What can you do?

This is Bright Ideas, a free weekly newsletter for people who want to know what’s up with clean energy.

I’m Julian Spector, living in LA and reporting on the clean energy industry for Greentech Media. I usually release this on Tuesdays, but I was cooling off at a few beaches for Labor Day (more on that later), so we’re rolling a day behind this week.

New here? Hit subscribe to stay in touch, and check out the archive for all the goodies.

A reader asked me how to be a better consumer of clean energy, and I hadn’t really addressed that in all these weeks riffing on the rise of renewables and the battle unfolding for a cleaner grid.

That’s partly because I’m wary of ascribing ethical value to consumer choices. If I’ve learned anything in my years reporting on this stuff, the colossal might of the system dwarfs any one person’s choices. We were born into a world that uses fossil fuels to get around and power our homes; tackling climate change requires changing that system wholesale, and a theory of change that focuses on which product to buy misses the bigger picture.

At the same time, individuals undeniably have some leeway to cause more or less damage within the range of options the system allows. Broad structural change takes a while—15 years, in the case of the Democrats’ new clean energy platform. What can you and I do in the mean time?

Think of this week’s post as a series of questions you can ask to figure out your place in the broader energy system and how to exert power in it.

Air-conditioning in Santa Monica, or, a chance to contemplate one’s place in a broader system of energy production.

Know who you buy from 

This one’s easy, because their name is on your bill. But this knowledge unlocks a bounty of crucial follow ups. 

Is your power provider an investor-owned utility? If so, it balances provision of life-giving energy with delivering quarterly profits to shareholders. It also is required to disclose essential business details for those shareholders every quarter, which reveals what the utility is planning and where it hopes to make more money in the future. Check out the investor relations section of the company website.

Is your power provider a municipal agency? If so, it answers to your city government, and by extension, to you as a voter. If you elect leaders that want to clean up the energy system, municipal utilities can move exceptionally fast. If voters don’t pay attention, city utilities can lag behind the times. You might also buy from an electric cooperative, or a “community choice aggregator” two structures that are localized and designed to give their customers a say in what happens.

Does your power company engage in shady behavior with your money? Check your local newspaper (fingers crossed it still exists) for any recent scandals. Try using the keyword “rate case” to find out if the utility is raising the rates you’ll have to pay, and what its justifications are.

Do you live in a place that requires an end to dirty power? One in three Americans do, according to a UCLA study. Several states have passed binding laws to phase out fossil fueled power, including: Hawaii, California, Washington, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, Maine, Nevada, plus Puerto Rico and D.C. Some cities have taken that step too. On the flip side, you have Ohio, whose legislature voted to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars from the public to prop up failing coal plants. Pending some national clean energy policy, where you live says a lot about what your future energy sources will look like. 

What can you do?

If you own a house and can commit to long term financial obligations, go solar! Shop around with a few local installers. Solar loans have flourished, so you don’t need to drop $20,000 cash to do this. You can also go with a larger national company like Sunrun or Sunnova, which offer no-money-down solar for a monthly payment that should be less than what you pay for electricity currently. If you’re worried about wildfires or hurricanes knocking out power and/or money isn’t an issue, consider adding a battery.

If you don’t own a house, or don’t want to make a 20+ year commitment to solar, check if your utility offers a clean energy option. These go by the name “Green Choice” or similar, and typically involve a slight premium in exchange for buying only clean power on your behalf.

If you live in a state with community solar, you can subscribe to the output of a solar plant in your region, and get credited on your utility bill for it. My colleague Emma wrote a stellar explainer on just that, check it out here.

Vote for politicians who reject donations from fossil fuel companies and utilities. Fossil fuel companies push for policies that benefit fossil fuels. But you may not have considered that utilities have powerful lobbying efforts of their own, aided by the fact that in many states, they rank among the largest and most influential employers. They often use political donations to support the status quo. Then again, if your utility wants to crank on clean energy, maybe their lobbying is good now?

Be aware of when you use electricity, because carbon emissions depend on what plants are running at a given moment. Services like WattTime and grid operators themselves track this information (email me if you need help finding this for where you live).

To use California as an example, we have so much solar power that electricity is cleanest when the sun is shining. That’s a great time to run appliances, charge electric cars, get your house nice and cool. Our carbon emissions rise as the sun sets and we switch to mostly gas power. The peak hours for demand and emissions typically land in the evening. If you can push any heavy electricity use out of those hours, you’ll probably reduce your carbon impact.

California grid emissions from a random day in April with a nice solar curve. Emissions are low when Mr. Sun is hanging out, but when dour Mr. Moon emerges, emissions soar.

This week in quarantine: Nuclear surfing, Dude!

You may have heard we had another heat wave in Southern California this weekend. It came with another round of blackout worries, and state authorities once again asked us to provide unpaid grid flexibility. By this I mean, they wanted us to voluntarily use less power than we wanted to, a service that the grid operator pays people for but which we were asked to donate as responsible Californians.

I decided to oblige, and instead of wallowing in an overheated house, I turned on Nature’s very own air conditioner, the beach. It’s at least 20 degrees cooler over there. But I had something special in mind, which took me south to a surfing spot known as San Onofre.

I don’t surf, but I’ve got a knack for spotting grid infrastructure. Walking along the beach, an orange sun dropping through hazy skies, I stumbled from surfer heaven into an elaborate concrete fortress crowned by twin shapely domes: the now defunct San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS).

It says something about California that the same facility that warns intruders they will be apprehended by armed guards also provides beach access along the coastal perimeter, lest nuclear nonproliferation defenses interfere with catching a gnarly break. 

This bum wouldn’t get out of the way, I just wanted a picture of that power plant!

They don’t make (carbon-free) power there any more. Some internal tubing started to leak, and rather than repair it, SONGS went quiet in 2013, except for lingering efforts to stick the radioactive stuff in long-term concrete storage. I wonder how many drivers cruising to San Diego on the 5 realize how close they pass to the dreaded stuff. 

I dove back in the ocean, absorbing a little more coolness as the lights twinkled on around the phantom power plant.