The Burlingame Voice

Slicing Up the PG&E Pie

The city of San Francisco is ready to offer PG&E $2.5 billion to buy the utility's lines within the city.  Let's just leave aside the question of whether a city that can't keep its streets clean, stop 30,000 car burglaries per year, build a subway line or Van Ness Avenue remotely on time, or run a bus system properly should be in the electricity business.  Those are great questions, but here we ask "What about Burlingame?"  The Wall Street Journal posits a bad answer to that question:

The removal of San Francisco from PG&E’s 70,000-square-mile service territory would likely affect rates and service for those in rural and suburban areas outside of the city by reducing the number of customers paying for the operation and maintenance of the grid.

Michael Wara, head of the climate- and energy-policy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute, said it is incumbent upon California to examine how San Francisco’s takeover bid would affect those customers.  “In order for this to happen, the state of California would have to be amenable,” he said. “There is reason to suspect it might have some negative consequences for the people left behind.”

We've already got cost and reliability issues with the electricity we are getting and the wildfire liability that PG&E faces certainly isn't going to make the cost issues any better.  Let's just hope our neighbor to the north doesn't stick it to us even more by taking a bigger slice of the pie.

Berserkley: Natural Gas and Gasbags

I could create a new Voice category called "Berkeley Insanity" and it would easily merit a dozen posts per year.  Ridiculing Berserkley is so easy that it can get addictive, but I'll just take this one hit and then stop for awhile.  Today's Chronicle front page piece says "Berkeley: City first in U.S. to bar gas lines in home construction".

Berkeley has become the first city in the nation to ban the installation of natural gas lines in new homes.  The City Council on Tuesday night unanimously voted to ban gas from new low-rise residential buildings starting Jan. 1.  The natural gas ordinance, introduced by Councilwoman Kate Harrison, requires all new single-family homes, town homes and small apartment buildings to have electric infrastructure.

California Energy Commission Chairman David Hochschild, a Berkeley resident, also spoke at the meeting and said that 50 cities across the state, including San Francisco, are considering similar action and Berkeley would pave the way for future legislation.

What makes this so stupid is that just last week the big headlines were about PG&E's plans to shut off electricity during high fire danger situations.  Anyone remember the Oakland hills fire?  Anyone think it couldn't happen again?  And to top it all off, the U.S. has been a net exporter of natural gas for more than a year and has driven the price of natural gas down 87% from its peak in 2005.  In the meantime, hardly anyone thinks electricity prices are going anywhere but up.  So much for "affordable housing" from that bastion of East Bay wisdom.  I'm grateful these sorts of ideas don't infect Burlingame too often although we must be vigilant every two years at election time (which is fast approaching again).

Planning Climate Action in B'game

The climate action planning continues in B'game.  Here are some of the tangible activities courtesy of the Daily Journal reporting on the Joint Council-Planning Commission meeting last month:

Officials are crafting the proposal in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the coming two decades through improved mobility routes, more efficient development practices, natural resource conservation and more.  Among the most notable programs and practices identified to cut greenhouse gas emissions are:

• implementing a transportation demand management plan
• establishing a complete streets network
• adopting more efficient construction management
• becoming more energy efficient and
• supporting Peninsula Clean Energy

We will have to see just how tangible these become in the face of potential mass over-development driven by Senate Bill 50 (if it becomes law).

Lot Y Goes Electric

You may have noticed that Lot Y on Chula Vista just south of Broadway has been under construction for a couple of weeks as a company called EVgo installs six charging station spots and an ADA compatible charging spot.  Three parking spaces are being lost to make room for the seven new EV charging spots that will be unavailable to gas-powered vehicles.  That is a net of ten fewer spaces for gas cars.  According to the staff report from December 2017

Parking Lot Y off of Chula Vista Avenue was selected for the following reasons:

- It services the Broadway business district and is located close to a primarily multifamily residential neighborhood.

- It is easily accessible to regional and local EV drivers. - It is currently underutilized.

- It has access to a nearby PG&E power source.

Another driver for locating in Broadway is the relatively high number of EV drivers in the area. The state tracks redeemed EV rebates, which accounts for about 75% of EV owners. In San Mateo County, the 94010 zip code (which includes Burlingame and Hillsborough) received the highest number of rebates at 557. The total rebate count in the County is 5,806, and 125,548 rebates have been issued statewide.

