There's an old California saying, “Water runs uphill toward money.”

Now California also wants electrons to flow against the laws of economics and possibly local environmental standards and neighborhood values.

The California Public Utilities Commission finally has released a proposed policy that would require the state’s three largest electric utilities to start building storage facilities along their transmission lines.   This policy complies with Assembly Bill 2514, by Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley in 2010. It was signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

However, there's a cheaper way to do the same thing: Use the transmission grid as a storage system. But that isn’t being considered by the CPUC.

Skinner policy

The proposed policy of the Skinner bill would mandate the installation of 1,325 megawatts of storage capacity by the big three electric utilities: Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric; as well as by “electric service providers” to the commercial and industrial sectors, such as municipal electricity departments; and by “Community Choice Aggregators,” or electric cooperatives.

A megawatt can power about 1,000 homes for an instant.  A megawatt hour can power 1,000 homes for one hour.  Total installed in-state electric generation capacity in California from all sources is about 75,000 megawatts.

So the 1,325 megawatts of storage capacity Skinner's bill would mandate would be less than 2 percent of installed capacity. Media reports of “massive energy mandates” are overblown.

The cost of 2 percent of installed electric storage could be absorbed by the other 98 percent, together with tax incentives.

But the widespread adoption of current electricity storage technologies would be cost prohibitive.  A Sandia National Laboratories study in 2011 conducted for the U.S. Department of Energy reported the costs for energy storage ranged from a low of $5 per kilowatt hour for “compressed air energy storage” to a high of $10,000 per kilowatt hour for Supercapacitors. (A kilowatt hour is enough electricity to power your home for one hour).  By comparison, the average price of residential electricity in California is a fraction of that, 17.5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The Sandia study additionally conducted a “present worth analysis” of the different storage technologies and concluded the costs ranged from $669 to  $1,409 per kilowatt-hour in cost for short-duration, frequent-discharge storage. (Compressed air and hydro storage were not analyzed.)

But this analysis is suspect because it was done for the Department of Energy and was based on questionable assumptions.  The methodology compared four hours of operation of several types of batteries to eight hours of operation of Compressed Air Energy Storage and Pumped Hydropower Storage, which are the two lowest-cost methods of storage.

Another drawback is that the cheapest storage technology, compressed air energy storage, requires the use of natural underground caverns along transmission lines to store pressurized air.  And to store energy for release to produce hydropower would require proximity to water reservoirs.  So what the CPUC is talking about is storage batteries located along transmission lines.

Target

The target of the energy storage industry is to replace existing high-priced natural-gas “peaker plants” with even higher cost storage battery systems on the sole basis of zero air pollution. “Peaker” plants come on line only during times of “peak” electricity demand, but otherwise are not generating elecricity.

Peaker plants produce power during heat waves and cold snaps at high prices to offset the limited amount of hours during a year they can recover their costs.  A peaker plant can generate instantaneous power for about $0.49 per kilowatt-hour, according to storage industry sources.

                Cost and Performance of Assumptions of Energy Storage

The real world unit cost to store electricity in private industry is about $201 to $707 per kilowatt-hour (in 1995 dollars).  The Electric Storage Industry Association reportedly states that energy storage costs have dropped to 2 to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, a drop of 99.994 percent below what Sandia Labs reports.

However, a 2003 study conducted for the California Energy Commission, “Improving the Value of Wind Generation Through Backup Generation and Storage,” concluded, “Even under fairly optimistic assumptions, the energy storage approach is unlikely to perform as well as operating under intermittent resources.”

Transmission-line storage

Not shown in the two studies cited above is what it would cost to use transmission lines as an alternative energy storage system.  Tom Konrad, PhD, compared electric storage and transmission as alternative energy storage systems.  He concluded that using the energy grid as a storage system would only cost about 1 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour.

In addition, he said, the cost to operate a transmission line is only $0.005 to $0.02 per kilowatt-hour.  For shorter transmission line, such as 400 to 500 miles between California and Arizona, the cost should fall toward the lower end of the range.

