Psychologists and abandonment and churn, oh my: Healing the planet is tougher than it sounded when you earned all that cheap applause by announcing it

DWP quietly scales back Villaraigosa's ambitious renewable energy goal - latimes.com

Leadership upheaval at the agency has resulted in shifting priorities. Under First Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner, the agency is revising plans to generate 40% of its power from renewable sources by 2020.
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That shift, initiated under the leadership of First Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner, is only the latest at an agency marked by upheaval as it pursues the mayor's lofty environmental agenda.

Since Villaraigosa took office in 2005, the nation's largest municipally owned utility has been in a state of churn. Multimillion-dollar initiatives have been announced, then abandoned. Executives have been installed, then jettisoned.
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And at one point last year, an organizational psychologist was brought in to sort out frictions between top utility managers.
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For Freeman, 84, it was his second stint heading DWP. Instead of the geothermal plan, he chose to pursue the development of a massive solar energy farm that, he predicted, would cover up to 80 square miles of dry lake bed in the Owens Valley.

Four months later, Freeman was pushed out as well, replaced by Beutner, a former investment banker who insisted on a more cautious approach to the solar initiative, including figuring out how much it would cost.

"Solar on that scale has never been done in this country. Never," said Beutner, who is Villaraigosa's top advisor on job creation. The DWP is now studying a solar project that is one-twentieth the size of Freeman's, officials said.