[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly K Squid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. Electricity prices are on the rise and they're forecast to go much, much higher in the future.
Climate change is wreaking havoc across the world even as we are pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than ever before.
Electric utilities want more and more control over the energy they buy or produce and sell to you. And finally, the Trump administration, it's doing its best to undermine the renewable energy that could address all of these issues.
What if there were a cost effective way to address them and give communities more control over their economies and their future? Well, there is community energy. Renewable energy systems designed to be locally owned and operated with, with electricity locally distributed and consumed can provide cheaper and more resilient power than anything that private utilities can offer. But the state of California and its investor owned private utilities have done everything they can to make it impossible to build community systems that they don't control.
Is there a way around these obstacles?
My guest today is Bob Kraus, energy policy strategist and principal of Neologic Systems in Berkeley, California.
For the past five years, Bob has been working to develop and disseminate something he calls Spark communities, which develop and deploy local electric utilities that can operate legally in parallel to and independent of the private utilities.
We're going to talk about the local energy conundrum in California, how it got to be this way and how Spark could spark a revolution in how and where you get your electricity.
Bob Kraus, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Hi.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: So it's always a good idea to begin at the beginning. Who are you? What's your background in history?
Why are you interested in community energy systems?
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Well, I'm classically trained software engineer and entrepreneurs. Been working with energy related startups and others in Silicon valley since around 87.
So I've spent the last 20 years as an investor and kind of looking at not just the opportunities that seem to be out there in the distance, but the risk that we're going to fail along the way.
And I live with my own solar and battery system off grid. Maybe a little more background is that I view conventional wisdom and the status quo as, as the stories that the incumbents tell. Great starting points, but not always the best end points.
So I go back in the way I think about things to first principles and build models that create value. Everybody, not just the players at the table.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: Basically, the history is they want to tell it, right?
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Well, that's right. And you know, several times in this hour I'll be referring to the narrative. And the narrative doesn't need to be evidence based or factual. It's just the story that somebody tells. And it's interesting for me to explore what's behind that narrative and why is that one the one they've chosen to tell?
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know, again, for our listeners, they get electricity bills one way or another, but most people have no idea how they, how those bills are calculated, where their power comes from.
Indeed, maybe they're not even sure who delivers it. So what kinds of power delivery systems and organizations do we have in California? Let's start with that and then go on to community energy.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: Okay, so everybody knows In Santa Cruz PG&E. And PG&E is a investor owned utility.
And so it has shareholders and those shareholders expect a return in the form of a dividend and they get it.
And so IOUs were created back in the 20s by the railroad Commission, which became the California Public Utilities Commission.
And they were granted service territories.
And in return they're regulated by the CPUC.
Initially, these service territories among IOUs, they don't overlap. But in return for having that exclusive territory, they have to agree to serve everybody within that territory and properly serve them. So they have, they have commitments that they have to make to make sure that they have enough reserves to always handle the amount of power out there or the demand out there. I'm sorry, then there are, there's public power and there's several forms of public power that have been around for as long as IOUs have been around. You know, one is a cooperative and a co op is a power company that's owned by its ratepayers.
And so they start it, they build it, they run it, and what they're doing is they're sharing costs.
Another kind of traditional public power is a municipal utility.
So right around, at the same time that IOUs were agreeing to be regulated and in return getting these service territories, there was a constitutional amendment that was ballot initiative that was passed.
And what it did is it gave cities, local governments, so cities and counties the right to control utilities within their borders.
And so they have the final say on that. Now what's happened over time is that much of those rights have been signed away in the form of franchise agreements.
Because most cities, the vast majority of cities and towns and small communities, they don't run their own power system. They do rely on the IOUs and so these franchise agreements are the terms which the IOU agrees to provide that power and the city agrees to allow them to use city right of ways and so forth and set up, you know, minimum standards for those IOUs.
And now there's a third way, and I hope we get a chance today to talk about that, that is being referred to as modern public power.
The difference between traditional munis and co ops is with modern public power, it's not either or it's not that the city has a municipal electrical utility and so PGE doesn't operate in their town. That's the traditional way.
