Category: Energy

By Melody Petersen / San Diego Union-Tribune TNS / Sept. 24, 2024

When Roy Richards spotted workers cutting down and shredding Joshua trees for a sprawling solar energy project near his Mojave Desert home last week, he started taking photos.

“Once the trees go through the shredders, they vanish,” he said, showing a reporter an image of a small pile of brown dust left by the crews. The developer of the Aratina Solar Center has government approval to fell all of the thousands of trees on the site.

Charles Langley, the Executive Director of Public Watchdogs is warning the public that once again, Southern California Edison is in radioactively “hot” water about another radiation leak involving the failed San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS). Langley is urging the public to learn about this shocking development this Thursday afternoon, Sept. 5th at an Edison-sponsored virtual meeting from 2pm to 5pm, September 5 (meeting details here).

Langley writes:

About the radiation leak:

The leak occurred during the transport of a 100-ton, thirty-seven foot high, “pressurizer.” Edison has claimed that the leak is below “background” radiation. A railroad worker in San Bernardino discovered the leak on or around June 30, during the pressurizer’s long journey from San Onofre to a disposal site in Clive Utah.

With all the talk about bike lanes versus charging stations, Rag reporter Geoff Page went down to Abbott Street to check out what the two city-owned charging stations in the parking lot of the main guard tower look like now.

Plus he wanted to see how the administration of Mayor Todd Gloria is  handling the new national push to increase charging stations all over California and the nation.

The issue that San Diegans should have the right to vote on creating a municipal utility — even if the idea is not good — is reverberating around our fair city. And reporter Paul Krueger is promoting this view.

Just yesterday, June 13, Krueger’s letter to the editor in the San Diego U-T was published. He had written it in response to their article, entitled,”San Diego City Council shoots down effort to put municipal utility on the November ballot” published on the 11th.

Here’s his letter, followed by a statement from Power San Diego, the group that wants to fire SDG&E.

I don’t trust our mayor and city council to oversee a municipal utility, and would vote “no ” on a ballot measure to oust SDG&E and establish a government utility.

The group that wants to oust San Diego Gas & Electric within the city limits of San Diego and replace it with a municipal utility has submitted a sufficient number of signatures to pose the question of establishing a municipal utility to the San Diego City Council.

The San Diego City Clerk has confirmed the Power San Diego Campaign collected enough valid signatures to pose the question to the San Diego City Council.

Bill Powers, a representative from Power San Diego, claimed responsibility for gathering over 31,000 signatures,

By Sarah Mosko / Times of San Diego / May 3, 2024

Many residents of Orange and San Diego counties were relieved when the nuclear power plant at San Onofre was permanently shut down in 2013. This naïve thinking, that the plant posed risks to people and property only while the reactors were operational,

Lack of Trust Reason Power San Diego Couldn’t Collect Enough Signatures for Ballot

San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board / May 17, 2024

San Diego Gas & Electric is easily the least objectionable of the state’s three giant investor-owned utilities. It is not a corporate felon on “a crime spree,” as a federal judge described Pacific Gas & Electric in 2022. It didn’t launch the clandestine scheme to make ratepayers cover far too much of the cost of shuttering the broken San Onofre nuclear plant. Though SDG&E benefited, that was the work of an Edison executive.

By Rob Nikolewski / San Diego Union-Tribune / May 14, 2024

Power San Diego, the initiative that wants to oust San Diego Gas & Electric by creating a municipal electric utility within the city limits of San Diego, has fallen short of its goal of collecting 80,000 verified signatures to put the proposition on the ballot this fall.

But the group turned in about 31,000 signatures to the County Registrar of Voters on Tuesday, which it says would be enough to put the question before the San Diego City Council instead.

Needs City Clerk’s Certification

The Power San Diego ballot measure campaign has delivered tens of thousands of signatures from their volunteer effort to replace SDGE with a non-profit public electric utility. Designed to conform to San Diego’s City Charter, the initiative would  establish a lower-cost electric utility, retain the current union workforce, and be overseen by a qualified board of directors with citizen oversight.

by MacKenzie Elmer / Voice of San Diego / April 22, 2024

The ongoing war between public power proponents and San Diego Gas & Electric looked more like a battle between the municipalization advocates and union labor Thursday [April 18].

Each team’s respective poster-bearing players – with signs that read either “fire SG&E” or “municipalization is union busting” — took turns encumbering the live feed webcast of the City Council Rules Committee’s public comment period. But almost no one from a labor union spoke in favor of the proposed government takeover of the energy grid. Proponents had hoped the City Council would consider putting up a ballot measure and spare them the burden of collecting signatures.

By Carolyn Chase

Why are our energy bills so high?

The Energy Industrial Complex is picking your pocket. The EIC in California consists of:

• The three for-profit monopolies: San Diego Gas & Electric, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison
• The CPUC – misnamed as the California Public Utility Commission – has ceased responsible oversight needed by ratepayers
• Politicians and appointees that fail to ask critical questions and go along with unnecessary rate increases.  They accept project designs that are the most profitable instead of designs that prioritize affordability and climate progress.

Forty-five years ago today — March 28th — Central Pennsylvania suffered a historic tragedy when one of the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island experienced a partial meltdown.

The accident, which occurred at the Generating Station along the Susquehanna River on March 28, 1979, went down in history as the most serious nuclear power plant accident in United States history.

According to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, researchers were able to determine that the meltdown had “negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment” — but that’s not to say there weren’t any lasting impacts.