Konrad’s analysis is based on sending electricity across time zones. Currently, Southern California gets much of its electricity from imported power from coal-fired power plants in Utah in the Mountain Time Zone.  And with the shut down of the San Onofre Nuclear Plant, Southern California is getting more imported power from Arizona, also in the Mountain Time Zone.

As Konrad described it, “Sending electricity from East to West would have the same economic value as discharging the same amount of electricity from storage, and then recharging it an hour later.” Additionally, transmitting electricity from East to West will benefit from advantageous price differences for California:

                                           Average Price Differential Across Time Zone

Imported power and storage

It can be concluded from Konrad’s analysis that imported power is good for California because it coincidentally has the same effect as a storage system.  If renewable energy is going to penetrate beyond the existing 33 percent share of power in California’s energy system, electricity storage is going to be essential.  But that is not on the probable time horizon.

Media reports that “tax credits can do for storage what they did for wind farms,” and the claims by energy industry consultants that the implementation of AB2514 “is the moment we all have been waiting for,” are overblown and premature.  A cost-effective technology for electricity storage is not available and may never be available on a large scale.  Targeting the replacement of peaker plants with storage battery systems is not within reach either.

Typically, peaker plants are tucked in inconspicuous or remote locations.

By contrast, to reduce transmission line costs, storage battery systems would likely comprise unsightly, high-priced storage battery plants closely packed in series along urban transmission line corridors.

'At any cost'

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, AB2514's premise is energy storage “at any cost.” If that's the case, then the high cost of battery storage doesn't matter. Then electrons will flow to the highest-cost solution without much regard for cheaper existing alternatives or “downstream” environmental and safety impacts to local communities.

New higher capacity Redox Flow Batteries are potentially suited to balance out fluctuations of electricity from solar and wind power plants.  But they store electrical energy in chemical compounds, which are liquid electrolytes that are charged in small reaction chambers.

As Underwriter Laboratories has warned, the new, large car batteries for electric vehicles pose potential health hazards. The same would occur should large storage batteries be used for electricity-grid storage.

Public reaction

How the public and local public safety officials will react to batteries erected close to residential neighborhoods hasn’t been disclosed or tested yet.  Will the California Occupational and Safety Administration require such battery plants to be marked “explosion hazard”? The energy storage industry is going to have to do a better job at full disclosure if it is going to expand batteries in California.

The environmental community and homeowners will likely have a say in any intrusion of electric battery storage facilities into urban areas. Just in June, as CalWatchdog.com's Katy Grimes reported, residents in Chino Hills defeated Southern California Edison electric transmission towers that were being erected near their homes.

Residential neighborhoods across California should be expected to oppose similar projects involving large storage batteries.

By Katy Grimes

How convenient. Instead of focusing on criminals released the last two years under AB 109 and now committing new crimes, the California Legislature is diverting citizens’ attention by taking up gun control. AB 109 was the prison “diversion” law that dumped thousands of criminals from state prisons onto local jails, many subsequently being released into the general public.

A hearing in the Assembly Public Safety committee Tuesday advanced the diversion while making the majority Democrats seem “tough on crime.”

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence was one group that testified at Tuesday’s hearing. It advocates more gun control, while saying, “We all deserve to live in communities free from the fear and threat of gun violence.”

For a group to make such a definitive statement about public safety, there is oddly nothing on its website about preventing or ending gang crimes or brutal gang violence with illegally obtained weapons.

AB 109 was supposed to shift “low-level” offenders from state prisons to county jails. Under the 2011 law, only inmates serving sentences for “non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual offenses” are allowed to be shifted to county Probation Departments for post-release supervision.

However, one ignored result of AB 109 is that nearly half of these “non-violent offenders” had previously been incarcerated for serious crimes. But parole supervision is now based entirely on an inmate’s current conviction, not on cumulative crimes for which he had served prison time in the past.

As the Huffington Post reported on March 20, “Recent shootings in the LA area have police wondering if a new California law is to blame for the outbreak of gun violence.

“LA County jails assumed supervision of thousands of non-serious felons from California in 2011 when the state legislated “inmate realignment” to deal with state prison overcrowding. The realignment left county jails across the state so overcrowded that low-level inmates have been released early to be rehabilitated on the streets as parolees.”

