How We Can Achieve True Energy Independence

Energy independence is in many ways a contradiction in terms. The American Way of Life depends conspicuously upon energy, not just for heat and light, but transportation, information, and fabrication. What we call “work” today consists mostly of operating machines. Our world is embodied energy. “Energy” is a state of dependency: the dependency of a society that necessarily eschews physical labor and is addicted to the “ghost in the machine.”

Energy independence policy therefore has an incoherent quality. President Trump called for “drill baby drill”¹ as an energy independence strategy. President Biden called for new transmission lines and grid investments to “bring about” centralized renewable generation-based energy independence.²

Americans with solar net metering systems believe they are energy independent, yet eligibility for their systems is capped at a small fraction of system load and depends on ratepayer subsidies. This means net metering customers, a small minority, remain dependent on payments forced on the majority of people who will never be included. This has brought political backlash: energy independence needs a coherent strategy.

So How Can We be Energy Independent, Actually?

Our relationship to energy is central to energy dependency, not merely the technologies that create energy. Focusing on technology creates a false two-dimensional economic theology: a belief system that worships technological idols: a faith that this or that kind of machine will make us energy-independent. This makes us morally dependent on technologies alleged to be independent. No technology will free us, because it does nothing to alter our unconscious relationship to energy. The pageant of false idols continues: one political party’s idol is the green grid, the other’s idol is domestic gas, oil, and coal, and another’s is nuclear.

Our policy discussions are stuck in mental quicksand, with no direction but down. That is why climate change continues, ultimately reaching the point of no return as energy demand continues to grow.

Climate change is a metric of our society’s overdependence on energy, just as the proliferation of slavery was a metric of Liberal English hypocrisy in the 18th century. What is different from slavery is that everyone today, rich and poor alike in differing degrees is part of the cause of climate change. The energy industry is the most guilty for lobbying against climate action, but all people use electricity, methane, gasoline, and diesel. Our clothes are made of petroleum, and our books and newspapers are being replaced by electronic devices. Acknowledging the consequences of energy dependency is hypocritical until we can find a way out: a path to economically achievable physical energy independence.

To solve an addiction, you have to face the nature of the problem. Historically, energy replaced slavery. Political support for abolition in the 18th and 19th centuries came from morally outraged people who owned no slaves. But today, all people depend upon energy. And energy is an automatic, invisible slave that does what you want the moment you demand it. You neither see nor are responsible for your slaves and beasts of burden: park them, turn them off, put them in the garage.

Energy is morally laundered. You don’t smell the smoke. Miles away, machines churn, and millions of tons of copper cable ripped from dead mountains deliver silent obedience across a poisoned, dying landscape. CEOs promise carbon-free this and that so you don’t have to feel guilty flying in their airplanes or buying their products, falsely mitigated and sold at a premium to virtue-signaling elites.

States sanction certificate trading systems – Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) and Carbon Credits, – so that climate-destroying products may be sold as legally “mitigated” in profoundly dishonest marketing messages to an increasingly confused consumer, undermining public consciousness of real problems and real solutions.³

Academic carbon models from the best universities treat all carbon as equal, and reduce all carbon sources to the consumer.⁴ A false equivalency of all carbon sources wags the finger at farmers as somehow equal to tourists, and small local farmers more “carbon intensive” than export-oriented megafarms.5 This kind of analysis is one-dimensional and unholistic to the point of being absurd – and is promoted by the biggest polluters on earth, eager as they naturally are to shift the blame. It has also alienated voters, divided society, and tainted climate action and climate-friendly technologies as “elitist.”

Real sinners are comforted by these sanctioned lies. Markets present a fiction of independence and sustainability that has poisoned the American mind and made actual energy independence remoter still, seemingly unattainable to minds so long deceived that they have lost the power to believe anything. Energy marketers are notorious fraudsters. “Renewable Energy” providers pollute the land with deceptive products that promise “community” this and “sustainability” that, undermining the language itself.

To find our feet and solid ground, we need to follow principles and resist temptations to cut corners.

Energy independence is not just a renewable energy supply. It is a different system of energy that depends less upon supply. We need to meaningfully reduce the use of non-local sources of energy: Local Power.

Energy independence is locally sited renewables. Careful! Even “local” has been abused in many places to mean “in-state” or “in-country.” But local is local: meaning municipal.

Energy independence is economic. To the extent you are paying a monthly energy bill, you are a renter of energy. This is economic dependency. Energy independence indicates user-owned renewables. It does not suffice to call it “locally owned” when any corporation or subsidiary can legally exist locally anywhere. Third-party ownership is dependency and servitude by users: feudal tithes paid to a distant master.

