Let’s get lots of people looking at these bills… please forward to anyone you know who may be interested.

Attention all decarbonization people, energy analysts, and climate-concerned citizens: want to see how a mid-sized American city spends its energy dollars? Want to help find some easy decarbonization wins (and dollar savings) for the City of Berkeley?

Here are 813 PG&E utility bills for the City of Berkeley from 2019 to 2022. I got these via this public records request. It turns out the city still spends a ton of money on gas, and has lots of energy-intensive buildings that could be decarbonized quickly with rooftop solar and storage (and short payback periods).

I submitted this request because I suspected Berkeley had no idea how much it spends on energy. And I wanted to show the low-hanging fruit of decarbonization: the easy wins of A) electrifying Berkeley’s most energy-intensive buildings and B) decarbonizing its electricity supply with rooftop solar. Unfortunately the city’s been dragging its feet on both fronts; partly due to a false narrative that Berkeley’s electricity supply is already 100% renewable. In fact, much of Berkeley’s electricity still comes from methane gas plants in Hayward, Pittsburg, and San Jose.

To be fair, who can blame the city managers (or any city managers) for not reading these bills and seeing the obvious potential dollar savings; they’re super complicated! And that’s on purpose: PG&E doesn’t want its customers to understand them, because energy efficiency and distributed generation (rooftop solar plus storage) are their real competition.

We can solve this problem by getting lots of smart people to look at these bills; that’s the quickest way to find great insights and accelerate the decarbonization process (and associated budget savings).

So please forward this post to anyone who might be interested.

Thanks!
Dave

P.S. If you’re wondering why the account numbers are blacked out on each page of each bill, its because the city insisted on manually redacting them, while warning me that it would take a lots of staff time to do so. When I requested to ask the city attorney if this was absolutely necessary and worth all that staff time, they replied she said it was. Ugh.

Also: these bills don’t include Berkeley’s twenty public schools. When I requested those bills from the school district (a separate government entity), they responded that they ‘had boxes and boxes of them’ and didn’t have the staff capacity to assemble and photocopy them.