prompting a huge drop in home and business panel installations, wiping out thousands of jobs, and forcing local installers to shrink or close up shop altogether.

That would be 17,000 vaporized jobs to be more specific.  Competing studies assert that non-solar customers are subsidizing solar customers--or vice versa.  What is undeniable is that a bunch of people who would have plunked down tens of thousands of dollars of their own money to contribute to green energy generation have changed their minds.  I would attribute it to the Law of Unintended Consequences, but it was so obvious that it has to be intentional.  Does anyone in Sacramento care to listen to the LAO? 

Total Cost of Homeownership: Not just the cost of the house

For all the talk about our "housing crisis", there is little media or politician discussion about what makes housing expensive here or many, many other places.  The build-our-way-out of it people, like the YIMBYs, just focus on the four walls.  As the letter writer below noted, it's tiresome.  It's also myopic.  The WSJ chimes in today with a piece titled "Insurance and Taxes Now Cost More Than Mortgages for Many Homeowners: Ballooning expenses rewrite the math of homeownership".  The piece zeroes in on home insurance, flood/fire insurance, property taxes and home repair costs and shows

These ballooning expenses are rewriting the math of homeownership. In September, 32% of the average single-family mortgage payment went to property taxes and home insurance, the highest rate ever for data going back to 2014, according to Intercontinental Exchange.  For a small but increasing share of households, the burden is far more significant. In five major metro areas—Rochester and Syracuse, N.Y.; Omaha, Neb.; New Orleans and Miami—at least a quarter of borrowers spend more than half their monthly mortgage payment on taxes and insurance, according to ICE. 

These metro areas have high property taxes or pricey home insurance relative to typical home costs, or both.  Nationwide, taxes and insurance make up more than half of the monthly mortgage payment for 9% of single-family mortgages. That is up from less than 4% at the end of 2014. 

Left out of the equation because of how the study gathered data are the other costs--electricity, natural gas, garbage, sewer/water and bond measures for schools and anything else the politicians can dream up (looking at you Caltrain and sea level rise).  A major variable will always be interest rates, but all of these other factors just pile on and increases get waved through regularly.

One could even argue the YIMBY mentality will make it all worse.  More grid, more water, more sewage treatment, more classrooms, more, more, more.  Decarbonize your house in the next 10 years?  That won't be easy or cheap as we noted here.  Looking at all of the costs in total reveals the real story--not the faddish one.

Pushing back on the YIMBYs

From the "broken clock is right twice a day" file comes this Letter to the Editor of the SF Comicle.  Somehow the editors let this one slip through the cracks and into print.  I don't know the woman or the organization, but she hits pretty much every button right on the nose:

YIMBY housing fantasies won’t work in California. Here’s the reality

Regarding “There’s no protecting California values without building more housing” (Open Forum, SFChronicle.com, Dec 13): The steady drumbeat of op-ed pieces from SPUR and YIMBY housing advocates is tiresome. Many Californians disagree with them.  Urban density and infill housing are supposed to remedy suburban sprawl. But urban density, in practice, simply creates overcrowded streets, with motorists circling in search of rare parking.   Infill comes at the expense of historic buildings and districts, which are often demolished. A classic example is the enormous apartment buildings planned for the former California College of the Arts campus in Oakland.

Transit-oriented development? This fantasy assumes that public transportation is a fixed utility. Many bus lines that once served our communities have been cut.  How many voters will oppose a tax to support BART because of the agency’s plans to put apartments in its parking lots? How many people have quit taking BART because there is no secure place to park near the stations?

The SPUR and YIMBY people want Soviet-style apartment blocks wherever they can be crammed in, extinguishing every vestige of charm from neighborhoods.  It’s time for the state to stop forcing draconian “density bonus” and “builder’s remedy” laws on neighborhoods that want to retain some breathing room.

Amelia Marshall

Board member, Oakland Heritage Alliance

Amen, Amelia.  Look no further than our latest Cellblock at One Adrian Ct.  It may not extinguish any charm in the neighborhood since it sits next to a Public Storage business, but you can bet it will raise traffic thru the Worst Intersection in the State and put pressure on all sorts of public services.  Did the grid get any major upgrade?  School capacity?  Did we hire another police officer for traffic enforcement?  Anything thing else listed here?  Keep up the good work, Ms. Marshall.  You are far from alone.

EV Chargers: On the blink in Lot Y

The bloom is off the EV market for a variety of reasons.  Unit growth is slowing dramatically.  Now that early adopters have made their purchases, the mainstream buyers' reluctance to go all-electric is hitting home hard with car companies, parts suppliers, battery factories and infrastructure players.  A number of EV start-ups will likely go bankrupt by summer according to the WSJ analysis and the big manufacturers are losing their rear bumpers on every sale.  Some to the tune of more than a $100,000 loss per sale!  Ironically, sales of high-end gas pickups and SUVs are propping up companies' EV divisions!

Range anxiety is one of the key causes of EV reluctance--and it is helping the hybrid market accordingly.  My only experience with a Tesla rental drove that anxiety home as I got about half of what the range gauge estimated.  Paying the supercharger rate wasn't dramatically cheaper than gas in the state I rented in.  Heightening range anxiety is charger malfunctions and vandalism (stealing the copper filler wire for scrap value).  Malfunctions are a national problem (estimated to be one in five) and very much a local issue as reported by the DJ this weekend:

In Burlingame’s Broadway District, continued issues with its electric vehicle charging stations are inconveniencing businesses and residents alike, Broadway Burlingame Business Improvement District president John Kevranian said.   A representative for EVgo, which owns and operates the six fast-charging electric vehicle stations located at 1133 Chula Vista Ave., confirmed that five of the six stations have likely been out of operation at times for a couple of months. One has been out of operation for weeks, she said.

