Living the Cheap Life

At SMUD, where I work, my bosses-bosses-boss, assistant general manager for energy supply, shows some telling trends.

SMUD, like most other utilities, cities, and municipalities, has embraced going green. With abandon. Carbon footprint calculators, selling carbon credits, pay a premium to get 50% or 100% of your energy from green sources -- that sorta thing. And SMUD has a mandate that in the future, a certain percentage of our resource mix has to come from renewable resources. Many others are adopting similar thinking...without checking, I'd bet that the City of Santa Barbara or Colorado Springs also have some sort of green energy goal.

I am not exact here, but I would say that our mandate is 25% by 2012. This is not federal law. Not even state law that I'm aware of, or a local ordinance. Just a goal.

But -- if you could see the trend, projected out to 2015, SMUDs renewable portfolio falls off a cliff. This is in part due to anticipated electric growth, but also the drying up of existing contracts. As everyone else is also riding this green turnip truck, the value of renewables is increasing and is, of course, becoming increasingly expensive.

I'm convinced that as SMUD will ask ratepayers in the future to pay more to meet this mandate...they will say "kiss my ass." On a SMUD employee forum board, one wrote, "I just want my electricity to be the cheapest it can during my lifetime."

A sentiment shared by most, I'm sure. So the mandate will be 'eased.' Just like the 1990 law that mandated 10% ZEV cars by 2003. Too expensive. Not enough infrastructure. I'd guess that now, five years after that deadline, we have reached 0.002%

That's what will be said about our 'easing' of the renewable portfolio goals. Just can't do it yet. The technology is out there, but... So cut the goals, further weakening the push for renewables, and wait until conventional sources are totally unreliable.