I'm betting that a number of those 557 rebates in B'game and H'borough are for Teslas, but it is not clear that you will be able to charge your Tesla in these spaces since

The charging stations would be universally compatible for fast charging-compatible EVs (including CHAdeMO and CCS standards) and accessible to EVgo subscribers and non-subscribers

But according to this Reuters piece

Besides CCS, there are three other standards that will charge batteries fast: Tesla’s Supercharger system, CHAdeMO, or Charge de Move, developed by Japanese firms including carmakers Nissan and Mitsubishi, and GB/T in China, the world’s biggest electric car market.  “I think over time CHAdeMO and CCS converge, likely into the current CCS standard, and the jury is out as to what will happen to Tesla,” said Pasquale Romano, chief executive officer of Silicon Valley-based ChargePoint, which runs one of the world’s largest charging station networks.

As noted above, one of the goals was to provide charging convenience for people in multi-family homes so perhaps Teslas were not the target market for this "charging plaza".  The good news is that EVgo is paying the city enough in license fees that the lost parking meter revenue should be a wash.  Whether Lot Y remains "under utilized" so that finding a spot when you need it isn't too hard is yet to be seen when there are ten fewer spots to choose from.  And if news reports about the possibility of electric rates going up 50% in NorCal due to PG&E's issues, we might see the EV car market stall.

Earthquake Warning: 3 Months Without Water

The SF Chronicle is reporting on a USGS study about the impact of a major quake in the Bay Area--something they say is overdue

While nearly 113 years have passed without a major earthquake on the fault from the Peninsula north, the quiet will end. It could happen tomorrow or next week or decades from now. When it does, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people will feel the ground shake like they’ve never felt before.  Based on current understanding of earthquake recurrence, that’s a statistical anomaly, according to a report this month from U.S. Geological Survey scientists.  According to a 1,000-year earthquake history of those fault branches, the chances that not a single site would experience a major temblor in any given 100-year period is about 0.3%, the paper said.

Yep, we are riding on a 0.3% wave of luck.  Burlingame is doing more than most to prepare for this by way of our annual Neighborhood Network disaster drills, supply caches, ham radio courses and the like we discussed here.  The added bit of information from the USGS study is that a major quake on our San Andreas fault would have the probability of causing 3.7 million people to go without water for the following periods of time:

1-3 days has a 60% probability

1 week has a 58% probability

1 month has a 48% probability

3 months with no water has a 30.5% probability

Wow.  It's basically 50/50 that we would have to go a month without running water.  That is one of the reasons I believe we should be strengthening the Hetch Hetchy pipeline, building more reservoirs and limiting further population growth until we have done that.  It is somewhere between sad, ironic and scary that plenty of politicians read the headlines about the IPCC's 100 year climate change model and want immediate action, but this much nearer and more identifiable threat goes unnoticed.  Forewarned is forearmed.  This year's drill is Saturday, October 12th.  Put it on your calendar and if you don't have a group working in your part of B'game, think about volunteering.

Update:  I just got my 33 gallon water barrel with pump and preservatives to last 5 years from our local B'game preparedness experts, Earthshakes.com.  $143 all in and very well worth it.  Here it is

 

Affordability Problems Explained

The former CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, T.J. Rodgers, has been an outspoken critic of much of what goes on it Sacramento for decades.  His latest pointed critique of brand spanking new Guv. Gavin brings some well-known statistics together in one place in reply to Gavin telling the business community I should (must?  will?) do more about affordability.

When I was CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, I chose Round Rock, Texas, over San Jose, Calif., for Cypress’s second wafer-fabrication plant, and I chose to locate our third plant in Bloomington, Minn. Other CEOs made similar decisions. Silicon Valley barely has any silicon left; there are now zero state-of-the-art wafer-fabrication plants here. We had to move because government has made Silicon Valley uncompetitive for manufacturing.

Despite boasting the second-highest gasoline tax in the U.S., California’s roads are so potholed it actually pays to buy tire insurance. California power costs around 15.7 cents a kilowatt-hour, compared with 11.2 cents in Oregon and 9.7 cents in Washington state. But even those state-regulated windfall rates aren’t enough: Pacific Gas & Electric is about to go bankrupt again.

California took in record tax revenue in 2018, beating estimates by $1 billion according to the Los Angeles Times. But Mr. Newsom demanded even more: “I want to see the [companies in Silicon] Valley step up and match our contributions,” he said.

Rodgers also invokes the dreaded NIMBYs but doesn't dwell on that aspect of the housing supply equation.  Nice to know our electricity is 62% more expensive than the State of Washington's juice.  Anyone know where you can buy good tire insurance for those trips on El Camino?

 

Clean Power or Reliable Power?