With modern public power, what happens is the city grants an additional franchise to another municipal utility that is a utility that they run, so the IOU doesn't get thrown out of town. And more to the point, the city, the community isn't required to purchase the existing infrastructure that the IOUs put down.
So another important difference is that these modern utilities or munis, they're opt in.
So on day one that they're operating, they don't have to serve everybody in town.
They only have to serve the people that have raised their hand and said, yeah, I'm interested in this or that product mix that you've said you're interested in offering.
And so for the cities that are getting into public power, they might have been running water or sewage utilities, but as they move into electrical, the kinds of services are very different that they they offer than the IOU would offer. So for example, they might start out just offering energy efficiency, fuel switching, going from gas to electric on their stove, EV chargers.
And so notice they're not delivering any more power to the ratepayer that's raised their hand, but they are lowering that ratepayer's bills.
And as importantly, those changes, those upgrades, they don't go on the homeowner's balance sheet, if you will. They don't have to have the capital up front.
They kind of even the playing field. As it is now, the people that are able to upgrade are those that have a bank account, a healthy one, enough to support it.
And these modern municipal utilities can float bonds or use cash flow from their operations to get these in the hands of ratepayers, to lower their overall costs. Now, the ratepayer, the homeowner ultimately has to pay for these, but they pay for them on a monthly bill.
You know, later one of these muni utilities might decide, well, we're also going to offer putting solar and batteries on rooftops.
And so anybody who would like that, now they've got, they continue to have the PG and E line and they can generate their own power and store some of it in a battery both for when the sun's not out or when the grid goes down or something like that.
And again, the city is financing it. This municipal utility that the city runs would be financing it. It's being paid off on a bill.
And anybody who has solar and solar and batteries in their house knows how that works. As long as the sun is shining and power is being generated, then you're not using PG and E electricity. As a matter of fact, you could be selling the excess utility to PG and E and they'll give you some return on that.
And so this power is as available and when it's not available you pull from the PG and E meter.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: So you've sort of given the game away here. I mean, this is essentially a description of spark, right, the spark community utility that you have been advocating.
You know, and I'd like to come back and talk a little bit, you know, in some more detail about, you know, how that would work.
But basically Community Energy would be some size kind of system that might be owned by locally.
Right. Local and controlled locally. Right. It could be in the form of utility. We had hopes, you know, 10 years ago that it might be possible for, for, you know, corporations, whether private or non profit, to set up systems like this. And, and essentially that has been stonewalled. But in the case of the, the modern public power, as you put it, right, you're talking about a municipal utility, although one that's not going to try and take over the distribution system. I mean, I read today in the San Francisco Chronicle that PGE wants $20 billion for its infrastructure in San Francisco. San Francisco has been trying to take over the utilities infrastructure for more than 10 years and they want 20 billion, which seems like a really high price.
What you're talking about then does not involve doing that, correct?
[00:12:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. I mean, when you look at the public power campaigns, the vast majority of them fail for the reason that you were mentioning.
As much as the IOUs go to the state and complain that they don't have the money to upgrade their systems to underground and so forth. When a community says we want to take over those lines, suddenly the story changes. And the IOUs talk about how valuable those unmaintained and worn out resources are worth and to the point that it's not financially viable for a community to actually do it. And that's the point.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: They, they want the, the replacement value as opposed to the depreciated value of the system.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Well, I guess, you know, I, that is part of the narrative is that it is replacement value and that will be tested because with these modern public power systems that we're starting to refer to, they're going to replace some of the lines. And I suggest that the cost of doing so is a lot less than what the IOUs want when their systems are taken over.
[00:13:54] Speaker A: Yeah, let's make another distinction. Smud. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District is a municipal utility. It has its own generating facilities. It buys its own power, it has its own distribution system. But of course that's, I won't call it an historical anomaly. That's basically because Sacramento never allowed PGE to buy it out. Correct.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: Right. There are 44 municipal utilities in the state and SMUD is the poster child for them.
