1 Andrea Pizano
From: Tom Kabat < >
Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2024 12:20 PM
To: Andrea Pizano
Subject: Fwd: Public comment on Exec Committee 10/25 meeting Item 2 ATTENTION: This message is from an external user. Confidential information such as social security, credit card, ba routing, wire transfer and other personally identifiable information should not be transmitted to this user. For questions, please contact the SVCE IT Department.
Oops Andrea,
I meant to make this comment below on item 3 about portfolio cleanliness policies.
Thanks,
-Tom
Begin forwarded message:
From: Tom Kabat < >
Subject: Public comment on Exec Committee 10/25 meeting Item 2 Date: October 24, 2024 at 11:56:28 AM PDT
To:
Dear Executive Committee,
I’m writing to comment about effective approaches to decarbonizing your territory’s energy usage.
I think in these explorations we need to keep two things in mind at all times:
1) What are the counter-factuals? ( Things that will happen if we don’t take the action. i.e.
How does our action change the world around us?)
2) What is our theory of change? ( How do we think our area’s action can be translatable to inspire other areas’ actions? )
3) What things can we import, vs. what things have to occur here either soon or eventually? Background fact to keep in mind: Our electric portfolio is pretty clean, whale the gas portfolio is extremely dirty in comparison when we look accurately at the upstream emissions especially to the customer premise.
So, there are diminishing returns on accelerating the further cleaning of our electric portfolio. While there is substantial GHG reduction achieved every time we electrify a gas device to become a part of our electric load to be met under our existing portfolio policies. This electrification helps lower electric rates and that leads to a beneficial uptake spiral. 2 On the other hand, further polishing our electric portfolio into the expensive to address times of day and year now adds to our rates or diminishes the net revenue for electrification programs and both of those lead to higher rates and stalls our electrification progress.
When I apply those 3 questions about how we can be effective at demonstrating the kind of change that needs to happen all around us I come to the following conclusions about the electric portfolio and electrification programs.
I see our important work to be
A) Managing our electric portfolio in an affordable and simply relatively clean manner.
B) Applying net revenues and creativity toward power efficient electrification techniques that demonstrate how our area can increase electrification more than we increase the need for distribution grid enhancements.
These efforts lead to the beneficial spiral of more electrification and lower (than otherwise) rates on generation and eventually T&D.
Thank you for thinking of this focus as probably the best effort we can share with the world for starting the beneficial spirals needed to preserve climate. -Tom Kabat
Energy Engineer
1 Andrea Pizano
From: Steve Schmidt < >
Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2024 2:54 PM
To: Andrea Pizano
Subject: Public Comment for Exec Committee item "SVCE Long-term Clean Targets" ATTENTION: This message is from an external user. Confidential information such as social security, credit card, ba routing, wire transfer and other personally identifiable information should not be transmitted to this user. For questions, please contact the SVCE IT Department.
Respected SVCE Executive Committee Members --
As a customer, past board member (alternate director for Los Altos Hills), and clean energy advocate, I'd like to encourage you all to continue to set bold goals for providing our customers the cleanest electricity available.
Being a little bit cleaner than PG&E is insufficient.
Clean Energy has always been our reason-for-being, and even appears in the name we chose for the organization: "Silicon Valley CLEAN Energy".
Not cheap energy, not occasionally clean energy, not low-risk clean energy.
I hope your recommendations to the board for long term clean targets embody the aspirations that went into creating SVCE.
Thank you!
Steve Schmidt