By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
“There are several contributing factors, including the increase of the Renewable Portfolio Standard to 50 percent by 2030, doubling of energy efficiency goals under SB 350, the challenge of managing overgeneration and intermittency conditions under a resource portfolio increasingly influenced by solar and wind production, the growth rate of distributed energy resources, and the potential increases in the departure of PG&E's retail load customers to Community Choice Aggregation.”
- PG&E press release, June 21, 2016
By random chance, two consecutive NPR headlines on the KCBX website on Jun. 21 – reporting the day's news and the news from the day before -- were this:
Plan to close Diablo Canyon: PG&E announces phasing out nuclear power in California by 2025
and
Community Choice Energy plan gets potential funding in Santa Barbara County
The juxtaposition of these news items is equivalent to an image of a wave of the future cresting just as a wave of the past recedes. The reason why can be found in the most interesting line in the above-cited PG&E press release listing the reasons for Diablo’s pending closure, ending with this one: the potential increases in the departure of PG&E's retail load customers to Community Choice Aggregation.
Community Choice Aggregation – aka Community Choice Energy, aka locally generated renewable power – is PG&E’s longtime upstart competitor, which, over the last decade and a half, has resisted every one of the giant utility’s multi-million dollar attempts to kill it. Instead of the utility model of coal, gas or nuclear-generated electricity sent over long-distance transmission lines from a power plant to a substation, Community Choice ultimately means renewable energy and local energy generation, a model that has now overtaken nuclear power in terms of megawatt-hour generation globally. A Community Choice program can replace Diablo Canyon’s contributions to both the energy grid and the economy, and do so more sustainably, safely, and with genuinely clean power.
It’s good that our elected officials are now saying – as the Santa Lucia Chapter has been saying for years – that we must prepare for a post-Diablo economy, but their follow-up tends to consist of vague, well-worn economic nostrums that don’t sound very prepared. We’re happy to remind any forgetful County Supervisors that, in fact, they began to plan for that future nine months ago, not vaguely, and in exactly the way the Sierra Club recommended three years ago when the Santa Lucia Chapter’s Executive Committee pointed out in The Tribune that “There is an answer to the Diablo question” and it is Community Choice Energy.
In a Viewpoint printed in the December 3, 2008, edition of The Tribune, Santa Lucia Chapter Chair Karen Merriam wrote that the state’s Community Choice law in combination with California’s other recent clean energy bills has "the potential to create a huge new market for renewable energy.”
Eight years later, San Diego’s fledgling Community Choice program has planted the flag for shifting to 100 percent renewable energy (read all about the precedent-setting plan in the May/June issue of Sierra), and twenty California counties are in some phase of evaluation of a Community Choice program. Less than a year after starting their Community Choice Energy program, Marin Clean Energy customers were already reducing their annual greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 70,000 tons, the equivalent of removing nearly 12,000 cars from the road each year, and 27% of all their energy was coming from renewable resources. Sonoma Clean Power saved its residents and businesses $13.6 million in its first year of operation. Programs in Alameda, Humboldt and Santa Clara are scheduled launch in early 2017.
On its website, SLO Clean Energy notes that Community Choice Energy means “rate Savings, local buildout through energy efficiency, feed-in-tariffs, and municipal projects would all provide a local return on investment,” all of which adds up to “careers that are fulfilling, financially rewarding, can sustain families, and build a stronger more prosperous community.”
Santa Barbara County Energy Choice puts it simply: “CCE creates a competitive market place, spurring innovation that benefits energy customers.”
So no surprise that SLO Clean Energy editorialized in 2013 that a “Post-Diablo future need not be grim.” The ability of Community Choice to “provide long-term electrical rate stability, local reinvestment of electricity revenues, local renewable energy and local jobs” meant it should be incorporated into the Board of Supervisors’ decision to “start planning for the day when, sooner or later, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant will no longer be with us.”
Last October, thanks to a superb job of community organizing by SLO Clean Energy, our County Supervisors voted to contribute $50,000 to a feasibility study for a regional Community Choice Energy program, along with Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties. In February, every city in SLO County opted in to the feasibility study.
Those pivotal moments were built on the fact that in 2010 –- thanks to the Sierra Club -- the update of the County’s General Plan included a detailed strategy to “evaluate CCA for the ability to develop local energy resources,” and the County’s adoption of a Climate Action Plan a year later that -– thanks to the Sierra Club -- included the provision that the County “will consider developing a community choice aggregation program with the incorporated cities of San Luis Obispo County to procure up to 50 percent of the region’s electricity use from renewable sources by 2020.”
The Tri-County Community Choice Energy Feasibility Study is expected to be completed and ready for Board review by late summer. The Supervisors should now feel a compelling new sense of urgency to continue down the path to Community Choice Energy, which is surest way both to meet the County’s “50% renewable by 2020” goal and build the clean energy economy that we will need to have in place and thriving when Diablo goes away.