Letter to Jerry Brown

I sent the following letter to Jerry Brown.  Maybe you would like to send something similar or along the same lines.

Honorable Governor Brown,

The question that immediately came to mind by everyone concerning energy is whether or not it is feasible to reach the goal in nine years.

I believe it is totally feasible as long as it is NOT done with very large desert power plants.  There are many significant problems with the proposed desert power plants - including environmental hurdles, high costs, high power costs, need for new transmission lines,  and others. These will all get in the way of meeting your goal.

However, instead of the State and Feds putting up billions in grants and financial support for a few large companies to help them destroy the deserts and jack up the price of electricity to consumers - go small and put the same money into supporting small locally produced and used systems (rooftops, parking lots, etc) - net metering plus the ability to sell back extra power at wholesale electricity prices.

Small systems have little or no environmental impact (because they are installed on locations that are already impacted); require no new power lines (because they decrease the power on the grid, not increase it); save the consumer money (because they make their own power for free rather than purchase all of their power from the utilities); are more affordable (because the local owner is more willing to invest when they can get a direct savings); are faster to install (because of little or no need for exhaustive permitting, environmental impact reports, design and construction of new power grid, etc); and create far more jobs (because they require about 10-20 times as much local labor as big centralized power plants).

The according to the news media, government is already offering grants to the large power plants of about $5/installed watt plus giving them almost free land, plus giving them tax breaks for the power they produce, plus giving them rate hikes for their new power, plus helping to pay for new transmission lines.  Give the $5/watt to homeowners and small businesses and solar will blossom without the need for any of the extra "Plus costs."

If given incentives close to those proposed from the large (German, Spanish and Chinese owned) power plants, local solar will meet the goals within five years without a negative environmental impact - while saving the consumer billions of dollars a year.

If you persist in going with the large centralized power plants, the costs will sky rocket; there will be extensive delays because of environmental impacts (especially when the public realizes that you are talking about hundreds of square miles of desert environment being totally destroyed by leveling, paved with gravel, sprayed with herbicides and fenced off from all wildlife); there will be massive problems with creating the temporary infrastructures to support a short term burst of workers during construction; they will severely impact the water supplies in the desert communities during construction and operation; and the will require building many new high tension transmission lines.  I believe it is unlikely that all of these obstacles, and others, can be overcome in time to meet your schedule deadline of 2020.


There are enough rooftops in California to meet 100% of California's electrical energy needs.  If all 6,540,000 single family dwellings were to install solar electrical systems, that would produce over 125,000 gwhr/yr of power. We currently use a total of 129, 000 gwhr/yr of electrical power and are making 42,000 from installed renewable sources (other than large hyrdro).  Add business roofs, parking lots, and other similar locations and the amount of space and power produced is far in excess of 100% of the total power needs for the State.