Portola Valley council to set baseline of 100% green electricity

Lots of virtue-signaling by the PV city council.

I wonder what the unintended negative consequences will be for the customers.

I hope it's nothing like what happened in Germany where government mandates dictated a portion of their grid be supplied by wind and solar energy. Since the wind and solar are intermittent, backup generators run off of coal and oil had to be kept in constant standby mode. The result? More use of oil and coal, and higher electricity costs for German consumers.

You bring up a good point: energy policy is complicated and very hard to get right. Germany (and Denmark, to an even greater extent) has pushed renewables through a very aggressive set of policies, which has led to large-scale adoption of solar and wind. And yes, this has increased electricity prices, but that was a policy decision: ten years ago, both solar and wind were much more expensive than they are today, so the only way to develop more of them was to require electric utilities to buy them. Those purchases helped drive prices down to where they are today.

California, incidentally, has had a similar policy (the Renewable Portfolio Standard) in place since 2005; PG&E bought renewables at prices well above market to meet its RPS requirements, and continues to do so. Those purchases are reflected in your current bill, and that has been a policy decision, not an "unintended consequence". The benefit of those above-market purchases, beyond the carbon-free electricity they're delivering, has been a dramatic decrease in the cost of solar and wind, to the point where renewables are nearing cost parity with fossil fuel generation (even before you factor in a price on carbon). Peninsula Clean Energy is seeing a premium for renewables over conventional sources, but that premium is much smaller and dropping steadily.

The challenge in the coming years will be matching our renewable portfolio (wind, solar, small hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass,and emerging wave technologies) to our loads; we rely on fossil fuel (almost entirely natural gas in California) as a backup to renewables, and will do so for the foreseeable future. Sound policy, however, can minimize that reliance through a combination of efficiency, demand management, "firming" of renewable sources over a wide geographic area, and the small but growing electricity storage industry. There's no question that this will be a long and technically daunting challenge, but I think its one worth pursuing, and I'm proud that Portola Valley is committed to doing its part. And as a resident, you are also free to either re-join PG&E or choose PCE's lower (50%) renewable product.

As you may have gathered, I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this and other energy questions. Thank you for the comment; very topical.

Best Regards,

Jeff Aalfs
Council Member, Portola Valley
Vice Chairman, Peninsula Clean Energy

If I go with the 100% plan for my home, how many birds on average will have died per month by being mauled to create the wind power component of my energy cocktail.

Serious question: Is it possible to configure my energy supply so that there is no wind component in my consumption? I don't want the dead birds on my conscience.