Why am I not surprised

So, the San Francisco City Council wants to pass an ordinance that would require businesses to turn off all non-essential lights at night. The idea behind this is to not waste energy and, ostensibly, to show just how gosh darn green this city is. The legislation would give building owners one year to upgrade their facilities to make them more energy efficient, but after that, they would be subject to fines for keeping on unnecessary lights in the building at night.

San Francisco BOMA is opposed to the legislation as currently written because 1) city buildings have already done a lot towards reducing lighting at night, and 2) thinks that building owners don't need more onerous rules put upon them by the city council.

I have my own reasons- California is night-time wind peaking state. In other words, the majority of our wind blows at night, thus, most of our wind-based generation occurs at night. The goal of this ordinance, as well as the other stupid idea Earth Hour, where everyone turns off their lights for an hour, is to show how green they are, how much they care about the environment and other such smuggery. The problem with it, as it pertains to California, is that the majority of electricity you are most likely consuming at night comes from non-GHG emitting resources, like hydro, nuclear and wind. For all the carbon savings you'd like to go out and claim for this, I'm sorry, but this little stunt isn't likely to produce very much in California.

The "Earth Hour" nonsense makes even less sense to do since it is occurring in winter/early spring when there's no benefit to the grid, rather, the grid operator will have to deal with a sudden drop in usage, causing frequency variations, then have to deal with a sudden increase in usage as everyone turns on their lights again. To me, this simply shows that the people who dream up these fantasies have no idea how electricity actually works. Not to mention is a terribly inefficient way to run power plants, which increases emissions.

On the other hand, if these events were marketed as a way to show businesses how they can save money on their electricity bill, that would be a far different case and easier to sell, in my opinion. By simply not consuming, that customer is going to be saving money from their electricity consumption. If turning off some lights reduces that company's consumption, that is an economic benefit to the customer- and is good. We should be encouraging energy efficiency, not threatening or forcing energy efficiency upon customers- this simply leads to opposition, foot dragging and, worse of all, increased costs to customers to comply.

Instead, the folks above don't care that you save money, they want to bash you over the head, call you names, and threaten you with fines if you don't agree to their environmental mandate of reducing emissions from power plants. It is a huge irony of environmental and energy policies in this state that we a) don't want to argue that doing simple things like turning off the lights can save people money, b) don't want new sources of cheap and clean power like hydro or nuclear to meet the expected load growth in the state, but, instead, wants to c) fine you, threaten you and harass you into not consuming because of environmental concerns and d) instead wants to build exceedingly expensive power projects like solar, wind, and tidal energy.

In other words, California policy is to increase the costs of electricity then force businesses to reduce for environmental reasons. But not residential customers. The legislature refuses to remove a rate cap that has been in effect since 2001 upon residential customers; thereby removing an economic incentive for residential customers to reduce their consumption. That is, since half of all residential customers in this state do not consume above a certain amount to trigger higher rates, they still see 2001 rates, and only have a reason to not go above their baseline. If the rate cap were lifted, then residential customers would be able to see a more accurate cost of electricity, and have an economic incentive to reduce and/or change their usage patterns. Ironically, it's the state's electricity goal to push consumption to off-peak hours where power is cheaper and potentially cleaner (nights and early mornings), yet we end up with stupid ideas based on environmental policy to show how much we care about the environment by turning off power at night. This stuff just boggles my mind.