Virtually all U.S. renewable energy is financed and owned by tax avoidance capital. Every word that might distinguish centralized, fuel-based, Wall Street-owned energy has been bastardized by marketing lies that are legal property and allowed by state regulators who have failed their promise to protect consumers and the environment. Depending on regulators is also dependency upon long-failed regulatory commissions all around the U.S.

Energy independence is self-consumed renewables. Depending upon utility payments through net metering for your solar is dependency, upon other ratepayers, most of whom don’t own solar. And selling your power onto the grid is a dangerous fiction to sell you the drink. Policymakers throughout the world are suffering under the contradiction that 30 years of renewable energy development has not delivered significant energy transitions.

Net metering, which was established a quarter century ago, has been discontinued by California and other states. Late last year the New York Independent System Operator reported that they need four times the grid to meet green power targets for centralized renewable resources. This is four times the dependency, not independence, and transmission projects have caused public opposition.5 And it will never be built because it would require huge rate increases. Over 30 years after Kyoto, climate change is in full swing as voters revolt in a mass “greenlash” against all things renewable.

A Paradigm Shift is Needed. And it is Already Here.

Part of the paradigm shift concerns who is the driving force of the change: who will own it. Utilities have historically prevented anyone from building energy transitions for fear of revenue losses and thereby have failed to do it themselves. Incentive systems designed to stimulate centralized and onsite renewables markets have reached their limits. Interconnect delays, net metering caps, and rising resentment against the inequity of ratepayer subsidy-based solar created barriers to high renewables penetration that energy independence requires. We need to find our feet in the 30 year swirl of state-sanctioned corporate fraud that is “green power” by studying a little history.

Many have forgotten that electricity industry restructuring was the foundational act that made a renewable energy industry possible, and how important market structure is to the economic feasibility of energy transition. Market structure, more than incentives and goals, defines the possible. Who is really in charge here? Market structure decides. The answer differs by state. To find the answer to energy independence you have to seek specific examples in specific places, rather than norms or even trends. Forget consensus. Stop following the herd. Look for leadership.

Major leaps have been achieved by municipalities in California, where cities, towns, and counties have taken the lead in building renewable energy facilities and buying physical renewable power rather than RECs. The entire coast of California – 250 municipalities – have aggregated into 25 groups and leveraged $35B of investment in the last half-decade, building local renewables dedicated to serving their customers for decades into the future.7

This was possible due not only to political will but a specific market structure that empowered it to have impact, called Community Choice Aggregation (CCA). CCA is the key to energy independence because it uses community buying power, local democracy, and municipal bonds to leverage meaningful community-wide energy localization. CCA was approved by the legislature in 2002 (AB117), a year after San Francisco voters approved the first Green Bond Authority in 2001 (Proposition H – Charter Section 9.107.8), combining the Green Bond authority with the aggregation authority in 2004 (Ordinance 86-04) and adopting a plan combining CCA with Green Bonds in 2007. The build vs. buy model was adopted by Sonoma Clean Power and other CCAs in ensuing years, and has come to be known as the California CCA model: CCA 2.0. This has enabled CCA to achieve scale of development formerly limited to huge utilities, empowering huge change. Today, California CCAs are the bigger players in terms of scale of climate impact than the largest players in the utility industry: even of major countries!

CCA provides the leverage to unify a community to take a great leap to real energy independence. No longer must we act in isolation, or incrementally, as consumers. We can act more decisively as communities. CCAs set rates and negotiate terms with suppliers. In California, they control the guts of supply, developing independent intellectual capacity to understand and manage transitions from the old approach to the new. This is known as “CCA 2.0.”

Aggregation is the most important part, but another key element is municipal finance. A CCA 2.0 program first created “Green Bonds” to finance local renewables and energy efficiency measures. Last year, California CCA 2.0 programs were the largest issuer of “Green Bonds” in America, building $15B of the $35B in new renewables they have committed.

By lowering the cost of financing under local authority, CCAs have achieved significant transitions in their energy supplies while maintaining competitive rates for consumers. Neither a premium service for the few, nor a sacrifice of economic prosperity, these green power programs are popular. California CCAs took nine of the top 10 spots of all U.S. utilities for energy customers purchasing renewable energy above regulatory minimums, including mega utilities like PG&E, National Grid, and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

CCA 2.0 is not just the record breaker for building and buying renewable energy. It blew past every U.S. utility out there, all of which have had many decades to get there but have never done so. CCAs have done this in remarkably little time! It is the tortoise, not the hare, who is the fastest.

