Tag Archives: San Francisco Bay Area

Repost from the San Francisco Chronicle
[Editor: The proposed increase is to be voted on at a Thursday, 12/17/15 meeting of the California Public Utilities Commission. See agenda, p. 17 (Item #16, Adopting Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s 2016 Electric Procurement Cost Revenue Requirement Forecast. The item in question is “$118.7 million for the Power Charge Indifference Amount.” More background and an ACTION letter opportunity at ActionNetwork. More at Marin Independent Journal. – RS]

High cost of breaking away

EDITORIAL – On Alternatives to PGE

The Pacific Gas and Electric Co., California’s largest utility and a longtime regulated monopoly, insists that its application to nearly double a fee for customers defecting to local clean power plans is simply a matter of market forces.

PG&E’s many critics think otherwise.

“There’s an urgency for PG&E to stifle competition,” said state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco. “They’re protecting a monopoly.”

The suspicions are understandable. PG&E has the legal right to charge the fee, known as a Power Charge Indifference Adjustment.

It has to do with PG&E’s obligation to provide power to everyone in its service area as the utility of last resort. Should any customer’s alternate energy provider go out of business, PG&E still has to be able to provide for those customers — hence a fee.

“We have to undertake long-term forecasts about serving those customers in the event of their other service provider going out of business,” said PG&E spokesperson Nicole Liebelt. “It’s about ensuring that those customers won’t be left stranded.”

Liebelt said that PG&E’s longterm contract costs for serving customers are higher than current market costs, and that’s why the fee had to rise.

“The formula for calculating the fee hasn’t changed,” Liebelt said. “It’s the inputs that change every year.”

But the fee has never been as high as it is this year — the cost for each residential customer would nearly double, from $6.70 to $13 per month. In San Francisco, the proposed fee for residents looking to move to CleanPower SF would skyrocket by 100.26 percent.

Meanwhile, there’s never been a greater danger of Bay Area customers stranding PG&E.

CleanPowerSF, San Francisco’s city-run green energy program, launches in the spring. Peninsula Clean Energy, a community choice renewable energy program for San Mateo County, is scheduled to launch in August 2016.

And Marin Clean Energy and Sonoma Clean Power aren’t going anywhere.

But the administrators of these programs have all cried foul, saying that the big fee hikes threaten their business models.

We urge the California Public Utilities Commission to consider these arguments very carefully before they vote on a rate increase as early as next week.

Leno has urged the CPUC to do a public review of its methodology for how the fee should be calculated before voting on any increase above 15 percent.

Considering the fact that the CPUC has historically been incredibly deferential to PG&E’s concerns, Leno’s idea is worth considering. Electricity customers deserve choices, and local clean energy programs deserve the opportunity to compete on a level playing field.

Air Quality, Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), Bay Area Refineries, Cap-and-trade, Carbon emissions, Emissions caps, Greenhouse gas emissions, Local Regulation, Public Health, San Francisco Bay Area

Letter to the Bay Area Air District: require strict emissions caps on refineries

September 16, 2015 Roger Straw

Posted with permission

Benicia Resident Marilyn Bardet’s letter to the Chair of the Board, Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD)

Direct staff to require numerical emissions caps on all refinery emissons

By Marilyn Bardet, Sept 16, 2015

Dear Chair Groom,

In response to the overwhelming testimony the District has received from all corners of the Bay Area, as chair of the BAAQMD board of directors, you, with your board, have the authority to direct District staff to revise DRAFT Rules 12-15 and 12-16 as currently released, to require strict numerical emissions caps on all refinery emissions, including GHG.

By all means of public testimony over a two-year period, you have heard from concerned and affected members of the public, respected regional and national organizations (including Sierra Club, NRDC, CBE, 350 Bay Area, APEN, Sunflower Alliance) and other experts in the field who have recommended and put forward well-defined revisions that would impose strict numerical emissions caps on refinery emissions tied to current emissions baselines for TAC, VOCs, heavy metals and PM2.5, including GHG.

You know that oil companies in the region aim to acquire and process the most dangerously polluting crude in the world — tar sands. Refineries processing changed crude slates whose blends have increasing amounts of heavy crude, unconventional crudes such as Bakken oil, and/or tar sands will adversely impact regional and local air quality, especially affecting front-line communities and those “downwind communities.” Allowing emissions to “go up to” long ago established permitting levels (Valero Benicia’s permit was established in 2003) is tantamount to the District “giving in” to benefit the oil industries’ profit, not public health.

The District’s mandate is to clean up the air for the benefit of public health, and, in accordance with state mandates, to protect the climate by drastically reducing GHG. Oil refining is the biggest industrial source of GHG. Carbon trading by refineries will simply send “pollution credits” elsewhere and keep toxic emissions “at home” that kill thousands of people in the Bay Area each year. GHG emissions from fossil fuel combustion threaten to destroy our global climate and way of life.

Strong refinery rules that set numerical limits on toxic emissions tied to current baselines and limit GHGs are our best chance to protect public health and protect the climate.

We need your leadership more than ever now! I am writing to ask that you make it clear to your directors that the “highest good” must be done by BAAQMD in the name of public health and climate protection, such that, until revisions to Rules 12-15 and 12-16 are adopted that set refinery emission caps at today’s levels, including for GHG, the agency will suspend permitting for refinery projects.

