The Climate Center: Community Choice Energy for Stockton
The Climate Center is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that helped some of the earliest Community Choice agencies in California become operational. The Center works with business, government, youth and the broader community to advance practical, science-based solutions for significant greenhouse gas emission reductions at the local and statewide level.
Community Choice Aggregation, also known as Community Choice Energy or CCA, is a program enabled by state law that allows local governments to buy electricity at competitive rates on behalf of their residents and businesses, giving community members a choice in where their energy is sourced from. The investor-owned utility (in Stockton, that’s PG&E) still owns the transmission and distribution grid infrastructure – the poles and wires – and delivers the electricity procured by the CCA to its customers. Many of the 21 existing Community Choice agencies in California, governed by boards made up of local elected officials, have reinvested net revenue back into the community to help customers save on energy costs through a variety of programs.
It’s a model with a great track record across the state – the 21 CCAs in California have collectively invested in 6,000 megawatts of new renewable energy infrastructure, creating thousands of construction jobs in the process. They’re now serving over 10 million customers in more than 170 cities and 20 counties with cleaner energy at rates competitive with or lower than the existing utility in their service areas.
In 2016, The Climate Center reached out to the City of Stockton to share information about the program and offer assistance for the City as it evaluated starting a CCA. Three years later, in March of 2019, Stockton’s City Council voted 6-0, with one council member absent, to seek a grant offered by Sonoma Clean Power in order to fund a feasibility study on establishing a CCA for the City.
In September of 2020, Stockton council members voted unanimously to select a consultant to conduct the feasibility study, which is estimated to be completed by mid-January of 2021. The City Council is expected to make a decision on whether to move forward with a CCA launch as early as March of 2021.
Community Choice Energy advances environmental justice goals
What a locally based, not-for-profit CCA could look like in Stockton depends on the community stepping up and helping to shape the program, and there’s great potential to tackle environmental justice issues.
If the City Council decides to move forward with a CCA, millions of dollars in existing power generation revenues would be redirected to the City. Residents would have a new choice in their electricity service provider that would offer more transparency and influence over how their money is spent. Because they are public agencies, all decision-making meetings of CCAs are open to the public, enhancing energy democracy.
By aggregating the electrical load of cities and counties, CCAs have the ability to generate reserve funds that over time can be reinvested into the community through tailored programs to address specific needs. This has been the case for all 21 existing Community Choice agencies across the State of California. They’ve also been responsive in times of crisis – collectively, CCAs in California have donated millions of dollars toward COVID-19 relief efforts in their service areas.
A critical goal of the Center is to facilitate the level of stakeholder involvement necessary to ensure programs offered by the prospective agency would be equitable and have positive environmental and health impacts in Stockton’s most vulnerable communities. The Center views CCA as a vehicle to address specific environmental problems caused by systemic racism that have led to higher rates of exposure to air pollution, as well as a lack of access to energy storage opportunities in the era of mass power outages.
Formerly redlined communities in South Stockton endure some of the worst air quality in the state, and many struggle to pay their utility bills. A locally based not-for-profit electricity service provider could respond with incentive programs to help bring electric vehicles and charging infrastructure to low-income neighborhoods, as well as programs that incentivize local renewable energy projects that offer energy storage at little to no cost for low-income families and struggling small businesses. This could help on customer energy costs while also addressing the local air quality problem.
The City’s economy was hit hard by the 2008 recession and is now entering an unprecedented era of economic uncertainty with the COVID-19 crisis. A local CCA could coordinate both large-scale and small-scale local solar & storage projects, using vacant parcels, rooftops and parking lots with the potential of bringing jobs with labor-negotiated agreements to the area. It’s precisely the kind of economic innovation local governments in the Central Valley should be pursuing in their post-COVID roadmap.
Taking a page from East Bay Community Energy’s playbook, a Stockton-based CCA could also elevate the many nonprofit organizations in its service area by offering community innovation grants.
To learn more about The Climate Center, visit theclimatecenter.org, where you can learn about and endorse its statewide Climate-Safe California Campaign – a public pledge of support to commit to 80% below 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 2022 and net-negative emissions by 2030, accelerating existing state timelines.
Contact: Davis Harper, San Joaquin County community outreach specialist
Email: davis@theclimatecenter.org
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