For-profit California electric utilities charge high prices and take minimal climate action. Three state-regulated for-profits, PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E, charge two to three times more for the electricity they deliver than large city regulated counterparts charge. The giant for-profits aim for carbon neutrality in 2040 or 2045. Large locally regulated electric utilities, SMUD and LADWP, aim for carbon neutrality by 2030 or 2035.
California and other states need a way to capture the environmental and economic benefits of community solar. Other states have found a way. California’s CCE industry should ask the California legislature to consider allowing California CCEs to use all or a portion of annual CPUC mandated PCIA charges to put local renewable projects on an equal economic footing with projects that require new high voltage transmission capacity to deliver electricity locally. This will increase CCE capacity and flexibility to address local energy resilience needs and to provide equitable access locally to the environmental and economic benefits of solar electricity.
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has been tasked by the Colorado legislature to recommend whether and how to implement Community Choice Energy (CCE).
California’s CCE experience has been rich in diversity and local/state decarbonization impact. California CCE generation portfolios are on track to become fully decarbonized in the next few years. The California CCE model was conceived and adopted two decades ago. It exploits economic options available at the time but allows little flexibility to capture economic, environmental and energy resilience benefits of local supply and infrastructure investment.
Nevertheless, Colorado and other states can adapt and expand California’s CCE model to facilitate 21st century energy policy implementation. Specific adaptations can result in greater reliance on local renewable electricity sources and electrification of local transportation. By adopting them Colorado can take CCE to the next level of public benefits and impact.
If Colorado adopts community choice, it should set a high bar for future local energy collaboration and fair cost responsibilities. This will give Colorado communities a much better way to meet energy and climate challenges of the 21st century.
California has ramped up a seventy-six billion dollar investment in all types of solar generation capacity over the past decade. California’s retail solar industry enabled half of the total investment. Rooftop solar has been a bright spot for California’s renewable energy transition even as state regulators and California utilities continue to make other energy democracy enablers - community choice, community solar, community microgrids - hard or impossible to finance.
Regulators are now considering rule changes that impose punitive “grid access” fees on rooftop solar adoption, plus drastic reductions in compensation for electricity that feeds into the grid from rooftop solar arrays. The future of energy democracy in California hangs in the balance.
[1] The proposed CPUC decision is not accompanied by case studies indicating how it will work out for ratepayers.
In California, as much money is being invested in locally beneficial solar projects as in large solar projects that export electricity to other areas. Balanced investment in local and centralized projects doubles the rate of GHG emissions reduction by doubling the rate of renewable energy deployment.
Local renewable energy production is becoming the foundation for local energy resilience.
Can expansion of renewable energy production in the U.S. be accelerated if “wires charges” for community renewable projects are adjusted to account for local energy resilience benefits and actual project-specific transmission grid usage? How much costly and environmentally controversial expansion of regional transmission systems can be avoided by expanding local renewable energy production for local use?