California CCAs have more than 10 times the number of customers of the next 10 on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s list of those utilities switching to renewables above state minimums.

I repeat: 10 times the next 10 on the list. This is a lesson to the wise. To be energy independent, you need to have local control – and local labor capacity. That is where democracy comes in. Communities organized democratically, not corporations serving isolated consumers, have taken the gold medal in transforming energy. Didn’t hear about successful energy transitions without economic pain? Hard to believe, right? CCA 2.0, which combines the aggregation of energy demand with Green Bonds, is already out-investing China and Canada! As reported by Bloomberg this past November, “The California Community Choice Financing Authority has issued $6 billion in 2024, with a significant uptick in the past 12 weeks, cementing its place as the 10th biggest green bond issuer in the world—larger than either the governments of China or Canada.”⁸

Those are just the results coming in from the CCA 2.0 model with Green Bonds, which provide the basic macroeconomic elements of energy independence, but they are not enough. A new model has already arrived, this time in New York State. Aggregation has to encompass not just electricity (only 1/4 to 1/3 of energy demand) but also include all of energy as measured by the UN’s “addressable carbon” sources subject to governmental authority: (1) power, (2) heat, (3) vehicles, and (4) waste. These four kinds of energy, heretofore separate, will be integrated into interoperable onsite energy systems in “CCA 3.0.”

This past December, the New York State Public Service Commission approved Local Power LLC’s program for CCA 3.0: a community aggregation for independence that will combine all four major categories of energy in onsite energy systems serving contiguous properties, by enrolling neighbors as users and owners. Incorporating heating systems and EVs as energy storage systems powered by new onsite renewables, and working with municipalities to turn local landfill and sewer waste into local white hydrogen for onsite fuel cells, CCA 3.0 represents the final frontier of energy independence: local, renewable, user-owned, democratically governed, shared, integrated, and interoperable.⁷

Technology convergence between plug power in buildings, cheap solar panels, EV chargers that can power buildings, high-performing heating systems like geothermal heat loops, and local green and white hydrogen-based fuel cell systems, promises energy independence through customer ownership, locational integration, and interoperability.

Local Power developed CCA 3.0 based on over 30 years of developing CCA and Green Bonds and anticipates 3.0’s rapid replication across the U.S. and the world just like 2.0 rapidly spread across California because it is real. Stay tuned as our pilot CCA 3.0 program soon launches in the City and Town of Ithaca, New York: The Green Energy Network or “T-GEN.”⁹

About the Author
Paul Fenn, Founder/President of Local Power LLC (localpower.com), coauthored the nation’s original Municipal Aggregation law in the mid-1990s, then authored the nation’s first Green Bond authority in 2001, the Community Choice Aggregation (CCA 2.0) law in California, the original CCA 2.0 program designs for San Francisco and other Bay Area CCAs through 2013, since replicated by most CCAs in California. In 2018, Bloomberg News said Fenn “may be the utility industry’s public enemy number one.” For the past ten years, Fenn has worked in the state of New York to implement a CCA 3.0 business model to enable any customer to co-invest in local Distributed Energy Resources across power, heat, transportation and waste technologies, to achieve community-wide decarbonization. His CCA 3.0 program, approved by the New York Public Service Commission in 2024, will first launch in the City and Town of Ithaca, New York later in 2025.

Sources
1. Inauguration speech, January 21, 2025.
2. For example the DOE’s “Transmission Facilitation Program,” October 2024.
3. For example, “The Next Big Climate Target: Ending Carbon Offset Scams,” The Washington Post, August 26, 2024; and, “Companies’ Climate Goals in Jeopardy from Flawed Energy Credits,” Bloomberg, June 9, 2022.
4. Naomi, Oreskes, “The Gas Industry Is Gaslighting the Public about Climate Change: A fossil-fuel executive blames consumers for the climate crisis,” Scientific American, June 25, 2024.
5. Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews, “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States, Environ. Sci. Technol., 2008, Volume 42, Issue 10, pp.3508.
6. “In a Warning to National Infrastructure Plans, Maine Voters Reject Transmission Line,” Institute for Energy Research, November 11, 2021.
7. https://bit.ly/4b4oIZj
8. New York Public Service Commission, “Order Approving Local Power’s Community Choice Aggregation Program,” Case Number 14-M-0224, Issued December 24, 2024.
9. “IGND: Ithaca explores way to purchase renewable energy,” Ithaca Voice, May 23, 2022.