This is a bold request, but these are very uncertain times that require every precaution and concerted action by leadership to create policies that protect people and the planet.

Thank you for your public service, and for you attention to my comments.

Respectfully,

Marilyn Bardet
Benicia

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Emergency Readiness & Response, Environmental Impacts, Explosion, Fire, Rail Safety

Santa Clara County votes to oppose oil trains

August 25, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from NBC Bay Area
[Editor: See also coverage on CBS SF Bay Area. – RS]

Supervisors Oppose Proposed Project That Would Bring Oil Trains Through Santa Clara County

By Robert Handa and Bay City News, Aug 24, 2015, 7:03 PM PDT

Santa Clara County leaders, including some fire chiefs, are looking to join the Bay Area fight to stop railroad cars filled with crude oil from traveling through neighborhoods.

The South Bay officials said they are worried a proposed plan in San Luis Obispo County could lead to a derailment, an environmental disaster and the loss of life.

A recent train derailment in San Jose made some Santa Clara County leaders suddenly very interested in blocking the Phillips 66 proposal to expand its Santa Maria oil refinery.

The plan to extend a Union Pacific rail line in San Obispo County would likely allow Phillips 66 to have up to five trains a week transporting millions of gallons of high sulfur crude oil around its Santa Maria refinery.

The route would run through 40 miles of the county in Milpitas, downtown San Jose, Morgan Hill, Gilroy and unincorporated communities, according to Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez.

The project would have an option to use Caltrain from San Francisco to downtown San Jose, Chavez said.

“A hundred years ago rail lines were going through prairies. Now they’re going through communities where people live, work, play and worship,” Chavez said.

With nearly 2 million residents, Santa Clara County is a more densely populated area than elsewhere on the route, Yeager said.

In addition to the human impact an oil train derailment would have, there would also be environmental consequences on air and soil quality and an already limited water supply, Yeager said.

The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote on a resolution against the proposal during its Tuesday meeting.

If the resolution is passed, the county plans to detail their opposition to the project in a letter to the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors. [Editor: the resolution passed by unanimous vote. – RS]

The Santa Clara County Fire Chiefs’ Association has also written a letter to San Luis Obispo County officials for additional information, training and equipment to keep the county safe should the project move forward, Kehmna said.

Palo Alto fire Chief Eric Nickel, president of the fire chiefs’ association, said Phillips should provide the resources to train county fire personnel instead of billing taxpayers.

In an email Phillips 66 spokesman Dennis Nuss said, “We remain committed to safety and to our proposal. We understand that there may be opposition to the rail project, and we look forward to San Luis Obispo County providing responses to all issues that are raised and addressing them in compliance with CEQA.”

Bay Area Air Quality Management District, San Francisco Bay Area, Valero Benicia Refinery

Valero Benicia sues BAAQMD, demands $57M in Clean Air Credits

July 29, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from Courthouse News Service

Refiner Demands $57M in Clean Air Credits

By Dave Tartre, July 29, 2015 5:37 AM PT

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – Valero Refining Co. sued the Bay Area Air Quality Management District on Monday, claiming it abused its discretion by denying it $57 million in emissions-reduction credits.

Improvements from a major modernization of Valero’s Benicia refinery brought significant and permanent reductions in air pollution, Valero claims, but the Air Quality Management District last year rejected its application to bank $57 million in emissions reduction credits for the work it did of its own volition.

The refinery, next to the Carquinez Strait about 25 miles north of San Francisco, emits fewer nitrogen oxides and less particulate matter greater than 10 microns in diameter than it did before the project, and also reduced organic compounds and sulfur dioxide, Valero says.

It claims that the Air Quality Management District has not disputed that “the emissions reductions were real, permanent, quantifiable, enforceable and not legally required.”

A Bay Area Air Quality Management District representative on Tuesday said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

Valero says it relied on a senior district engineer for guidance during the project, only to find out that the district was not bound by her decisions.

After the project was complete, Valero says, the Air Quality Management District changed the baseline emissions figures for the before-and-after comparison it uses to grant or deny credits.

The district’s hearing board upheld the denial on appeal.

Valero on Monday asked the Superior Court to declare the ruling a prejudicial abuse of discretion not supported by substantial evidence in the administrative record.

Valero claims the district’s hearing board mischaracterized its 3½-year project as a “simple shutdown of equipment.”

To the contrary, Valero says, the refinery was outfitted with new furnaces, new flue gas scrubbers and other equipment that “reduced emissions of various pollutants … by thousands of tons per year, thereby significantly improving Bay Area air quality.”

Though the work was prompted by a 2005 consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Valero says it went far beyond the agreement’s requirements, to retool the refinery’s equipment and operations.

Valero says that $500 million of the $750 million spent on the project went to “achieve emissions reductions beyond those required by the Consent Decree or by other provisions of law.”

Valero seeks writ of mandate to evaluate the fairness and consistency of the district’s rejection, not just whether it was reasonable.

A spokesman from Valero declined to comment, saying the company would let the filing speak for itself.

It is represented by Ronald Van Buskirk with Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, in San Francisco.