And the cost of energy is lower. They spent 20 years fighting all the way up to the California Supreme Court and they won.
And you know, there are challenges with any organization and SMUD certainly has some of them. But it's a well run utility that the communities that they serve are quite proud of having.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: But they own the infrastructure which was built basically over the last hundred years. So they're not in that same position as San Francisco is.
You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschutz. My guest today is Bob Krause who for the past, well, five or six years has been advocating a form of, you might say municipal utility called a spark community utility, which would operate in parallel to existing private utility systems. And we want to get back into more detail about that.
But let me ask you first, Bob, a question.
One of the incentives for going to solar, going to community energy of this sort is that the private utility rates are so high and they're continuing to rise.
What's behind that particular, you know that the fact that they're going up and up and up.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: Well, at the top, it's a publicly traded company. It has shareholders and those shareholders invest with an expectation that they will get a return.
And the IOU stance with the regulators is such that their business model must support that return.
And so the way the business model is that when they invest in infrastructure, that investment gives them a guaranteed annual return.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: We, we should probably note here that since around 2000, California private utilities have not been allowed for the most part to own and operate their own generating facilities. Right, Right. They PGE still owns hydro in, in the Sierras, but outside of that, they buy their power from what are called independent power Producers. I think that's a sort of an important point when you're talking about infrastructure. So. Sorry, continue.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: Yep, yep. So we're really talking about the transmission and distribution lines and you know, all the infrastructure around that, like substations and so forth.
But yes, they get a guaranteed annual return and so in order to increase rates they have to go to the CPUC and put in a proposal for, in justification for those rate increases.
Now the CPUC has evolved quite a bit over time and, and since that energy crisis that we had under gray Davis around 2000, 25 years ago. Yeah, 25 years ago, yeah, things have shifted quite a bit. And so he put in a, a CPUC commissioner, Michael Peavey. And Michael Peavey had been head of Southern California Energy and the Edison Institute and he came in and within six months had become president of the cpuc.
And it really changed the very nature of that regulator. It became much more deferential to the IOUs.
That is, they became reliant on the data supplied by the IOUs and tilted more in the direction of their interest rather than the public interest that they're supposed to be managing.
And so these rate increases now are very much pro forma in that 25 year period.
The unit cost of energy in California, it depends on which IOU, but in, in PG and E territory, it's gone up at two and a half times the inflation rate for 25 years in a row.
So anything that goes up at multiples of the inflation rate over periods like that is unsustainable. And that's where we find ourselves right now.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
Does, and why would community energy or community utility offer lower electricity rates? What's the difference there?
[00:19:25] Speaker B: Yeah, well, right off the top there are no shareholders, there are no taxes to be paid and so the cost structure is much lower. But again that, that, that cornerstone element of the IOU's business model where every dollar they invest in their infrastructure annual return on.
And so the incentive there is to invest more whether it's needed or not or whether it's the right investment to make.
With community energy, they don't have money to throw around like that and they certainly don't have the incentive to throw it around.
And so they, the buck stops with any city administrator. They're there to provide services. And that would certainly be the case with a municipal energy utility. And so they're going to make sure that the system stays up, but they're going to do it efficiently and they're not going to be worried about whether putting in, for example, Distributed energy like solar and wind and batteries is in their financial interest. They're really looking at the community because that's who they serve.
And so the decisions that are made by public power just have pivot around fundamentally different financial physics.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Yeah, well, not to be cynical, but your description of public officials might give them too much credit.
But we won't get, we won't get into that.
You know, we haven't talked really about community choice aggregators, about which there was a great deal of optimism 10, 15 years ago when the whole movement started. What's a community choice aggregator? What was it supposed to do? And what are those CCAs doing now?
You know, and, and in comparison to what a community energy, community utility or a municipal utility might be able to do. A spark community utility.
[00:21:42] Speaker B: Yeah. CCAs are a fantastic resource for the state.
I don't view ccas as having failed in any sense. They've done what they were built to do.
