Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 11:18PM In March I hosted a group of ten students from the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield Iowa, and gave a lecture on how to move to the new energy paradigm. The students, all part of the schools Sustainable Living Program, filmed the discussion and used it to make this video. I hope you enjoy it!
Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 11:08PM 
On Tuesday I posted an article about Smart Grids on Energy Pulse, and it's stirring up quite a lively debate. The article was viewed nearly 200 times on the first day, and it drew 9 comments. It seems that even some of the big hitters in the energy policy arena weren't aware of the implications of revenue decoupling, or of its connection to Smart Grid. Check it out!
Monday, March 2, 2009 at 12:36AM 
Join us for a community forum and discussion on the localization of our food and energy systems in Northern New Mexico. Facilitated by leaders from Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (www.livingeconomies.org) and the Santa Fe Alliance.
The Regional Food and Fuels Project is a collaboration between the Santa Fe Alliance and Local Energy that will strengthen our local food system, decouple it from fossil fuels, and create economic benefits by increasing the local recycling of food dollars. This program also seeks to create green jobs, which will address Santa Fe Alliance's workforce development initiative needs as well.
The project is sponsored by: BALLE, Stokes Family Foundation, McCune Charitable Foundation, and Santa Fe County.
Details of the Regional Food & Fuels Project Community Forum:
Date: Tues, March 3 from 5:00 - 8:00pm
(networking and refreshments from 5-5:45pm; discussion forum 5:45 - 8pm)
Location: Santa Fe Complex, 624 Agua Fria (directions: www.sfcomplex.org)
Van Jones Promotes Smart Grid, but is it Really Smart?
If ever you need to push a progressive agenda, you’d do well to have Van Jones on your side. The first time I saw him, at the 2007 BALLE conference speaking about his work with at-risk youth, he transfixed a room of six hundred people for forty-five minutes of laughter and tears and applause. The Yale-educated civil rights attorney is a heavyweight orator: who else gets a round of applause after giving congressional testimony? Watch the video.
So it was great to find out that Jones was selected to join Obama’s green-team of advisors, but now our job is to ensure that he’s aware of what the big utilities have in mind with their so-called “Smart Grid” program. Any time they have to tell you it’s smart, I get worried, and with “Smart Grid” my worst fears are being realized. So I couldn’t help but cringe during the testimony as Jones compares the potential benefits of building a “Smart Grid” to building the interstate highway system or the internet. He also talked about helping consumers save money with energy efficiency, which sounds good but doesn't hold water under the plan the utilities have put forth. Here are the problems:
1. The benefits of the interstate highway system and the internet were the direct result of placing them in the public trust, rather than allowing them to be held by corporations. But the so-called “smart grid” is slated to be corporate-owned, just like the dumb grid we have now. No one that I know of, other than a group of us in Santa Fe, is calling for the power grid to be placed in the public trust. Yet it MUST be made public if we are to realize its benefits. Imagine entrusting Halliburton with our highways, or giving the internet to General Electric so they can make it more efficient. The electricity backbone of this country is too important to leave in private hands. It needs to be part of the commons, like the acequia systems that bring water to the farms.
2. Consumers no longer save money with energy efficiency – that was only true BEFORE revenue decoupling rules were put in place. Under revenue decoupling, revenues received by the utility stay the same when customers use less energy. Utilities pushed for this in an attempt to maintain their investment ratings as we headed into the recession, because they knew their stock would be downgraded as energy demand began to fall. And it worked. Banks love to loan money to companies that have guaranteed revenues -- it doesn't get any better than that. But for consumers it's awful. Imagine if typewriter companies had been given revenue decoupling -- we would still be paying them for the sales they lost to computers. If the Saudi’s impose revenue decoupling on oil we will have to pay them for oil in perpetuity. Good idea, or sheer insanity?
The rationalizations used by utilities to get revenue decoupling are fatally flawed when you consider that utilities have been acting in bad faith all along. We could have had a smart, clean, and efficient grid years ago, if only it hadn’t been far more profitable to build a stupid, dirty, and inefficient one.
3. Further ensuring that consumers won’t benefit from the Smart Grid is a provision of the act creating it that requires States to pursue policies that allows utilities to recover "losses" if the Smart Grid renders any of their existing assets obsolete. That is ground breaking, from a legal perspective. Even the boldest of the “stranded cost” arguments made during electricity deregulation, which were based on takings law, did not contemplate that technological obsolescence could be grounds for cost recovery.
Now that Van Jones has the ear of the president, there is so much potential to expose the problems with the Smart Grid program. It's his job is to ensure that the benefits of the green economy accrue all, just as his nonprofit Green For All is doing. So we should praise Jones for saying that the power grid could serve as an engine of green-economic development, creating green jobs and providing affordable access to green energy. But in reality, that potential has always been there. What he needs to say is that the reason it has never happened is that utilities have always held all the cards, and they still do. Take the transmission grid public and get rid of revenue decoupling, and the county will finally have a tool to create green jobs like never before. It's an opportunity we must capitalize on -- the time is right.