You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 199 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Cause we don’t survive without energy
This week’s topic: ENERGY
SF can easily become a green energy exporter
We have a huge number of green, renewable, sustainable energy sources available to be tapped within SF city limits. We have enough energy available to easily power SF. We have enough that we can export energy. We are unbelievably lucky in this regard, but only if we actually use these sources. So let’s take a look at if and how well we are using them right now.
Here’s where we are on solar
In addition to solar panels on individual homes and buildings, SFPUC owns and operates 9 municipal solar installations that can generate up to 7.2 megawatts (a number mostly unchanged since 2009, by the way). According to the CA Energy Commission, SF’s 2021 electricity consumption was 5008.4 kWh, meaning that these 9 municipal installations, when in operation, can meet current electricity needs if the sun is shining.
However:
- Our electricity needs will rise as we stop using fossil fuels.
- Not enough solar energy is produced or stored for solar to supply our night time, winter, cloudy/raining, and foggy weather needs.
- If some or all of SF’s municipal solar installations are not in SF, the dependability of this energy source is easily compromised.
BOTTOM LINE: We already have a lot of solar energy and can have much more. We need storage capacity. We need to increase small solar and get panels on roofs across the city.
Here’s where we are on wind
There is wind energy in the PG&E energy mix, but not very much. There is more in Clean Power SF, but still not very much. Yet SF’s capacity for small-scale wind is as important as our solar capacity because SF is rich in wind. If we provided a market for innovation in small-scale turbines (especially vertical-axis) and made manufacture easy to set up in the city (it is a perfect type of industry for our city’s size, location, and resources), we could cover SF in wind turbines designed and built here. Every street light pole, every roof, every school, every traffic light — every place with wind gets a turbine. After all, Golden Gate Park was made with energy from windmills.
BOTTOM LINE: We’ve got the energy source. We don’t have the turbines, or the regulations to support them. We need this to be fixed now.
Here’s where we are on heat pumps
Heat pumps are extremely efficient thermal transfer devices that can be used with air, water, and ground, or anywhere you can tap into differentials in temperature and specific heat capacity. Heat pumps have been in use in Switzerland since 1937. The Exploratorium’s HVAC system is a bay water heat pump.
SF Environment has been encouraging homeowners in SF to buy air-source heat pumps for over a decade now, and points people to rebates offered by the state or federal government for purchasing and/or installing heat pumps. Unfortunately, SF Environment is a Potemkin village by design, created to seem as if SF is serious about environmental action, but grossly underfunded, isolated, and utterly powerless. Outside city hall, few people know it exists and even fewer have access to or use its information. Even inside city hall, how many people know where SF Environment’s office is (without looking it up)?
BOTTOM LINE: Heat pumps are an obvious way for SF to save energy, reduce our carbon footprint, reduce our environmental inequities, reduce our dependence on imported fuels, improve our local air quality (by eliminating wood burning for heat), and promote better health outcomes. There are state and federal programs available now to help pay for heat pumps. But SF is doing little to access or promote the technology or the programs.
Here’s where we are on tidal and wave
SF’s Mayor Adolf Sutro was using wave power in 1887. SF’s Mayor Gavin Newsom submitted a permit application for a wave power project in 2009. We’ve got wave and tidal action on 3 sides from water that is rising. Tapping into this abundant energy source not only could fuel the city but can help us closely monitor and react to the impacts of sea level rise in real time.
BOTTOM LINE: SF has used and abandoned this energy source multiple times because using it doesn’t make anyone rich.
Here’s where we are on storage and conservation
There are many ways to store energy: chemical batteries (including in vehicles), pumped hydro, pumped thermal, gravity, compressed air, hydrogen, mechanical (such as flywheels), rail, molten salt, and more. There are many ways to conserve energy (from Energy Star appliances to use reduction).
SF’s program to encourage conservation is anemic, sporadic, and underfunded; you have to be looking for it to find it. For storage, SF has some accidental pumped hydro potential in the emergency water reservoirs for disaster fire suppression, but that water is already needed for other uses. Hetch Hetchy is our largest energy (and water) storage system, but it’s only ours by theft/graft/colonialism (call it what you will). The distance is too great, and the need along the way likely to grow; this is not a dependable source of either water or power. If there are other energy storage units around, they are very well hidden.
BOTTOM LINE: SF does a bad job promoting and enabling conservation, and appears to have no local energy storage capacity at all.
So what do you need to do?
ACT NOW! If you want SF to survive.