PG$E's energy is NOT green. Check out the Facts: - Feasability
studies find the Bay Area has solar and wind
capacity to meet 50% of San Francisco's energy by 2017...without raising customer costs.
- PG&E aims to increase its renewable energy by the legally mandated minimum of 1% a year. It does this by outsourcing it. (See this.)
- PG&E's $4.9 billion budget for generation and distribution does not include a single dollar for solar or wind. This is true for its 4-yr plan through 2010. You can run a search for 'solar' and 'wind' and 'renewable' and get a total of less than 10 results. Then run a search for 'nuclear' and see how many times it is mentioned in the document. (Long document, we recommend searching by keywords - 'solar', 'wind', 'nuclear', '4.9' See: General Rate Case, CPUC Proceeding A0512002)
- PG&E praises itself for its work on energy efficiency & giving out efficient lightbulbs - when all of that is legally required and funded by our tax
money (see: Public Goods Charge on your monthly bill).
- PG&E endorsed climate change legislation because compared to future presidents, Bush is likely be more "sensitive to the needs of business," explains PG&E CEO Peter Darbee. (See pg. 2 of New York Times article, 1/19/07)
- PG&E is aggressively lobbying for nuclear energy to be the 'green' solution to climate change, despite the fact that there is no safe solution in sight for the nuclear waste it leaves behind for 240,000 years. (See pg. 108 the $800,000 bill you're being charged to fund the nuclear lobbying association General Rate Case)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ANALYSIS: PG&E's energy efficiency and carbon-reduction programs are typically funded by taxpayers and lauded for their leadership in comparison to their utility peers. Yet PG&E's
energy mix and lobbying track record proves it is not moving towards a safe and systemic solution to the climate crisis. Are we going to be pacified by incremental moves and programs that are better than their peer fossil-fuel companies? If so, we are setting ourselves up to experience the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina & Chernobyl again and again.
The facts are clear. PG$E is invested in unsafe and dirty energy
production facilities and has no intention of changing that. The time to radically scale up our solar and wind
energy is yesterday. But all we have is today. And we have a choice. By passing Community Choice Aggregation policies - we can break PG&E's contract - and foster a truly green energy market without raising our costs. San Francisco Supervisors are getting close to passing this policy... coincidental timing with PG&E's multi-million PR campaign to "green" this city? What do you think.
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