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Paul Douglas Fenn is a public intellectual who is architect of several landmark state and local laws, authorities and programs to bring about energy democracy in the United States. A political philosopher, political campaigner, and author, Fenn is best known for creating Community Choice Aggregation and Solar Bonds, having drafted state and local policies and program designs to empower communities to take control of and localize their electricity and gas suppliers. Fenn’s efforts have brought about a significant, rapidly growing movement of thousands of activists and over 1300 municipalities in the U.S. to democratize and transform America’s electricity and energy finance industries.

Fenn has been quoted in and interviewed by hundreds of newspapers and media outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News and The Nation, and has numerous articles published in the U.S., Europe and South America.

While best known for his energy leadership, Fenn’s overarching focus is theoretical and historical, viewing democracy as a cultural phenomenon that has largely failed, and seeking to localize energy as a platform for re-enlightenment: a “positive dialectic.” Fenn has authored several books and dozens of essays and articles outlining a broad strategy of enlightenment based upon energy democracy, and has organized and led several major political campaigns, most notably the successful defeat of a $67M campaign by Pacific Gas & Electric to suppress Community Choice Aggregation in California, Proposition 16 (2010). Fenn also drafted and helped run San Francisco’s Solar Bonds campaign.

In 1997, Fenn formed a partnership with wife, veteran activist and Jerry Brown campaign manager Julia Peters, to form Local Power , and the two of them led a 20-year campaign to bring a “revolution in power” to the Bay Area, California and the U.S..

Community Choice Aggregation
Community Choice Aggregation, abbreviated CCA, is a system adopted into law in the United States states of Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Illinois, which allows cities, counties, and some special districts, to aggregate the buying power of individual customers within a defined jurisdiction in order to secure alternative energy supply contracts on a community-wide basis. Also known as Community Choice Energy (CCE), municipal aggregation, governmental aggregation, electricity aggregation, and community aggregation, CCAs now serve nearly 5% of Americans in over 1300 municipalities as of 2014.

Landmark Legislation
In Massachusetts, where the nation's first CCA bill (Senate 447, Montigny) was first drafted by Fenn in 1994 when he served as Massachusetts senate energy committee director filed in 1995 and enacted in 1997, the towns of Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard formed the Cape Light Compact and successfully lobbied for passage of the landmark CCA legislation. Two of the Cape Light Compact founders, Falmouth Selectman Matthew Patrick and Barnstable County Commissioner Rob O'Leary, were subsequently elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and Senate respectively. Between 1995 and 2000, Fenn formed the American Local Power Project and worked with Patrick to draft and pass similar laws in Ohio, New Jersey, and other states.

California
In the early days of the California energy crisis, Fenn formed Local Power Inc. and drafted new CCA legislation for California. In a campaign organized by Local Power, the City and County of San Francisco led Oakland, Berkeley, Marin County, and a group of Los Angeles municipalities in adopting resolutions asking for a state CCA law in response to the failure of California's deregulated electricity market. Fenn's bill was sponsored by then Assembly Member Carole Migden (D-San Francisco) in 2001, and the bill became law (AB117) in September, 2002.

CCA formation in California was delayed by initial political opposition by the state's investor-owned utilities. In June 2010, Pacific Gas & Electric sponsored a proposition, California Proposition 16 (2010), to make it more difficult for local entities to form either municipal utilities or CCAs by requiring a two-thirds vote of the electorate rather than a simple majority, for a public agency to enter the retail power business. Although PG&E contributed over $46 million in an effort to pass the initiative (Prop 16's opponents, led by Local Power Inc. and The Utility Reform Network, had access to less than $100,000), Proposition 16 was defeated.

According to the Clean Power Exchange, a project of the Center for Climate Protection that tracks Community Choice expansion in California, by the close of 2016 26 of the 58 counties in California either had operating CCAs, were on schedule to launch service, or were at some earlier stage of evaluation. Over 300 cities are similarly engaged in operational or emerging CCAs.

Solar Bonds
Starting in 2001, Fenn began to develop a new form of CCA focused upon physical localization, drafting the landmark Solar Bond authority for the City of San Francisco and campaigning with his wife, Julia Peters, for voter approval, which was approved in November 2001.

Solar bonds are municipal revenue bonds issued to provide low-interest financing for lower-cost accelerated development of local renewable energy technologies such as solar photovoltaics. San Francisco voters approved Fenn’s Solar Bond authority in November, 2001. Under "solar neighborhoods" approach, municipal governments would enter into multi-decade community-wide power purchase agreements with competitive suppliers and issue solar bonds, or "H Bonds", to finance the new supplier's rollout of local renewable energy and energy efficiency measures, offering municipal bond financing to residents and businesses, the debt for which would be repaid on monthly electric bills - an approach that has come to be called "on-bill financing."

Apart from creating a new generation of Community Choice Aggregations, San Francisco's solar bond authority spawned the subsequent appearance of both public and private financing of customer-owned solar and energy efficiency measures, including PACE financing, Climate Bonds, and the solar Power Purchase Agreement or Solar PPAs, transforming the photovoltaics industry in the United States.

The City of San Francisco enshrined solar bonds in its Community Choice Aggregation program in 2004 when it adopted an ordinance combining the City's authority to procure power for its residents and businesses with its authority to issue revenue bonds under the solar bond authority.