Sleight of hand

Brown signed AB 109 only two years ago to “stop the costly, ineffective and unsafe ‘revolving door’ of lower-level offenders and parole violators through our state prisons.”

While state Republicans fought realignment, and now are focused on the many serious problems because of it, Democrats have been successfully diverting everyone else’s attention to gun control issues.

Because the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects citizens’ rights to legal, lawful gun ownership, Democrats’ efforts to limit those rights will be legally challenged in federal court.

But this makes for a fantastic diversion away from the mess they’ve made under prison realignment in California. Passing laws which don’t cost anything helps Democrats avoid realigning their spending priorities.

AB 48 Firearms and Ammunition Sales

Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, thinks the problem with guns is the bullets, magazines and gun parts.

“AB 48 would put in place safeguards for ammunition,” Skinner said of her legislation at the Tuesday hearing. “Bullets are the very thing making guns deadly.”

Her bill would ban the sale of magazine parts kits that hold more than 10 cartridges and the sale or transfer of ammunition by anyone other than a licensed firearms dealer. And it would require that every ammunition transfer be reported to the state Department of Justice.

In other words, Skinner’s bill would make it “a misdemeanor to knowingly manufacture, import, keep for sale, offer or expose for sale, or give or lend any device that is capable of converting an ammunition feeding device into a large-capacity magazine.” Violation of this law would be punishable by a fine, and/or imprisonment in a county jail — the same county jail currently letting “non-violent” offenders out due to realignment.

How ironic that Skinner proposes to punish law-abiding gun owners as criminals, while real criminals are being let out to commit more crimes.

But Skinner is ignoring that most gun crimes are committed with stolen or illegally obtained weapons. And it sounds as if she is trying to shut down an industry by limiting who can purchase ammunition, and how much is “legal.”

“If enacted, a gun owner who ‘furnishes’ ammunition to a friend at the shooting range, and a father who hands his son ammunition while teaching him how to properly and safely use a firearm, would become criminals,” said the National Rifle Association about Skinner’s bill. “Under AB 48, sporting goods stores, general stores, and shooting ranges that do not sell firearms would be BANNED from selling ammunition on a widespread basis throughout the state. This would effectively put many ranges out of business.”

Keeping “consumers safe”

“This is about protecting gun users, to make our consumers safe,” said Ben Van Houten, a lawyer with the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, while testifying during the hearing. “How serious are we going to be keeping consumers safe?”

Gun control laws only impact the gun owners who follow the law. There are no statistics to show reductions in crime when guns and ammunition are restricted. While 12 of California’s elected sheriffs have taken a stand against gun control, the Legislature forges ahead on unnecessary restrictions in an effort to gin up emotion and opposition, while putting criminals back out on California streets.

By Katy Grimes

California Assembly leaders enjoy an annual slush fund of $38 million. It’s money they can do with however they please.

The Assembly’s operating budget was $112 million for the 2011-12 fiscal year that ended June 30, 2012. But $150 million was appropriated. The remaining $38 million was spent at the discretion of Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles. 

It’s like a giant, sugary slushy.

In 2011 and 2012, I reported on the Democratic stonewalling done to then-Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-La Canada, when he tried to get Perez to release the entire Assembly budget, including the “discretionary” spending, in a move toward transparency. Portantino was stonewalled and punished.

Task force

I just spoke with Phillip Ung, California Common Cause policy advocate, about this gigantic fund of unaccountable millions, and how this happens every year without intervention, exposure or accountability. Ung said that the Assembly has no oversight other than itself.

Assembly Rule 15.7 requires an annual performance audit in addition to a financial audit. But Assembly leaders have historically ignored this rule.

Perez formed a legislative records task force late in 2011 after the Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times filed a lawsuit demanding the operating records. In a move which can only be described as the fox guarding the henhouse, Perez named Assembly Rules Committee Chairwoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, as its leader. Assembly operations are controlled by Perez and the committee.

The task force did nothing in 2011 other than release doctored records of Assembly members’ office spending, specifically targeting Portantino.

Early in 2012, Portantino demanded the release of all Assembly records to the public. But Skinner’s committee denied his request, saying the Assembly’s letters and correspondences are exempt from transparency under the law.