[00:21:56] Speaker A: I didn't say they'd failed.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: No, no, no, you haven't. But. But there is increasing criticism of them as, as the, their unit cost of energy has got closer to that of what the IOUs are, are offering. And you know, the original CCA, Marin Community Energy, the CEO, has recently agreed to step down because of contracts, energy contracts that were signed that, you know, propagated that higher cost. But, you know, CCAs have been quite successful in doing what they were designed to do, which is the bulk procurement of and cleaner supply portfolios for energy.
So that gives ratepayers new options that they wouldn't have just with PG and E.
But there are challenges in doing that.
The two biggest challenges in the way that CCAs were set up is that first of all, they don't bill you separately. They have to use the IOU's billing system.
And the PG and E puts very real constraints on what kinds of products can go on the bill. So this, on bill financing of EV chargers and so forth that I was talking about earlier, the IOUs won't let the CCAs get into that.
Another problem is that the energy that's produced is, it's still bulk energy.
You know, you, I'm sure if you've driven down Highway 5 heading to LA, you've seen solar farms and they're in the Mojave and, you know, around Joshua Tree. And so those are big power generation stations and they're hooked up to transmission lines and that power is transmitted to where they're. It's actually used.
And so that that power system is still reliant on the transmission and distribution lines. And so they're not able, CCAs aren't able to generate power close to where the load is.
And so we hear in the news about how the transmission system can't handle additional solar power and bulk generation of solar power. That is certainly true just like any other power plant. But if you can bring the power closer to where it's actually being used, for example, on a rooftop or ground mounted within the community, then you overcome that challenge.
And you know, you asked in the previous question why costs were so high.
The biggest component of the cost that we pay for every kilowatt hour of power is that it's transmission, it's the, it's transport, it's both transmission and distribution cost.
If you can bring the generation close to the load, then that cost essentially disappears.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: Yeah. A couple of years ago we had a show which involved interpreting your electricity bill. I think I call sort of talmudic instruction. Right. And, and, and it's clear that if you look at an electricity bill, it's designed to be confusing.
And I do think most people don't know that transmission is half the cost of, of what you get charged.
In the case of the CCAs, I guess since they have to use the, the utilities transmission and distribution systems. Right. They have to pay that cost as well.
But, but you know, one of the things that a lot of us have puzzled about is, is why CCAs have been so reluctant or have found it so difficult to develop local generating facilities.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
Again, they can't put solar on your roof.
They're not allowed to.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: They're not allowed to sell that kind of product to.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: They can't go behind the meter.
Right. So anything, you know, you've got a meter and on the other end of that meter are the PG and E wire.
And on your side of the meter, behind the meter is when you put solar and batteries on, then it's behind the meter. They have to connect all of their generation capacity in front of the meter.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: You mentioned that you're off the grid.
Do you have any kind of connection to the grid?
[00:27:00] Speaker B: By the way?
[00:27:01] Speaker A: I'm just curious because.
Answer that question first. I'm not, I'm not trying to be difficult, but then.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, I do. I do. Just like these modern public power utilities, I maintain my connection to PG&E. The system I have has a load controller.
It's an additional box in my system. And I've got some batteries and I've got my solar capacity and the load controller manages where that power Both the power that I'm using and the power being generated goes, it goes into the batteries.
But I never pull power from PG&E unless I have to. So if it's, you know, if it's winter time and the sun is up for only four days, four hours during the day, and I just don't generate enough to refresh my batteries, then I do pull some power during that time.
But the thing I was going to say, Ronnie, is North Berkeley's without power right now.
They're in solid PSPs.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Yes, I saw that because of, of wind and, and dry weather, I guess. Right.
[00:28:19] Speaker B: I've got a friend downstairs in my living room with her laptop because she can't do any work. So she came over here because, you know, even if the power goes out, we're going to stay up. It's wonderful.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: Does the wireless stay up? I know that when we have power outages, you know, eventually the cell phone towers run out of battery power and everything comes grinding to a halt at some point.
[00:28:43] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
Well, just, just as a, as a case study, then, let's assume that Berkeley had been able to put into place some kind of community utility system.