Development of CCA 2.0
In 2004, Fenn prepared a “CCA 2.0” Ordinance that shifted the paradigm of CCA from delivering retail energy discounts to “meeting or beating” the utility’s rates while increasing green power levels and building local Distributed Energy Resources. Fenn’s ordinance married the CCA authority to purchase power collectively with a municipal authority to finance Distributed Energy Resources on residential and commercial buildings. The CCA 2.0 ordinance drafted by Fenn (86-04, Tom Ammiano) defined a new kind of energy program to build 360 Megawatts (MW) of solar, green distributed generation, wind generation, and energy efficiency and demand response to serve San Francisco ratepayers using his Solar Bonds. Specifically, the ordinance combined the power purchasing authority of CCA with Fenn’s solar bond authority (San Francisco Charter Section 9.107.8, Ammiano), to change the mission and expand the power of CCA to allow the CCA to finance new green power infrastructure and offer financing to residents and businesses. After Fenn was appointed chair of San Francisco’s Citizen’s Advisory CCA Task Force in 2006, the City adopted a detailed CCA Plan also written primarily by Fenn (Ordinance 447-07, Ammiano and Mirkarimi, 2007), which established a 51% Renewable Portfolio Standard for the City’s CCA program. Over the following decade, Sonoma and San Francisco worked with Fenn's company, Local Power Inc. on program designs focused on achieving energy localization through renewables and energy efficiency.

After Fenn drafted and San Francisco Supervisors approved the ordinance (86-04, 2004) for sponsoring supervisor Tom Ammiano, who had also sponsored placing the solar bond authority on the 2001 ballot, Fenn went on to draft a 2013 business model to implement the $1 billion project. . As Fenn’s program approached finalization, proponents encountered increasing resistance from business interests

Local Power also contributed substantially to Sonoma county's Sonoma Clean Power program which has a similar structure.

Throughout the decade-long effort to define a new business model for energy, Fenn’s work encountered significant opposition from local bureaucrats, who favored a more conservative approach. In San Francisco, struggles with San Francisco Public Utilities Commission staff resulted in years of delays before the program was ultimately implemented. In Marin County, where Fenn had been a co-founder of Marin Clean Energy, Local Power struggled to convince the management of California’s first CCA to stay true to a vision of energy localization, and was disappointed with Marin’s decision to focus on Renewable Energy Credits for the first half-decade of its service. However, MCE has since changed course and is now focused on a localization strategy.

CCA 2.0 in New York
Starting in 2013, Fenn worked with local group Citizens for Local Power to draft CCA legislation for the State of New York followed by Governor Andrew Cuomo's order directing the PSC to implement CCA directly under its own authority in December 2014. , after which the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) identified CCA as consistent with the stated goals of the regulatory reform “Reforming the Energy Vision” (REV), stating that local energy planning gives municipalities better opportunities to realize the benefits of distributed energy resources enabled by REV. . Since 2016, Fenn has worked with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to assist its efforts to augment development of DER under a “CCA 2.0” business model, and became a technical advisor to the New York State Clean Energy Advisory Council Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) Work Group.

Books

 * The Localist Platform (Forthcoming, 2017).


 * Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction (With Eduardo Subirats and Christopher Britt Arrendondo- Forthcoming, 2017).


 * Spectacle of Enlightenment (with Eduardo Subirats and Christopher Britt – Accountable Publishing, 2016).


 * This is Not a Theory (Accountable Publishing, 2010).


 * The Whip and the Teacup: Plays in Cultivated Violence (Bates College, 1988).

Articles

 * "Technical Enlightenment" (El Viejo Topo, Spain, 2016).


 * "The Vanity of Resistance" (Crisis y Crítica, Colombia, 2016).


 * "Community Choice Empowers Electricity Customers in New York and Beyond" (Environmental Defense Fund Blog, New York, 2015).


 * "The Municipalist Intellectual" (Almanaque Literario, Mexico, 2015).


 * "Imperial Populism, Failed Resistance & Positive Dialectics" (Crisis y Crítica, Colombia, 2013).


 * "Positive Dialectics and Localization" (El Viejo Topo, Spain, 2011).


 * "LNG: A Dead Man Walking?" (Natural Gas & Electricity, U.S., 2009).


 * "Carbon-Reduction Tax Dollars Better Spent on Demand Reduction, Not Mega-grid Schemes (Natural Gas & Electricity, U.S., 2009).


 * "Obama’s Smart Grid Legislation (Natural Gas & Electricity, 2009).


 * "Smart Grid Opens New Doors but Needs Correct Environment" (Natural Gas & Electricity, 2008).


 * "Community Choice Aggregation is a New Solution for Energy Markets (Natural Gas & Electricity, 2008).


 * "360: San Francisco's Billion Dollar Public Works Project" (American Institute of Architects, 2006).


 * "The Link Between America's Raging Health and Energy Crises" (Red Flags, 2006).


 * "Nuclear Power Turns 'Green' in a Deregulated Market" (The Workbook, 1999).


 * "Oakland’s Charter" (Oaklanders First, May, 1999).


 * "Party Has Forgotten Its Populist Roots" (Ghost Writer for Jerry Brown – San Francisco Chronicle, March, 1998).


 * "The Law" and Other Essays, Why Are We Losing Our Freedom? (Accountable Publishign, 1996).


 * Deep Style Magazine (Editor, 1995).


 * America in Decline (Editor, 1993).


 * "Positive Dialectics: Otto Bauer and the Nationality Question" (University of Chicago, 1991).


 * "The Christian is Gaunt in the Light: Narrative Formats of Social Theorizing" (New School for Social Research, 1990).

Radio
Since 2010, Fenn has co-hosted a bi-weekly FM radio show (Fridays at 1pm PST) with Charles R. Schultz, The Local Organon, at KWMR in West Marin, which focuses on politics and culture from a localist perspective, featuring original audio essays by a dozen authors & guest interviews such as Helen Caldicott, Leo Panitch, William K. Black, Melvin Goodman & Arlie Hochschild, on energy, climate change, imperialism, localism, nuclear proliferation, GMOs, decadence, the Left, oligarchy, & globalization, and related issues.