San Francisco: Where Bureaucracy Reigns Supreme

Tesla's Powerwall battery.

When we visited the Tesla dealership in 2017, I saw our path to going green.

During the day rooftop solar panels would produce excess power. The power would not be sold to PG&E (and repurchased that evening) but would be stored in batteries in our garage, where our Tesla EV would be charging at night time. An added benefit is that we would be independent of unreliable brown-out prone PG&E.

The dream would wait, as solar and battery technologies were improving rapidly. Besides we had a fairly new natural-gas water heater and furnace that were reliable and inexpensive to operate. Their useful lives would expire in the mid-2020's, which would be a good time to execute the solar panel==>battery==>EV vision.

But if we lived in San Francisco, one of the greenest cities in America, the dream would be impossible. [bold added]

San Francisco needs power when the fog comes out and after the sun sets. Meeting that demand without fossil fuels will be impossible if we don’t start storing our solar energy for off-hours use.

And yet for the past three years in San Francisco, it has been illegal to install a battery storage system over 20-kilowatt hours on a one- or two-family home. For context, that’s not even enough to power a 2013 Nissan Leaf, one of the smallest electric cars on the market.

San Francisco's fire-safety concerns over battery storage are "unproven" and not subscribed to by any other Bay Area city. They're emblematic of a City bureaucracy that prevents its own citizens from doing the very things that City leadership advocates.

Meanwhile, San Francisco faces a budget deficit of $200 million in the next fiscal year and is looking for places to cut.