What would that, you know, what kind of resilience would that might that offer in the face of these, I can't remember, power shut offs, these emergency power shutoffs.
So,
[00:29:14] Speaker B: so we, we've mentioned the Spark community utilities.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: Right? Yeah.
[00:29:19] Speaker B: And so, and, and I've, I've talked a little bit about it more broadly because it's not just with this California specific program, the SCU model, but in general it's a, it's a staged, a phased rollout and the stages come because it makes sense for that particular community. And every community is unique.
So in Berkeley again, Berkeley being Berkeley, the first thing they would probably do is just like I suggested they do energy efficiency and EV chargers and so forth. If they were far enough down the line, they're almost certainly putting solar and batteries behind the meter for families that want that.
And then after that they might start stringing their own separate lines that don't use PGE's lines.
And in clusters, she'd have maybe a block or a group of houses that the, the Muni has put solar and batteries behind. It connects them, but it also could connect neighbors who have a tree in their yard so that they can't put solar in.
[00:30:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to mention the over the fence rule. Right. If you had a municipal utility, would that over the fence rule still apply? And maybe a short explanation of what that is. Would be useful.
[00:30:52] Speaker B: Yeah. So the over the fence rule is.
The regulation is 218B and it was drafted and passed by legislature faithful to the IOUs many years ago. And what it says is that if you can only share power to more than two houses if you are a utility.
And so, Ronnie, if you and I were neighbors, we could share power, but we couldn't with our shared neighbor.
[00:31:31] Speaker A: We have to be a utility to go beyond that.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: Yeah, but the, the munis that we're talking about, they are a utility and they've been franchised by the local community.
And so they can run those wires. Those wires separate from the IOUs.
And again, it's important to understand here, it might be interesting to understand that the power that's being transmitted in a situation like this, it's as available.
It's not. You can get all of your power from these lines necessarily, and nor do you have to, because PG E is still there.
And so the, the whole technology is fundamentally different. They're DC instead of AC lines at 400 volts instead of 240.
They use A, you know, a protocol called Energy Net. They're just really smart, modern distribution lines.
[00:32:36] Speaker A: But I would, I would guess that the private utilities have very strong incentives to do whatever they can to prevent this from happening.
[00:32:47] Speaker B: So one of the foundations of the modern public power movement is that this is not a situation where communities are asking for permission.
They're not, they're not trying to change a law or, or anything like that. The, these utilities operate under existing laws and court decisions.
And so, yes, the utilities, especially when the first systems go in, they're going to raise their hands and say, we. Yeah, they're going to fight and they're going to claim that their monopoly is what, again, here comes a narrative is a natural monopoly.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: Which means that they were promised that their service area would be exclusive.
And it's exclusive with regards to all other IOUs, but it's not exclusive in that there can't be any other utilities within that territory.
[00:33:56] Speaker A: Oh, that's interesting. So. So any private utility could not operate within the franchise, the delineated territory, but a municipal, a municipal utility could.
So. Well, that's quite interesting. Let's, you know, how.
How would Berkeley go about doing this? Okay, we're probably going to take another break shortly, but, but let's start with that. Okay.
What are the, you know, what would be required to create such a utility in Berkeley?
[00:34:30] Speaker B: It's hard to run a city government because the city government, again, their job is to keep the lights on, you know, to keep services delivered no matter what. Yeah. And so the first thing that would happen is there would be a conversation certainly within the city administration, but also across the city, because this is something that the community would have to buy into.
And so that's really step one, and that's a very big step to just kind of talk it out and talk about the trade offs and the opportunities and you know, what it would look like on the other side. The second step is you would, you'd take a proposal, somebody would take a proposal to the Berkeley City Council and they'd say, and the city Council's decision would be, are they going to franchise just such a modern public power utility?
And if they did, nothing has to change.
Everything can stay the way it is right now, but then they've opened the door to actually starting to offer services under that franchise.
The next step is there's a county level organizational, a regional planning organization called the lafco and a local area.
I'm sorry, I forget what the acronym says. Whatever it is, but whatever it is, the LAFCO has to approve things like this, like a utility offering electrical service.
