Years ago, in the middle of the boom in nuclear power plants, we used to say, only half in jest, the private utilities would never accept solar energy because you can't put a meter on the sun. Turns out that's pretty close to true.Read more »

One of the factors that the state regulators took into account when they decided how much PG&E should be fined for the San Bruno blast was the company's financial situation -- that is, how much of a fine could the utility "safely absorb." That's the first sign that something screwy is going on here.Read more »

One of the most important stories on the future of the country's electricity supply has been largely ignored by the major media outlets. My friend Johnny Angel Wendell, who is a talk-show host at KTLK in Los Angeles, passed it on to me, or I might have missed it, too.Read more »

I remember years ago a loser of a supervisor named Bill Maher tried to make a lame joke in opposition to a public-power measure. "If the city tries to run an electric system," he said, "every time I throw a light switch my toilet would flush."

Ha. Ha. Ha.

But it's a common refrain: We can't even run the Muni on time -- how can we run an electricity system?Read more »

You have to love the way the lawyer from TURN (The Utility Reform Network) put PG&E's Vice President Jane Yura on the spot during hearings on the San Bruno pipeline disaster. There was lots of back and forth about the company's ad campaign and whether PG&E had "lost its way," which is what the Chron played up, but here's the bigger issue, buried deep in the story:Read more »

Since San Francisco's Local Agency Formation Commission is meeting Dec. 7 to talk about renewable energy, I went and read the 100-page report of the Mayor's Task Force on Renewable Energy, which offers 39 different suggestions for meeting the goal of 100 renewable electricity in the city by 2020.Read more »

So PG&E wants to frighten, deafen, and kill a whole lot of marine mammals and fish by blasting sound waves at the Ocean floor -- to discover exactly what? That there are, indeed, a lot of earthquake faults right near the Diablo Canyon nuke -- and that a serious quake risks cracking the containment facility or toppling the whole thing into the sea, contaminaing much of the coast and poisoning a huge population area?

Don't we already know that?Read more »

Any pretense that the group called San Francisco Women for for Responsibility and an Accountable Supervisor is anything more than a downtown sham vanished with the arrival in District 5 mailboxes Nov. 3 of a mailer attacking Sup. Christina Olague for supporting public power.

The mailer uses pictures of Olague and Julian Davis -- and that alone is a not-so-subtle attack on Olague. Davis has lost all credibility in the race, thanks to a string of allegations that he groped women.Read more »