Dwp

Los Angeles officials are speeding up plans to end the city's reliance on coal-powered energy, a move that could help Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's drive to burnish his legacy as an environmental leader. On Tuesday, commissioners at the Department of Water and Power moved forward with plans to dump the utility's interest in a coal-burning plant in Arizona and convert another one in Utah to natural gas. The plants provide nearly 40% of the city's energy. The changes, coupled with new commitments to renewable power, would make the city coal-free by 2025, utility officials said.

Still skeptical about solar power -- and especially about the wisdom of installing panels on your own rooftop? One can hardly be blamed, given horror stories about the difficulties in getting assistance from local utilities such as the L.A. Department of Water and Power. Yet more and more Californians are doing it anyway -- because it's paying off. The California Public Utilities Commission, which tracks solar installations statewide, on Thursday updated its ticker to show that California has now installed 1.5 gigawatts of rooftop solar, roughly equivalent to what would be generated by three medium-sized coal-fired power plants, according to clean energy expert Michelle Kinman at Environment California.

In the midst of a deluge of outside spending to boost the campaign of Los Angeles mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel, several rivals sharply questioned the city controller's ability to serve as an independent voice at City Hall at a time when the union representing the city's water and power workers has spent nearly a million dollars on her behalf. When the five major mayoral contenders met for their final debate on KCAL-TV Channel 9 Friday night, Greuel had benefited from at least $2.65 million in independent spending - a figure that dwarfed the outside aid for her rivals.

Outside campaign committees affiliated with two powerful city employee unions have spent more than $2.2 million on their bid to make Los Angeles City Controller Wendy Greuel the city's next mayor, according to Ethics Commission records posted Saturday. Working Californians, which is heavily backed by the Department of Water and Power union, reported spending an additional $770,000 on Greuel, much of it for campaign commercials. That brings the group's total to $1.65 million - money that has also gone toward billboards, pollsters and campaign consultants working on Greuel's behalf.

If you bumped into the guy, you probably wouldn't recognize him. Chances are, you've never even heard of him. But he's one of the most powerful players in Los Angeles politics, and he's swinging for the fences again, using his considerable clout to boost mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel and a slate of City Council candidates who just might be inclined to serve his interests if they're elected. Feared, coveted, respected, reviled - union boss Brian D'Arcy is all those things. But he likes to pull strings from behind the curtains and generally doesn't stoop low enough to speak to pesky media folks.

MAMMOTH - For a High Sierra stream whose name evokes mountain serenity, Pine Creek is nobody's idea of harmony with nature. On many mornings over the last decade, residents from the eastern Sierra enclave of 40 Acres cut a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power chain so they could open a gate and redirect the creek's water their way. On many afternoons, DWP workers closed the gate to send the water cascading into the Los Angeles Aqueduct system...

Re "DWP will buy excess solar energy," Jan. 12 Well it's about time. But why should the L.A. Department of Water and Power limit the amount of solar energy it will buy from customers through 2016 to 100 megawatts? Why not buy all the solar power available? Why can't residential customers sell all the power they generate? Residential customers' meters should simply run backward when they generate more power than they are using, essentially selling it back at the same rate they pay. We would end up with a broad-based system less reliant on large, centralized facilities with all the large liabilities (think San Onofre)

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers for the first time will be able to sell back excess solar energy created on rooftops and parking lots under a new program approved Friday by the city utility's board of commissioners. Described as the largest urban rooftop solar program of its kind in the nation, the so-called feed-in-tariff program would pay customers 17 cents per kilowatt hour for energy produced on their own equipment. The DWP has already accepted more than a dozen applicants and will be taking dozens more as it accepts contracts for up to 100 megawatts of solar power through 2016.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power repeatedly bypassed its competitive bidding process when it awarded $480,000 in contracts to lobby Sacramento decision-makers, according to a report issued by City Controller Wendy Greuel. DWP executives issued four no-bid contracts for state lobbying over the last two years, two of them to Mercury Public Affairs, a firm that includes former state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez as one of its partners. No public debate or vote by the utility's five-member Board of Commissioners was required under DWP contracting rules because each agreement was $150,000 or less.

Watching water stream under parked cars and through the gutters every time it rained made Alice Abler cringe. "What a terrible waste," Abler recalled thinking, pondering all the pollutants being swept down drains and into waterways. Her chance to act came with a new program that provides homeowners with free rain gardens installed in their yards. These shallow depressions surrounded by dirt berms and planted with climate-appropriate flowering plants are designed to hold rainwater from rooftops and paved surfaces and keep it from flowing to streets.