Do you like nuclear power? There’s quite a bit to recommend it. It has a very low spatial footprint compared to wind or solar. It can run 24/7, rain or shine, light or dark. By some measures, nuclear power plants produce less greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy than other green sources. And despite the hype about Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power is as safe as solar and wind, and WAAAAAAAAYYYY safer than coal, oil, or gas.
But maybe you don’t really care about all that safety and greenery stuff, and just want to keep your lights on using anything that works.
If you live in San Francisco, tough. Thanks to a complicated bureaucratic process, it has been decided that San Francisco categorically cannot be powered by nuclear energy, without ever going through a process to figure out whether that’s something the people of the city want or need. However, there is something that you can do, right now, to help fix that.
Before getting to that, though, it’s necessary to first get a brief primer on ELECTRICAL GRID MANAGEMENT POLICY (please read the preceding phrase in a booming voice with lots of echoes).
At a 35,000 foot level, an electrical grid has 3 primary actors: Generators, The Grid, and Consumers. Generators do “stuff” to generate lots of electrons, those electrons are then handed off to The Grid, who sends them to Consumers who want to use those electrons to do other “stuff.” The consumers then pay the grid based on how many electrons the grid sent them and the grid in turn pays the generators for doing “stuff” to make those electrons in the first place.
But there’s a problem. Sometimes, consumers don’t like the particular “stuff” that’s done to make the electrons they’re using. Maybe those electrons are made by burning fossil fuels that contribute to global warming. Or maybe they just think the grid is overpaying for their electrons and think they could do a better job finding cheap electrons to make their Nintendos and vinyl record players work.
So why not allow consumers to decide to only get their electrons from the particular sources they choose? Well, that desire runs counter to the whole notion of an electrical grid. Once electrons are on the wire, you can’t distinguish where the electrons came from.
So what about cutting out the grid and just running a wire straight from the generators you like to your home or business? Well, that would be really expensive and annoying to maintain.
However, it is possible to approximate the running of wires from specific generators to a set of consumers, using COMMUNITY CHOICE AGGREGATORS (again read in the booming, echoing voice).
Community Choice Aggregators, or CCAs, are sort of a financial middleman run by local governments that makes contracts with generators that in a manner that the following dialogue analogizes:
CCA: Hey there Jen E. Rator. I like the way you generate electrons and want to pay you to do it. I’ll pay you $10 million to send a Bazillion electrons to The Grid this month.
Jen E. Rator: Sure I can do that. Instead of taking money from Grid for my electrons, who doesn’t always know how many electrons are needed and varies how much I get paid, I’ll take you money instead.
CCA: Great! Hey, Grid! I’m paying Jen E. Rator to put electrons on you and I’m going to act as if all the electrons you send me are coming from Jen, because I paid to put that many electrons on you. So from now on, I’m not going to pay you as much because you’re not the one paying for Jen’s electrons anymore.
The Grid: I’m legally obligated to say OK. But I will still need you to pay me a little bit to maintain those wires that move the electrons around.
So what’s going on in San Francisco?
San Francisco, like many other local jurisdictions in California, has a CCA, called CleanPowerSF. It makes contracts with generators to put electrons on the grid, focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and keeping prices low for consumers, subject to certain constraints.
One of those constraints? CleanPowerSF is categorically prohibited from getting any electrons from nuclear power plants. Outlined straightforwardly in their Business Practice Policies document “CleanPowerSF will not utilize [...] nuclear energy.” No room for ambiguity, there. Did you spin a turbine by splitting an atom? Then you’re not getting any money from CleanPowerSF.
Why is this the case? Who decided to take this course of action? Given the scale of that sort of prohibition, you might expect it to have been decided by the Board of Supervisors. You know, those people who are elected to make decisions that reflect the values of their constituents and should respond to the wishes of their constituents?
Nope.
The “no nuclear power” policy was first outlined in the original CPSF Business Practice Policies document which got rubber stamped by a city commission in 2015. The policy was only explicitly stated in another commission resolution in July 2020, adopted a month after the publication of a fearmongering article about the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power plant. As far as can be divined, the city’s elected representatives have never explicitly weighed in on the subject of whether CleanPowerSF can consider using nuclear power as a source of energy. In fact, seemingly the only input that has ever been made on the subject was eight public comments made regarding the adoption of the July 2020 resolution.
What can you do about it?
Normally, when faced with some aspect of San Francisco political dysfunction, like crime, housing prices, obnoxious business regulation, or corruption, the most productive response is usually to try to get better people elected who care about actually fixing the issues, because the issue is caused by policies originating from the Board of Supervisors.
But in this case there may be a quicker solution. Since the actual elected organs of city government have never weighed in on the subject, the highest level word on CleanPowerSF energy policy comes from the body that manages it, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. As it so happens, 3 of the 5 Commissioners’ terms expired last month and will need to have replacements appointed, while another seat has been vacant for some amount of time. That means that if a new commission is seated that recognizes that nuclear power has a place in a green energy system, they could reverse the existing policy on their own, without needing to wait for City Hall to opine on the matter.
With that in mind, we have started a petition to urge Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors to appoint a nuclear-friendly SFPUC that is willing to consider nuclear power when planning the purchases of electrons for the people of San Francisco.
You can find it at: https://secure.everyaction.com/pY6639V8T0e1FyubYRO9VQ2
It only takes a couple seconds to sign, a minute to share, and it’s narrowly tailored such that it can actually make a meaningful difference in the real world.