Testimony of Mark Rodeffer, Sierra Club DC Chapter Chair before the DC Council Committee on Transportation and the Environment
October 9, 2018
Councilmember Cheh and members of the committee, thank you for holding this hearing today.
My name is Mark Rodeffer. I'm the chair of the D.C. chapter of the Sierra Club. We are the nation's oldest and largest environmental advocacy group. We are a grassroots organization with more than 3,000 dues-paying members and more than 10,000 supporters in DC. Our top priority is combating climate change. We work to shift away from the dirty fossil fuels that cause climate change and instead move toward a clean energy economy.
On behalf of our thousands of members in DC, I ask that this committee and that the full DC Council approve the Clean Energy DC Omnibus Act of 2018. The climate cannot wait, and the 13 members of the DC Council should not wait either.
Climate risks to DC residents
According to DC's Chief Resilience Officer, Kevin Bush, DC has the fastest rate of sea-level rise along the East Coast. DC is at increased risk because the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers are tidal and 70 percent of our land is coastal plain. Mr. Bush told Washingtonian magazine in July that if Hurricane Sandy had hit our region, we would have seen a storm surge into the Chesapeake Bay and into all of its tidal rivers – including the Anacostia and the Potomac. We don’t know exactly how many lives this would have taken, nor how many billions of dollars in property damage would be caused, but we know the impact would be severe. For me, as a resident of Southwest DC, living in a building that sits just a few feet above sea level, this is a serious concern.
Jobs & the local economy
In DC, we don’t mine coal and we don’t drill for oil and gas. That’s a good thing. But spending money on fossil fuels means every dollar we spend on that dirty energy is a dollar we send out of DC. But renewable energy and energy efficiency create jobs right here in DC. Those jobs cannot be outsourced.
According to the U.S. Energy Department’s 2018 U.S. Energy and Employment Report, DC has more than 12,000 energy efficiency jobs, most of those in areas such as high-efficiency heating, ventilation and air conditioning, renewable heating and cooling, and energy efficient lighting. The building performance standards in this bill mean more of those good-paying jobs in DC.
According to the Energy Department, DC has just over 2,000 electricity generation jobs. More than three-fourths of those jobs are in renewable energy – more than 1,500 jobs in solar and about 150 jobs in wind. Dirty fossil fuels account for just 270 jobs in DC. That means for every one dirty energy job in DC, there are six clean energy jobs. Expanding renewable energy in DC expands jobs in DC. It means more families with solid middle class incomes. So remember when the opponents of this bill say it will cost too much, what they really mean is that we should send our money not to moms and dads in DC but to coal barons in West Virginia and Wyoming and oil tycoons in Texas and Saudi Arabia.
Long-term contracts
The Sierra Club strongly supports the bill’s requirements for long-term renewable energy power purchase agreements. Long-term contracts allow wind and solar developers to borrow money to build new utility-scale projects. New wind and solar projects mean more energy from those sources and less greenhouse gas emissions from dirty fossil fuels.
Long-term contracts also lower costs for DC ratepayers. We saw exactly this in 2015, when the DC government signed a contract to purchase 125,000 megawatt hours of electricity annually from a wind farm in Pennsylvania. It is saving the DC government $45 million in electricity bills over 20 years. But, as the Washington Post reported, individual ratepayers in DC see none of the savings, because that clean energy is powering only DC government buildings.
We very much appreciate that wind energy is keeping the lights on in the Council chamber today. But we’d like to see all ratepayers in DC share in the millions of dollars of cost savings from long-term contracts. So we support requiring these long-term contracts for both standard offer service and competitive electricity suppliers.
Hydropower
The Sierra Club opposes bringing hydropower into our Renewable Portfolio Standard. Even if we disregard hydropower’s damaging effects on wildlife and watersheds, relying on electricity from dams that were built long ago – sometimes more than a century ago – does not reduce carbon emissions today. DC ratepayers should not pad the pockets of dam owners when there is no benefit to the climate.
The argument that hydro is needed for baseload is overblown. The middle of the night, when solar energy is not produced, is also when demand is lowest. Prolonged periods of absolutely no wind on a large geographic scale does not happen. Most importantly, these baseload concerns would only come into play when we reach renewable energy penetration levels of 80 percent and beyond. We won’t be there for years. We do not need to subsidize a resource today to because of concerns that it might be needed in future decades. Our money should be invested today in sustainable energy, like wind and solar.
Summary
In summary, the Sierra Club strongly supports the Clean Energy DC Omnibus Act. We thank you, Councilmember Cheh, as well as Chairman Mendelson and the other councilmembers who co-introduced or co-sponsored this legislation. Your bold leadership is needed to solve the climate crisis.