Respected members of the board of AVA,
After listening to your Advisor Committee meeting on Monday May 13th of 2024, I am dismayed by the votes against procuring power from Diablo Canyon. As a climate activist that understands the severity of our situation, it’s heartbreaking to see so many of you dismissing a way to quickly reduce carbon emissions and instead relying on improbable projections.
The energy policy that you are pursuing, based on 100% “renewables” is not new. It has been attempted before, and failed to reduce carbon emissions. Germany invested $600 billion in solar, wind and energy efficiency while also shutting down their nuclear power plants. As a result, renewable power ended replacing nuclear power, rather than fossil fuels. Carbon emissions per Kwh in Germany are on average almost 10 times higher than those of France, where most of the electricity comes from nuclear power.
Germany has possibly the most advanced industrial infrastructure in the world. Germany has some of the best engineers and energy experts, as well. Germany has a government fully committed to this energy policy, and yet, despite these favorable circumstances, Germany has failed in achieving a meaningful reduction of their carbon emissions.
If the board of AVA insists on refusing nuclear power as part of their energy mix, they need to answer a very important question: What makes you think that you can succeed where the Germans failed, lacking the resources they have available?. During the meeting I saw nothing that answers the question, just blind faith on the targets being met by 2030. Neither you nor I can predict the future, but we can have alternate plans in case things don’t work as expected. When our state as a whole is set to miss its 2030 climate goals, it is arrogant beyond belief to reject low carbon electricity based on ideology, not on facts. It is the ultimate hubris to think that you can do better than Germany without even justifying how. We are facing an existential threat. We need to get serious about reducing our carbon emissions by any possible means, not just by those that are palatable to your particular ideology.
In the Joint Powers Agreement that established AVA it states the signing parties seek to “Develop an electric supply portfolio with a lower greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity than PG&E, and one that supports the achievement of the parties’ greenhouse gas reduction goals and the comparable goals of all participating jurisdictions“. According to the data presented on the meeting, AVA’s carbon intensity is 496 pounds CO2eq/Mwh. PG&E’s carbon intensity in their 50% solar choice plan is 46 pounds CO2eq/Mwh. AVA’s emissions are more than 10 times higher than the emissions from PG&E. if AVA rejected the allocation of power from Diablo Canyon, it would be violating the mandate of its own Joint Powers Agreement, and showing callous indifference to our climate emergency.
You could use some of the income from the allocation to help your customers in need, especially those from vulnerable communities, minorities, immigrants like myself. I am grateful not to need the help, but I am privileged, and millions of others are struggling right now with some of the highest electricity prices in this country, right here in California. I do believe that you have a moral duty to help them and by rejecting the allocation you would be doing a disservice to them. The fact that nuclear power is unacceptable to some people is not an excuse to ignore this moral duty.
More than 30% of our power is imported from out of state, making us the largest importer of electricity in the US. When you have a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary like Pacificorp lobbying the CPUC to the tune of 2 million dollars per year and coal plants like Intermountain supplying 20% of the power to Los Angeles, you can be certain that a lot of our “unspecified” power comes from coal. This is the power that you are choosing over Diablo Canyon, at a time when last year was the hottest year in the last 2000 years, when there was an incredible and shocking jump in the concentrations of CO2.
Even one of the greatest, most influential climate activists of our times, Greta Thurnberg, has supported keeping existing nuclear power plants, over using coal. If the allocation from Diablo is rejected, instead of following her advice, you would be following the steps of Germany, the country that arrested her twice last year, for her activism against coal. Using Greta’s words: How dare you?
I apologize if my words sound harsh, but I am moved to the point of desperation. While our planet is burning, I see complacency, hubris and irrational optimism instead of pragmatism and a commitment to solutions. It is beyond me how can a CCA with ten times the emissions of PG&E can reject low carbon electricity and embrace coal. I urge you to change course and accept the allocation from Diablo Canyon, to send the world the message that you are taking climate change as seriously as it deserves, rather than using it conveniently for ideological purposes.
Sincerely,
Guido Núñez-Mujica
Climate Activist
Data Scientist
Computational Biologist