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California's Community Choice Law - via PayPal

This is Not a Theory: Essays from the Trenches on Monopoly, Climate Crisis and California's Local Power Revolt,

by Paul Fenn.

As of April 2010, the author is now selling signed prepublication copies of Grid Lock at $25 per copy plus taxes and shipping. MasterCard, VISA, American Express and other major credit cards can be taken on our PayPal page:

Paul Fenn is widely regarded as the leader of America's Community Choice movement. Nationwide, some 2 Million Americans in seven states now receive their electricity from alternative energy companies through Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) laws that allow communities to aggregate their buying power and bring innovation to America's grid-locked monopoly energy industry. In California, PG&E's Prop 16 and $65M campaign to stop CCA in California in 2010 put a spotlight on Community Choice as PG&E moves to block Marin County, San Francisco and other communities seeking to switch residents and businesses to greener power suppliers under the Community Chice law, Assembly Bill 117 (2002). Mr. Fenn wrote California's Community Choice law in 2002. After developing similar laws in Massachusetts, Ohio and New Jersey in the late 1990's, and also drafting the nation's first "solar bond" authority for San Francisco in 2001 - now a section of San Francisco's City Charter - Fenn's company, San Francisco-based Local Power Inc., has drafted ten years of documents for San Francisco's pathbreaking Community Choice energy program known as CleanPowerSF, and has been a leading participant in similar efforts throughout Northern California to implement major climate protection and energy independence measures using Community Choice and solar bonds. By inventing new authorities to empower local governments, Fenn has transformed energy markets and realized the impossible, with many communities receiving much greener power at lower prices than previously thought possible. Today, Community Choice Aggregation is a national movement, with CCA programs in hundreds of cities and counties now underway. Fenn's company, Local Power Inc., focuses on how to use CCA to achieve substantial energy localization and customer ownership of energy. Working with communities like Sonoma County, Boulder, Colorado, San Francisco, and others, Fenn's unique approach to energy tailors a complex mix of green technology choices, smart grid and demand technologies adapted to local energy use patterns to supplant conventional power plants. A comprehensive, unprecedented regional data survey is performing a detailed historical analysis of 250,000 PG&E meters to design an integrated local power infrastructure to deliver a record-breaking regional greenhouse gas reduction while requiring neither an electrical rate increase nor a major public investment. Most recently, Fenn's company, Local Power Inc., was hired by the City of Boulder, Colorado to design a "Localization Portfolio Standard" for the City based on a municipal utility or under the status quo.

Fenn's analysis of the real political and energy industry challenges to solving Economic and Climate Collapse combines the detailed knowledge of an expert with the broad-brush perspective and theoretical capacity of an historian. Fenn speaks thus with a unique insight into implementing the actual solutions to the world energy crisis - today, as a discreet public works project, rather than waiting for the Godot of the strictly market-based energy structures that have defined U.S. and European public policy in recent decades. Prior to commencing his 17-year career in energy, Mr. Fenn studied history and philosophy, winning a number of academic awards and earning a Master's degree in intellectual history at the University of Chicago in 1992, with "Positive Dialectics," a study of Otto Bauer in Vienna and proposing a new political strategy for failed left politics in Europe and America. A "Localist Manifesto" subtitled "Positive Dialectics" was published by Barcelona-based EL VIEJO TOPO in August, 2011. Fenn has written and published continuously during this period, speaking routinely in public forums. He is currently working on a book with Eduardo Subirats and Christopher Britt entitled The Prometheus Project, building on the Localist Manifesto and other writings of the Spanish series, "Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction." With public interest in Community Choice Aggregation now increased in his defeat of Proposition 16, Fenn has written a book to present "a revolutionary view on the implications of the energy/climate/economic crisis that extends beyond the usual discussion of technology and into critical changes in economic and political theory, based on an American and European intellectual recovery from the Cold War and European imperialim." A more detailed bio is here.