Now, however, eight parking spots in the tightly packed Broadway District have become largely nonfunctional.   “This is the holiday season, too. It’s crucial these work during the holiday season. If EVgo is not going to repair them, maybe they can cover the stations, and use them as public parking,” Kevranian said.

John is on-the-money with the idea of covering a charger if it is broken so everyone could see that they can use the space.  Given they don't have meters, it would be a freebie, too. The sad part is that EVgo cannot keep chargers working that only went live in 2019, as we noted here.  The DJ piece notes that EVgo may not be complying with the city contract.  I'd say that is a safe bet, but did we negotiate any performance penalties?  Usage in Lot Y ramped up pretty slowly as we noted here, but random outages are likely to stunt future usage.  Anxiety is bad for business.

Gasoline prices: Get ready for more pain

After reading about our Air Resources Board move this month to tighten gasoline "standards" even more I was reminded of this post from 2015.  The California average was $3.22 back then and in February 2017, I noted the price of regular at the Peninsula Ave. Shell was $3.05.  With apologies to composer Mary Hopkin

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and drive forever and a day
We'd buy the fuel we choose
We'd fight and always cruise
For we were young and sure to have our way

Today regular at that Shell station is $4.99, 64% higher than 2017.  And we need to get ready for more pain at the pump as Calmatters writes about the November 8th CARB vote

The new rule’s potential effects on California fuel prices are largely unknown. The air board said today that oil companies typically already pass 8 to 10 cents per gallon of costs on to consumers because of the state’s fuel standard.  Environmentalists and consumer advocates opposed the new rules, warning the changes will boost alternative fuels — such as biofuels made from cow manure or soy beans — that may have limited environmental upsides, and will allow oil companies to stay in business because they can buy credits or switch to producing those fuels.

In an initial assessment released last year, the air board projected that the proposed new standard could potentially raise the per-gallon price of diesel by 59 cents and for gasoline, 47 cents, in 2025. Air board officials have since disavowed that estimate, writing last month that the analysis “should not be misconstrued as a prediction of the future credit price nor as a direct impact on prices at the pump.”

Oh, let's not "misconstrue" anything.  We just won't make any forecast.  Other estimates put the gas increase at 65 cents per gallon or higher.  Meanwhile over in EV world, where CARB would like to push all of us, the WSJ has a piece titled "The Withering Dream of a Cheap American Electric Car".  Tesla has backed-off building a $25,000 car and all the other, non-profitable car companies see no way to succeed making a cost-competitive version either.  The Lucid CEO notes

“That market is notorious because you get into mass manufacture—terrible, low margins,” he said of the low-price EVs. “To install the manufacturing base for millions of these units makes little sense to me.”

Abandoning the idea of a $25,000 car comes as a blow to those who were betting that the electrification of the automobile was on track to happen seemingly overnight—with EVs for every pocketbook replacing the tens of millions of vehicles on the roadways.

Get ready to pay more--probably a lot more--because 12 unelected, activist bureaucrats say so.  By the way, it pays well too for a part-time gig.  CARB Chair Liane Randolph is pulling down $278,876 in pay and benefits.  She's probably buying premium.

"Stove grabbers" get singed in Washington and Berkeley

The natural gas "stove grabbers" had a bad day on Election Day as Washington State passed Initiative 2066 by 3% and Berkeley gave a gas tax a big thumbs down.  Californian politicians like to say we lead the nation in implementing change, but perhaps Washington is leading this time around.  About the initiative, the WSJ noted before the election

Anthony Anton, CEO of the (Washington state) hospitality association, says 84% of the restaurateurs he represents rely on natural gas. Remodeling to go electric is a “massive cost at a time where operators just can’t afford it,” he says. Some say the quality of their product would suffer, as some cooking methods, such as stir-frying, are difficult to perform on lower-heat electrical stoves. Most of the association’s members are very small businesses with substantial debt from Covid lockdowns.

The building association worries the new energy code will raise the state’s already high housing costs, locking out potential buyers. The code requires that new buildings meet a certain environmental “score.” Without the points from an electric heat pump, a builder will have to make up the difference with other green measures that run between $15,000 and $20,000 in a single-family home. “Every time they raise the price $1,000, it prices out another 500 Washington families,” says Greg Lane, the association’s executive vice president.

The Washington State Tree Fruit Association is concerned about rising costs of refrigeration to keep produce fresh. A sudden power outage could be catastrophic for the state’s apple industry. Trade regulations for its top two export markets require that fruit be constantly refrigerated at a specific temperature for as long as 90 days.

The state’s cheapest energy plan would almost double electricity demand in Washington by 2050, putting an unprecedented strain on the grid.

The Seattle Times writes "Initiative 2066 adds provisions to state law that explicitly protect access to natural gas and ensure that local governments and the state’s energy code cannot “prohibit, penalize or discourage the use of gas.”"

And over in Berkeley, they had their own Measure GG which the Comicle notes is going down bigly at 70/30 opposed.  Per the Comicle:

Measure GG would assess a special tax on buildings of 15,000 square feet or more that use gas for heating or other purposes, with exceptions for single-family homes, residential buildings with at least 50% affordable units and government buildings.  The measure required a simple majority to pass, but as of Friday the opposition was winning 68% of votes, with 32% in favor.  The tax would amount to nearly $3 per therm, which is more than double typical natural gas retail prices from Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

There are so many Unintended Consequences and unseen-by-politicians costs to these poorly thought-out initiatives, but voters appear to be figuring some of them out and sending them down in flames.  Hopefully the new B'game city council will leave this issue in the off position.