Why solar power could be the next victim of SF’s bloated bureaucracy

For the past three years, it has been effectively illegal to install a battery storage system on a one- or two-family home in San Francisco.

San Franciscans don't often agree on much. But it's safe to say you won't get much pushback if you suggest that we should be powering our city with 100% green energy.

What will it take to achieve that vision? More solar panels on our rooftops, of course. But also batteries. Lots of them.

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.

That's because in 2019 — without any public debate and without much of anyone outside the solar industry noticing — the city Fire Commission quietly updated the fire code to effectively ban battery systems of this size over unproven safety concerns. This ban would likely have become permanent this week if it weren't for Jeanine Cotter, CEO of San Francisco solar and battery installation company Luminalt Solar, who provided the only public comment in advance of a vote on the matter, begging commissioners to solicit more public opinion before making such an important decision.

"For the past three years, solar installers have had to stop designing based on the needs of our clients," Cotter says. "Instead, design and system sizing was driven by the need to be under the city's threshold."

San Francisco's guidelines are far more onerous than those recommended by the California Fire Marshal. And they kneecapped the city's residential battery market: "Outside of S.F., it's rare that we would ever deploy a system less than 20-kilowatt hours," Cotter says.

Thankfully, the San Francisco code change wasn't a total deal breaker in terms of blocking new solar power. That's because California's "net energy metering" program generously rewarded solar owners for sending excess power to the grid during the day, allowing them to use utility-generated power essentially for free at night. Batteries were a nice touch, but they weren't essential to make a system viable.

Those days, however, are over.

On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission adopted new rules governing how residential solar interacts with the state's power grid. Payments for sending excess power to the system will shrink by roughly 75%. Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar & Storage Association, estimates that this will cut the solar panel market by 40%-50% starting late next year.

All isn't lost, though. Instead of sending excess daytime power to the grid, would-be California solar owners can still pencil out their investment by installing batteries and using stored juice to get them through the night. If this happens en masse, it will take tremendous pressure off the state to meet peak energy demand from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. — when solar panels stop operating but energy use skyrockets as workers arrive home.

Making this plan a reality, however, "increases pressure for streamlined permitting of batteries," Del Chiaro says.

One of the best ways for San Francisco to help California meet its climate goals, then, is to do the one thing it routinely seems incapable of doing — removing red tape.

Instead, we’re heading in the opposite direction.

Aside from its fire code, San Francisco is only just now rolling out a state-mandated pilot permit streamlining program for large solar panel systems — but it won't include residential battery installation for one- and two-unit homes.

To its credit, the Fire Commission appears to have finally recognized some of the unintended consequences of its battery regulations. At a public meeting on Wednesday, Fire Marshal Ken Cofflin recommended that the commission defer any final decisions on battery safety codes until soliciting more community input. Reached for comment, San Francisco Fire Department Capt. Jonathan Baxter told me that "the department is working with the energy-storage systems industry on clarifying California safety requirements for energy-storage systems for single-family dwellings in the city and county of San Francisco."

Nick Josefowitz, chief policy officer with nonprofit think tank SPUR, was one of the first to hear Cotter's alarm about the fire code's impending impact on green energy. While he's relieved that the commission now appears willing to consider a more holistic view of battery installation, he sees the entire affair as emblematic of our city's broken system of government — one where the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing and doesn't really seem to care.

"San Francisco has all these governmental silos," he says. "Because the Fire Commission only focuses on fire safety, we get into these absurd situations where it proposes an effective ban on San Franciscans putting solar on their roof for a tiny theoretical reduction in fire risk. It's the same type of siloed thinking that creates these elaborate bureaucratic mazes that make it so difficult to build a new apartment building, open a new restaurant or for an existing restaurant to put seats on the streets without violating a half dozen conflicting codes."

Fixing this broader dysfunction won't be easy. Fire experts should clearly have say over fire safety. Just as, say, homelessness experts should have influence over homelessness policies. But allowing subject matter experts to craft policies in a vacuum is generating deeply flawed results.

With no top-down vision — and no top-down authority to enforce that vision — we’ll be left a status quo that clearly isn't working: piles upon piles of competing red tape that serve only to further bloat our ineffectual bureaucracy.

Matthew Fleischer is The San Francisco Chronicle's editorial page editor. Email: [email protected]