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Istockphoto/aclio
Coincidence or is MCE's record being buried? *
CCA salespeople find themselves boxed into a corner when the poster child of their "success" is dogged by pesky stories that won't go away; it's a more serious problem when a sympathetic media buries or deletes those stories from public scrutiny.
Documents about MCE (Marin Clean Energy) Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) recently disappeared from links in Marin Post blogs.
Here is why I am suggesting that this may be occurring at the Marin Independent Journal.
When published, my Marin Post blogs contained links that directed readers to Marin Independent Journal (IJ) URLs to IJ Op/Eds that are now contradicted by California legislation, and by MCE's own financial record.
These Op/Eds are plain language problems for MCE marketers who sell the MCE model to municipalities that are considering joining or launching, or expanding their own CCA.
As of this morning, two key links in those Marin Post blogs no longer directed readers to the original IJ stories, but instead took readers to a different IJ story about radio stations (which had nothing to do with the original topic), even though nothing had been changed on the Marin Post’s pages.
This could only mean that the two original Marin IJ link URLs had been disconnected from the articles that were originally published by the IJ and are instead now being redirected to the same, new IJ page. The only way this could possibly happen is if the IJ URLs had somehow expired and a different document was added to replace both by the Marin IJ, or the Marin IJ purposely took down the original articles and redirected both URLs to the new article about radio stations.
Fortunately, the problem has been fixed by circumventing the IJ and posting the Op/Eds on a private server.
So, the question is, who would want those original articles that were critical of MCE to disappear?
- Kate Sears and CCA Salespeople
These are difficult times for CCA proponents as costs soar in Solana Beach and Los Angeles, and as cities push back on joining Riverside County's CCA, Western Community Energy. Economics of forming a CCA now threaten the CCA financial model. CCAs throughout California are damaged by stories that expose mistruths of CCA patriarch, MCE and how it gamed consumers.
The first Op/Ed, “Making informed energy choices,” by Supervisor Kate Sears who acts as MCE’s Chair, recommends that consumers use MCE’s annual mailers to make “informed” decisions about MCE's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to the incumbent utility.
However, the State of California is enacting legislation, AB1110, that halts CCAs from employing MCE-style labeling abuses where dirty energy is advertised as being clean. Those cards that Sears' Op/Ed references, mailed each year to households throughout MCE's territorry, are loaded with fiction and propaganda. They are not "full of valuable information."
MCE nevertheless claims that all should be forgiven because it is no longer gaming the public to the extent before. But its record speaks for itself. To date, MCE has emitted more than 1.5 billion pounds of GHG emissions that it has failed to disclose to consumers. This from an agency that arrived on the scene with claims of integrity and superiority compared to other energy providers.
- Consultants’ Incomes and $350 Million to Shell Oil
The second Op/Ed, “Marin benefits from clean energy,” by Shawn Marshall, who acted as MCE’s Vice Chair and now sells CCA services to municipalities throughout California, claims that MCE will “redirect” money from PG&E shareholders back to Marin residents.
However, Marshall’s column fails to identify that, at the time of her published Op/Ed, MCE was already involved in discussions with Royal Dutch Petroleum for a full-services energy contract where MCE would export more than $300 million from Marin to Shell (and the oil giant's shareholders) after expansion throughout Marin County. Through 2018, MCE has “redirected’ nearly $350 million to Shell after expansion into Napa County, Solano County, and Contra Costa County.
With the exception of reporting on Sears’ conflict of interest and her Royal Dutch Petroleum stock and other oil stock holdings, the Marin IJ has remained silent for 8 years about exposing or strongly criticizing MCE.
Paradox of "clean" energy
When Marin remained under a cloud of smoke from the Paradise wildfire, MCE was reporting that its energy from wood-burning power plants, known as biomass, was clean.
Again, the media, and particularly the Marin IJ, remains silent.
* Image at top is San Juan coal-fired power plant, supplier of imported energy into California that MCE reports is "clean."