As of April 2012, when I wrote my last story about the task force, there were still no records available of any meetings. To date, finding any information about the task force is difficult. I contacted Skinner’s office for a status update of the task force. The two staff members I spoke with said they couldn’t locate any information about the task force, and referred me to Perez’s office.

“The Speaker’s committee on transparency is secret,” Portantino told me in April 2012. “The minutes on the committee…secret. We don’t know if they’ve ever even met. Members should be embracing transparency. It’s not a radical concept.”

The Assembly Rules Committee then killed Portantino’s AB 1887, which would have required the state controller to audit the spending by the Legislature for the next two years.  Thereafter, an independent firm would perform the annual audits.

“We celebrate when the auditor audits Bell, CA,” Portantino said. “We are an agency which budgets more than we need for a slush fund.”

AB 1887 also would have required the Legislature to return any of the $146 million not spent. However, without that law, Perez gets to decide where and how the money gets spent.

In 2011, leaders in the Assembly and Senate authorized $200,000 for lawyers to keep the information secret in the fight over records, according to Portantino.

Violating its own rules

One of the Standing Rules of the Assembly calls for an annual performance audit of the Assembly. But in 2011, Trent Hager, Portantino’s chief of staff, told me the Assembly has never actually complied with this rule. And Hager ought to know because he worked for the Rules Committee for many years.

The rule reads:

“Performance Audit — 15.7. In addition to the annual financial audit required by Rule 15.6, the Committee on Rules shall contract for an audit of the administrative operations of the Assembly. The administrative departments to be audited shall be determined by the Committee on Rules. An organization performing an audit pursuant to this rule shall be selected by a majority of the membership of the Committee on Rules. A contract for an audit shall be awarded through a competitive bidding procedure. Audits shall be prepared in a manner and form to be determined by the organization performing the audit, and shall be consistent with generally accepted accounting principles.

“All findings and recommendations reported by an auditing firm shall be made available to Members and to the public.”

One of the reasons for secrecy may be the worst kept secret in the Capitol — the numbers of Capitol staffers on the payroll of the Legislature who actually work on political campaigns, something banned by law.

Where’s the slush?

Ung explained that most of the slush fund money goes to pet issues of the Assembly leaders. Rules governing the slush fund, which is contained in the Assembly operating budget, are “vague and ambiguous,” making it easy for abuse. And Ung said it’s highly questionable to send money from the slush fund to various state agencies without an Assembly vote.

That’s just how the Assembly obtains its surplus, according to a 2011 signed court declaration by Gus Demas, then fiscal officer for the Assembly Rules Committee. The details of the budget on the state website do not include the slush fund. But some expenditures were reported by the Daily News, which got ahold state budget documents:

The California Commission on the Status of Women ($150,000);

The California Conservation Corps ($680,000);

The California Military Department ($800,000);

The California State University system ($400,000);

The Department of Education ($8 million); and

The Department of Parks and Recreation ($1.5 million).

Other recipients were the Secretary of State’s Office and the Joint Legislative Budget Committee.

Assembly leaders have spent more than $73 million of the slush fund since December 2009.

According to Demas’ court declaration, Assembly leaders gave $55 million to state agencies between December 2008 and August 2011. Perez spent another $21 million between December 2011 and Aug. 31, 2012, according to state budget documents.

By Wayne Lusvardi

More scientific evidence is mounting against California Assembly Bill 296, which would fund pilot projects to eventually mandate Cal-Trans paint roads a lighter color to reduce the so-called “urban heat island effect.”

A new study indicates “cool roads,” combined with the inevitably mandated “cool roofs” of buildings, would severely reduce groundwater supplies in urban areas on a cumulative basis.

The “urban heat island effect” is defined as a “higher-temperature ‘dome’ of heat created over an urban or industrial area by hot layers forming at building top or chimney level.” The “heat island effect” disappears by midday when temperatures rise so it technically should be called the “nighttime urban heat island effect.”