The LAFCO's interest is really making sure that it doesn't harm anything that's already in place. And so LAFCO's would be quite open to it, but it's probably a six month process.
And once the LAFCO has approved, and matter of fact, while that process is going on, this newly franchised municipal utility would be creating a website and it would have a wait list on it for those people that were interested. There would be a survey there that would say, we're considering offering these products initially.
Which ones would you be interested in? And again, check the ones that you would actually want and we'll get back to you, we'll put you on a wait list.
And so we. Once the LAFCO approval comes in, the next thing that needs to happen is financing. Like, how is the city going to pay for this?
And there's a number of possibilities that often what happens is you go to a foundation or money is donated to, to bootstrap it up.
And to really scale though, you need to issue bonds, that is debt.
So in California, there's two kinds of bonds. There is general obligation bonds and there are revenue bonds. General obligation bonds are whatever government entity that floats these bonds. They say, you know, we're planning on using them for this particular purpose, but they can be used forever. They want. Now the catch with that is that general obligation Bonds have to be approved by the border, by voters, by a two thirds majority.
Revenue bonds don't need a ballot approval because they're backed by, as the name implies, the revenues that would be generated by the investment that would be made through those bonds.
So if Berkeley were to decide that they want to install 100 or a thousand rooftop solar and battery systems, they would probably do a fairly small revenue bond and do that. And as that money comes in, that revenue comes in, they can syndicate that bond out.
So what happens is you take that debt off your books, somebody in Wall street buys it, you sell it, and as long as the revenue produced is at least 125% of what the interest payment needs to be, then you can sell it to Wall Street. And now you got that money back, then you do your next thousand homes and you get this flywheel going with finance.
[00:39:31] Speaker A: I will say that I have been trying to understand bonds now for a while.
They are very, very confusing. But we don't have to go there.
You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Bob Kraus. And Bob is an advocate and proponent of something called Spark Community Utility, which is basically a municipal electrical utility that could operate in parallel to and independently of the private electrical utilities that tend to dominate in California and elsewhere in the, in the country.
The, the financing is a, is an interesting question, I guess. And the, the repayment would come through the bill, right? It would show up on the bill as part of the monthly bill. And what, Just, just quickly, what sort of term are we talking about with these bonds? 30 years, 20 years?
[00:40:28] Speaker B: I think we're probably talking 20 years because that's the expected lifetime of a system.
[00:40:33] Speaker A: Yeah, okay. Yeah, well, look, I know that the SPARK is modeled on a similar effort that's going on in Ann Arbor. Maybe you can tell us about how Ann Arbor managed to do this and you know where it stands right now.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: Ann Arbor, we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Ann Arbor went through a, a multi year exploration of what they could do.
As I say, every community is unique. And what's somewhat unique about Ann Arbor is it's obviously in Michigan where it gets cold.
The housing stock is fairly old on average.
A lot of it is student housing.
And their local utility, dte, had not done a very good job at all in maintaining their lines. So they were getting repeated power outages pretty regularly.
And DTE's response was, there's nothing we can do about it. So as their Tiger team in Ann Arbor explored things and they really spent a multi disciplinary three years looking at possibilities. They looked at CCAs at the state level and continued to do so, by the way, but they came up with this modern public power entity that they called the Sustainable Energy Utility, the seu.
And as I was suggesting would happen in Berkeley, they immediately took it to the residents and started talking about it and the residents embraced it wholly.
They didn't have to, but they actually put a, a ballot measure out.
And In November of 2025, that ballot measure passed by 79% of voters.
Ronnie, I can't think of a time where 79% of people in one community have agreed on anything.
But after that they, they launched in April and I'm sorry that that vote was actually in November of 2024.
They launched in April of 2026. So this past April they are, they've put solar and batteries on 100 homes so far and their first tranche is going to be a thousand.
So another thing unique about Ann Arbor is that the university is there, of course, and I went to U of M, a wonderful town, great school, but so they had a partner in U of M and some of the researchers there had been doing long standing research on geothermal energy.
