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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.

Recent Press Stories

about Paul Fenn

--Midwest Energy News: How Chicago’s municipal aggregation could be a boon for renewable energy (November 15, 2012)

--The Wall Street Journal: Cities Take On Utility Role - Chicago and Other Communities Buy Cheaper, Often Cleaner Energy for Residents (November 12, 2012)

--Pacific Sun : Clean energy extends its cord - Marin's spark catches fire in San Francisco and beyond (September 21, 2012)

--EnergyBiz : San Francisco’s Green Rush Getting Started (September 20, 2012)

--San Francisco Chronicle : S.F. weighing green alternative to PG&E; (September 16, 2012)

--San Francisco Bay Guardian : Harrington finally brings CleanPowerSF to City Hall, hoping his SFPUC legacy will be a city that produces its own renewable energy (August 28, 2012)

--Rock River Times (Illinois): Energy efficiency in Germany and the U.S. (July 25, 2012)

--Rock River Times : Community choice aggregation as envisioned by Paul Fenn (July 16, 2012)

--Point Reyes Light (Marin County): Marshall-based energy group localizes on power and profit (June 28, 2012)

--East Bay Express (Bay Area): When Will We Go Green? (May 30, 2012)

--The Arcata Eye (No. California): Energy Aggregation Could Widen Renewable Choices (February 27, 2012)

--The Pacific Sun (Marin) : Credits where credit is due? Marin Clean Energy is leading the green-energy way—thanks in part to RECs (February 24, 2012)

--The Daily Northwestern (Chicago): San Francisco company aims to localize renewable energy in Evanston (February 13, 2012)

--North County (San Diego) Times: Rebelling against SDG&E;: Locals want alternative (Jannuary 28, 2012)

--San Francisco Daily Journal: San Francisco Explores Alternative Power Deal (December 22, 2011)

--Earth Techling: San Francisco Begins Down The All Clean Energy Path (December 9, 2011)

--Renew Grid (San Francisco): SFPUC Gives Local Power Green Light For RFPs (November 28, 2011)

--The Bohemian (Sonoma) : The Bottom Line- Green and cheap energy: Can Sonoma County have both? (November 23, 2011)

--San Francisco Daily Journal: Municipalities seek alternative to public utilities (November 16, 2011)

--The Anderson Valley Advertiser (Mendocino): Green, Cheap, Now: an interview with Paul Fenn of Local Power Inc. (November 5, 2011)

--Good Magazine: Local Power: Boulder Considers Moving Off the Grid (November 4, 2011)

--350.org: 350.org Endorses Local Power Ballot Measures in Boulder, Colorado (October 27, 2011)

--Sierra Club, Global Exchange, Local Clean Energy Alliance, Our City and Brightline Defense: Press Release: Environmental, Worker and Justice Groups Hail Breakthrough with CleanPowerSF Program (October 11, 2011)

--National Renewable Energy Laboratory Blog: The New(er) Kids on the Block: Community Choice Aggregators (August 29, 2011)

--The Boulder Daily Camera: Guest opinion: Localization is not municipalization (June 26, 2011)

--Renewable Energy World: CCA Local Power Begins California Expansion (June 1, 2011)

---The Bohemian: Voltage & Violets - How a public power agency in Sonoma County could revolutionize the grid (May 25, 2011)

--North Bay Business Journal: First Marin, now Sonoma moves on energy program (April 4, 2011)

--Huffington Post: Local Power for Boulder and beyond (December 18, 2010)

--The San Francisco Bay Citizen: SF courts bidders for new, greener power company (October, 2010)

--Sacramento Business Journal: Voters pull the plug on PG&E-backed; proposition (June 2010)

---S.F. Business Times: Marin says 78% of its power is renewable (April 2010)

---Wall Street Journal: PG&E; spending millions to block local utilities (2010)

--Sonoma County Press Release: $1 Million Renewable Energy Secure Communities Grant to Sonoma, Local Power Inc. (2009)

--New York Times: New group seeks to bring greener power to Marin (2009)

--National Public Radio - KQED San Francisco: Power Struggle in Marin (2009)