“Cool Roads” a “Health Disaster in the Making”

Last week, Dr. Mark Jacobson, a climatologist at the Stanford Engineering School, said painting road surfaces a lighter color would be “a public health disaster waiting to happen.”  He explained that making the air cooler near the ground surface will worsen the dreaded inversion layer that traps pollution.  An inversion layer is created when a layer of hot air traps colder air below in an urban basin typically rimmed by mountains and the ocean.  All that painting roads white, grey or light green would apparently do is bring back the smog levels that Los Angeles experienced in the 1960s.

“Cool Roads” Would Reduce Urban Groundwater Supplies

Now, a new study from Arizona State University indicates that repainting roofs and roads lighter colors would likely lead to about a 25 percent reduction in urban rainfall over a five year cycle — or 5 percent per year.

The research is summarized in the Sept. 7 issue of Environmental Research Letters. The researchers included Alex Mahalov, the Wilhoit Foundation Dean’s Distinguished Professor or Mathematical and Statistical Sciences.  The research was conducted on what is called Arizona’s “Sun Corridor,” composed of four growing metropolitan areas: Phoenix, Tucson, Prescott and Nogales.

The researchers estimated that the expansion of urban development would reduce rainfall by 12 percent and that “cool roofs” would reduce rainfall another 4 percent per year.

The study concluded: “[T]ruly sustainable development will have to consider impacts extending beyond average temperature” to include impacts on rainfall and groundwater hydrology.  In other words, painting building roofs lighter colors would involve a tradeoff of slightly cooler average air temperature for less urban rainfall.

The amount of additional rainfall reduction from “cool road” surfaces was not specifically estimated by the Arizona State University study. But a guesstimate can be made.

Road surfaces are estimated to cover from 14 percent of the land area in Los Angeles and 26 percent in San Francisco.  So the combination of “cool roofs” and “cool roads” might be about a 5 percent reduction in urban annual rainfall.

For example, a 5 percent reduction in rainfall to the huge Main San Gabriel Water Basin in the suburbs of Los Angeles could rob it of its entire “safe yield” each year. Safe yield is “the annual amount of water that can be taken from a source of supply over a period of years without depleting that source beyond its ability to be replenished naturally in wet years.” The investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to clean up local groundwater basins of contaminants may be jeopardized.

Groundwater supplies about one-third or more of urban water demand in a dry year and about half of that in a wet year in Southern California.

AB 296 Based on Junk Science from Wired Magazine

A podcast circulating widely on the Internet shows Adam Rogers, Senior Editor of Wired Magazine, advocating for “cool roofs” to reduce the impacts of “global warming.”  Rogers bases his advocacy for cool building roofs on unscientific observations from a jet flight over industrial areas around Burbank airports.  Such junk science about how to combat global warming has not only been bought by the public but by policymakers such as Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who is the sponsor of AB 296.

It is junk science to believe that cooling the air near the ground surface would reduce air pollution.  It might reduce temperatures, but it would create more air pollution and unhealthy air.  This is because nature has feedback effects.

For example, bring a microphone near a speaker and you get feedback noise. In a similar fashion, feedback effect happens when trying to reduce urban air temperatures. The feedback from cooler air is greater air pollution.

Hot air rises naturally.  By cooling the air at lower elevations, a relatively warmer layer of air traps the cooler air below creating an inversion layer.  And inversion layers trap pollutants resulting in greater smog.

It is difficult to separate cause and effect in climate and drought research. If AB 296 ends up mandating “white painted roads,” the resulting drop in urban groundwater basins would be falsely used as “proof” of global warming as its cause.   The “political feedback” effect would be to attribute any decline in groundwater on industry-caused global warming to justify Cap and Trade as a taxation mechanism.  AB 296 would likely result in a self-fulfilling prophecy that global warming causes urban droughts. And if one disputed this, one would likely be called a “denier.”

Jerry Brown: The Junk Science Governor?

Jerry Brown frequently portrays his opposition as “unscientific” whether it is on issues such as water and the Sacramento Delta or energy and global warming. But it is clear that AB 296 is based on junk science that reputable scientists say would jeopardize human health and urban groundwater supplies.

AB 296 is now on Brown’s desk for signature, having passed both houses of the state Legislature. The question even science can’t answer: Will Brown choose science or junk science?