Congrats to readers who have developed their Critical Thinking skills and can recognize my provocative, but ultimately false, title of this post.  The falsehood is the appearance of a dichotomy between clean power and reliable power.  We can probably have both, but do we have them right now?  The big outage in downtown San Mateo is almost five hours old as I type.  I am just opening the glossy brochure that arrived in the mail from Peninsula Clean Energy courtesy of the SMC Office of Sustainability.  Based on the massive traffic jam on El Camino, the extra car emissions and likelihood of a lot of spoiled food and health emergencies, one has to wonder if the County and various City Councils are focused on the right thing? I'm glad it wasn't pouring rain without working sump pumps.  Personally, I vote for reliable power first.  One of the few worthwhile things ex-councilwoman Terry Nagel advocated for was more reliable electricity in town.  I'm not sure we ever got it, but the aspiration was good.

In the fun facts from Germany department, we get this

The mindless (German) rush to renewables has already done tremendous damage to the German standard of living, with 300,000 households each year having their electricity turned off for non-payment.  With the cost of consumer-born subsidies at 25 euros bln per annum and surcharges of 6.88 euro cents per kWh, or twice the market price of a kilowatt, Germans pay three times more than Americans today.

Worse is to come.  According to the German consumer agency NAEB, by 2020, they will be paying 45 euro cents per kWh, compared to 10 cents for the U.S. and 20 cents in France.

Lest we digress too far, take a look at your PG&E bill.  "Delivery" is the bulk of the cost and that is where the power failures originate.  You can feel free to stay enrolled in the I-didn't-ask-for-this "Clean Power" program and save 5% on the minor part of the bill, but don't lose sight of the real issue-- reliable first world electricity.  Councilwoman Donna Colson has promised me an article about the benefits of Clean Power--which we will publish.  This post is just contextual background for that future post.

Slow Progress on Broadway

The DJ is highlighting the installation of the new (replacement) power pole at the B'way - 101 interchange

Work began Friday, Dec. 11, and is expected to be completed by Sunday, Dec. 13, as crews assemble a 130-foot steel pole near the Broadway overpass designed to hold the high-voltage lines sent sprawling across the highway after heavy equipment accidentally knocked down the previous structure, said a Pacific Gas and Electric spokesman Joe Molica.

As we know from the comments on the September post here, traffic and creative driving have been an issue there during construction.  I loved this quote from the PG&E guy in the piece

“For safety purposes, everyone keep their eyes on the road,” he said.

Solid advice all over town.

Council Candidate Forum - Part 1

OK, OK, alright.  Yes, I have delayed writing my analysis about Thursday's Candidate Forum for a very good reason.  I believe one candidate stretched the truth in six instances and I am doing a bit of fact checking before I call her out as a liar.  You deserve that much, dear reader.

In the meantime, let's just talk about the event itself.  This was my seventh or eighth Candidate Forum put on by the League of Women Voters.  They get worse every election.  The LWV sends someone who knows nothing about B'game because that is how they think they remain objective.  Mostly they just appear clueless.

The scuttlebutt in council chambers afterward was how few of the real B'game-specific questions that were submitted actually got asked.  I took seven pages of notes and here were some of the topics:

• What are the senior citizen issues these days?
• Where will the money for the new Rec Center come from?  (Great question, not such good answers).  Many questions later the LWV emcee asked about General Obligation bonds instead of following up immediately.
• What will you do about low income housing?  (Ugh.  We are the fourth densest city in the county with 52% renters already.  That stone has no more blood.  Later came the Rent Control question over again.  I'll be addressing that in the Part 2 post.  In the meantime, ask yourself what is the difference between "rent control" and "rent stabilization"?  
• Then "what should we do about Climate Change"?  Two questions later the same thing on "Sustainability".  Then another one about "Community Choice Energy" like B'game is going to become its own power company.  What BS.  You would think Putin, Obama, Xi and the Pope were on the dais.
• My favorite was a few questions later about the "Role of libraries".  Everyone was in favor of libraries.....are you surprised?

And yet there were two clear winners that did not surprise me one bit.  When I get a response from City Staff regarding one central question, I will give you a more complete review.

B'way Observations

I always appreciate tips from regular readers and I got one today about the Broadway intersection.  I've heard a few complaints (separate from the crane mishap) about delays and long hours of the day when nothing seems to be happening, but in the meantime one reader notes

At least 5% and as many as 10% of the cars coming south on 101 and getting off at Broadway are making illegal u-turns at Rollins causing a very significant risk of injury to many drivers. Have not seen any police presence there whatsoever. I am planning to contact Burlingame PD as well.

I'll add it to my list for the Chief as well, so thanks.  In other news, the two months might be even tighter than usual at that intersection

Beginning this Sunday evening, September 27, 2015, and continuing through November 22, 2015, PG&E will be working at the intersection of Rollins Road and Broadway between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. every night except Saturday. PG&E’s proposed work involves necessary improvements to an existing PG&E underground electrical transmission main. As the work is within the intersection, there will be lane reductions on all approaches. 

As of yesterday when I went through the whole maze twice, here is what the dirt pile on the east side looked like.