Not the geothermal where you try to tap into, you know, the heat, you know, deep down.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: Not like the geysers.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, not, not the geysers. The, the fact that Earth is a, it's. You can store energy in soil and you can draw that energy back out when you need it.
And so the university partnered with Within Arbor and they're building 20 miles of tunnels that are 12ft deep that have pipes that go through them.
And in the summertime they take the heat that's being extracted by chillers, air conditioners and so forth, and they pump that heat into the ground. And then in the wintertime, same plumbing takes the heat out and it heats the buildings.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: Oh, that's interesting.
[00:44:57] Speaker B: So that's a big part of their system too.
[00:45:01] Speaker A: So, and, and what, what do you know, what the plans are? I mean, what their kind of, you know, strategy is for, for, for growth or expansion?
[00:45:12] Speaker B: Well, yeah. Missy Stoltz is, was the Director of Innovation Ann Arbor. It's really her brainchild.
And you know, Missy appreciates that she is the very tip of the spear. Yeah. And so they're, they're being cautious and realistic and yet ambitious and forward moving at the same time. But the, the long and the short of it is, is that they, again, just like with the SEU model here in California, there are tiers or phases, and they are studying which phases they might move into later. But right now, just getting their first tranche of rooftop solar and battery systems. That's all that they've announced, though. Again, there's a lot of planning going on in the background.
[00:46:15] Speaker A: Are there communities in California interested in this, in spark and, you know. And where can our listeners find out more about it?
[00:46:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, good questions. Thanks, Ronnie.
So.
So, yeah, there's a number of communities that we're having conversations with.
But again, it's. It's hard to decide that you're going to take something like bold as this is on without a model for.
For knowing that it's going to be successful.
[00:46:52] Speaker A: Someone's got to take the first jump, right?
[00:46:55] Speaker B: Somebody's got to take the first jump. So one community that is. Is moving forward is this wonderful community of Bolinas, California.
Sup on the Marin coast.
1500 residents, no mayor, no city hall.
Their. Their mantra is what we can do ourselves is likely to get done and done right and just very strong, independent people.
And they have the benefit of.
They have their own water and sewer utility.
And it's a public utility district, which is a type of organization that's allowed in California. And so it's called. It's actually spelled B C P U D, but it's called bpud.
And so BPUD already has the latent authority, if you will, to offer energy.
And so some five residents have come together as a tiger team to kind of really explore and model what's possible in Bolinas.
And bpud, with bpud's blessing and the deliverable of that exploration, will be a proposal to BPUD board.
And the proposal might be. It doesn't, it doesn't work for Balinas, but if it does, if they think that it does, then the proposal would be that BPUD franchise an electrical utility.
[00:48:51] Speaker A: And so where can our listeners learn more about Spark?
[00:48:55] Speaker B: Yeah, so the Spark website is spark communities, that's plural.org and we put together a little page for Balinas in particular because, you know, the community is notified of this very early on. And
[email protected] Bolinas there's some information specific to that community, including a, you know, a short slide deck with a narrative and everything that really kind of explains what it would mean for that community.
[00:49:44] Speaker A: Okay. Anything else you want to mention?
Because we're just about out of time.
[00:49:50] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think we covered it. You know, the key thing is, is that the status quo doesn't need to be maintained. That change is possible. And this is just one of many directions that are coming out of necessity because things are getting really dire out there in terms of climate change and so forth. So I Ronnie, I appreciate you giving me a chance to talk to you about all this.
[00:50:15] Speaker A: Yeah, Bob, thank you for being my guest on Sustainability Now.
You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Bob Kraus, energy policy strategist and principal of Neurologic Systems in Berkeley, California. For the past five years, Bob has been working to develop and disseminate something he calls Spark Communities, which develop and deploy local electric electrical utilities that can operate legally, in parallel to and independent of their private utilities.
If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainability now and Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts, among other podcast sites. And if you'd like to hear about forthcoming shows, please drop me an email@ronnie lsqd.org so thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K SQUID your community radio station, and keep it going.
And so, until next every other Sunday, Sustainability Now.
