Experts Weigh in on Why San Francisco Shouldn’t Sell RECs as Green Power
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 20, 2015
Contact: Hunter Stern (415) 517-0318
San Francisco – Supervisors London Breed and John Avalos have introduced legislation that would allow CleanPowerSF, the City’s Community Choice Aggregation program, to sell unbundled Renewable Electricity Certificates (RECs) as ‘green power,’ ‘clean power’ and ‘greenhouse gas free power’ to San Franciscans. There’s only one problem: RECs are not green power. According to the experts, they are an accounting gimmick that allows buyers to ‘greenwash’ dirty power and sell it as green. But don’t take our word for it:
Third Party Opinions:
RECs are not clean energy and should not be represented as such.
The Experts on RECs:
Ed Harrington: Former Manager of the SF Public Utilities Commission has said that RECs aren’t “real green power.” From his interview with NPR on September 17, 2012:
“What PG&E is talking about offering starting next year, and we’re not sure if they will offer it, isn’t really generated green power. What they’re going to offer is what’s called renewable energy credits, and what that means is that you still provide brown power, but you’ve bought a renewable energy credit from somebody who might be doing wind in the Altamont Pass, but you aren’t buying the actual wind power. You’re just buying this asset that the state created that’s called an energy credit. That’s cheaper. We could have provided a program like that for about the price that PG&E is going to provide it for. We thought people here wanted real green power. Real power that was being generated that was green.”
The Sierra Club: On October 12, 2012, James Barsimantov and Dustin Mulvaney offered the following testimony on behalf of the Sierra Club and the California Clean Energy Committee regarding PG&E’s proposed use of RECs for their ‘Green Option’ program:
“Challenging the additionality claims of RECs from a financial and time (initiation date) perspective demonstrates that voluntary RECs do not pass: REC prices continue to remain depressed, meaning they cannot be a significant source of project revenue. Since eligible generation has a 14-year window, a large number of RECs are completely unrelated to new generation.”
Joseph Romm: Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, told Bloomberg:
“It isn’t reasonable to say that purchasing a REC is equivalent to not polluting.”
“It’s spreadsheet mumbo jumbo. Companies show their emissions are reduced, but overall emissions to the environment aren’t changed.”
Daniel Press: Chair of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, said of RECs in the San Jose Mercury News:
“Prices for renewable-energy certificates, as negotiated by brokers and power producers, are very low — 10 percent of the difference between the cost of producing nonrenewable and renewable energy, and far too little to actually spur production. By harnessing the power of the word “renewable” for spin and gimmickry, certificate brokers have persuaded hundreds of colleges to buy the “environmental attributes” of wind, landfill gas and solar energy — but not the electricity itself.”
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that “the new CleanPowerSF program will likely have to rely heavily on renewable energy credits — essentially carbon credits — instead of electricity received directly from renewable sources.”
And SFWeekly called them “faux-green renewable energy credits.”
The CPUC on RECs:
On August 22, 2008, the CPUC laid out its “Decision On Definition And Attributes Of Renewable Energy Credits For Compliance With The California Renewables Portfolio Standard.” Within that report, the CPUC asserts that:
“We also agree with those parties stating that a REC used for RPS compliance should not be used as a GHG offset, because it is clear from the very definition of an offset that, once counted for RPS compliance (and thus “otherwise regulated”), a REC can have no GHG offset value.” [4.1.2.3.2. Renewable and Environmental Attributes, page 22]
The CPUC also noted that:
“In addition to the statutory exclusions, there are other common aspects of renewable energy transactions that should not be part of the REC. These elements are excluded from the Green Attributes set out in STC 2 and should likewise be excluded from a REC:
energy, capacity, reliability or other power attributes;
production tax credits and other tax incentives;
fuel-related subsidies or “tipping fees” or subsidies for promoting local environmental benefits; and
any emission reduction credits, other than those issued pursuant to § 40709 of the Health and Safety Code (which are already excluded by statute), encumbered or used for compliance with operating and/or air quality permits.” [4.1.2.3.4. Other Exclusions, p. 30]
Don’t let city politicians sell San Franciscans dirty energy and call it green. Join us and learn more at www.TruthInEnergySF.com.