California Community Ignites Choice Model and Stays in the Driver’s Seat — Episode 98 of Local Energy Rules Podcast

Podcast: Local Energy Rules
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 1761s
URL: https://media.blubrry.com/localenergyrules/content.blubrry.com/localenergyrules/2020-2-ler-98-east-bay-cca-jessica-tovar.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-03 04:06:50

we're not just reducing greenhouse gases and providing cheap energy that's bought off of the market, but that there's so many more opportunities to create this clean energy infrastructure and create jobs for the community, but also have other environmental justice and social benefits. Jessica Tovare is the coordinator of the East Bay Clean Power Alliance, one of the community powers behind the East Bay Community Energy Program, serving Oakland and surrounding communities in California. We talked about this community run multi-city energy purchasing group that's securing more renewable energy and bigger economic benefits for community members since it took over the electricity supply in 2019. I'm John Farrell, Director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Eliance and this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast sharing powerful stories about local renewable energy. Jessica, welcome to the program. Thank you. I wanted to start with what I thought was the most exciting element of East Bay Community Energy, which was this focus on local economic benefits and jobs. So I just want to read a little bit. There's this great quote from the program launch press release from Reverend Ken Chambers, is the pastor of West Side Missionary Baptist Church in Oakland. So I'm just going to read that here. We need to create opportunities for low-income people, traditionally shut out of the clean energy economy. We need to train and employ local people like the formerly incarcerated and people of color with family sustaining wage jobs so that we can afford to stay in the Bay Area. So can you tell me a little bit about what is in what's called the local development business plan that is part of this publicly run utility? Sure. So the local development business plan is pretty much a plan for how we can develop local clean energy in Alameda County, but it's not just limited to wind and solar, but it includes things such as energy efficiency, for example, and other benefits like creating opportunities for people to start share solar programs, for example, and really kind of opening the door and having a plan for the different options and opportunities that we could be actually having a more clean energy incentives in the East Bay. So, for example, creating community innovation fund to begin funding projects, such as a community short solar program or cooperative, other things that are in there is like energy efficiency kind of incentives like on bill repayment, for example, so that we can actually do energy efficiency retrofits to low-income people's homes, a lot of homes in the Bay Area are old and obviously contribute to a lot of energy waste. And so to begin to be able to upgrade our homes and actually reduce that waste and really acknowledge that it's expensive to do those things, but if we have this opportunity of pain for that kind of program through our savings, then that's been official to low-income folks in the East Bay Area. I guess there's a local development business plan is like a roadmap for how we can start over time, developing these clean energy projects in the East Bay, but at the same time we need off market purchase energy, which is part of our problem is that we're constantly being bombarded with market-based solutions which are not solutions, they're false solutions, right? And some sources of energy are things that we don't necessarily agree with, like large hydroelectric damming, which is bad for the environment, bad for the fish, for the water, certainly bad for the communities that live by hydroelectric dams. And also a lot of that energy is in other states, it's not shared at home. And so really the local development business plan, our point for advocating for that was really the creation of jobs and stimulating our local economy. And at the same time really providing benefits that benefit people who are otherwise shit out of the clean energy economy. Does that make sense? Absolutely, I wanted to note too that in my digging into this a little bit before we spoke, I was just amazed at the range of different tools. I mean, you mentioned them some already, like the on-built financing, tools, the innovation fund. But there was also like a feed-in terra focused on developing local energy sources, like on public buildings. There was community solar. There was what's called enhanced net metering, which is to say that there were envisioning payments for things like projects on low and moderate income property, for projects that in particular helped hire folks be more inclusive in the workforce. And there was also that a goal to have projects supported through the business plan pay prevailing wages. So it was clear that this isn't just a vision statement, but there's clearly a lot of very concrete tools as part of this business plan about how to do it. Sure. Yeah, one of the things, I mean, again, there's a lot of stuff in the local development business plan, but one of the things that's related to what you just mentioned is there's something called community benefit adders and so an adder would be to incentivize, you know, if there is family sustaining wage or union wage job creation, so there's incentive for that. If you're like doing a particular project in a low income community, there's a low income community benefit adder. There's also an adder for storage, for example. So there's all these different opportunities to incentivize. And you know, this is something that even though it's created for our community in the East Bay area, Alameda County, it's still also a useful tool for other communities to look at opportunities that go beyond installing wind and solar energy in your community, right? And as you mentioned, the speed and tariff are important because if we're incentivizing, you know, our municipal buildings to become solar, then we're able to provide solar energy into our East Bay community energy program that then local people could be buying that energy and you know, over time that stable energy, it's local clean energy, it's the way to stimulate our economy, create jobs and create that clean energy infrastructure that we want so badly to combat climate change and all these other injustices in our community. So if you could go into one more little piece of this, so there was this innovation fund and it was gonna be focusing on these projects with local economic benefits. You know, I've been doing some interesting interviews. I did with some folks in Portland who just passed a local funding initiative for kind of equitable solutions to climate change. I've worked with folks in Minneapolis they're putting together like $2 million a year for the city to help invest in climate solutions. Can you give us a sense of how much money is gonna be invested out of this community run utility into some of these local solutions, these incentives? Yeah, so that is actually like the question that we have right now. This program just launched in June for municipal and commercial customers and then it rolled out on November 1st for residential rate payers. So this program will be generating, I mean, in the first year, it's millions of dollars and then from the year thereafter will be billions of dollars. Initially, the board said that they would be allocating about $2 million to kick start the first year of local clean energy development. But right now it's a little bit uncertain and the uncertainty comes from recent attacks on community choice, specifically the PCIA which spent for power charge and different adjustment and it's pretty much ongoing C that's imposed by investor-owned utilities like PG&E on community choice programs and because very recently our California Public Utilities Commission approved what they call the alternate proposed decision which is pretty much an increase, a big increase on the PCIA charge. Now work faced with actually probably dealing with a good chunk of money going to the PCIA. So that means that there's less money for local development and for the program and we're kind of in the dark about where things are at right now and we probably won't have actual numbers until either late December or sometime in January. So initially it was projected that this first year would net $43 million but it sounds like it's going to be less than that as a result of this recent attack at the PCIA which is a real bummer because at the same time we're dealing with PG&E injustices in different ways, right? Like the recent wildfires in the Bay Area which destroyed a lot of people's homes and you know many people have died and to this date people are still doing recovery efforts to find remains and identify people that are still on the missing person's list. So I think we're at a time where now people are really seeing how much how much is that stake as a result of having this really corporatized infrastructure for electricity and people are really outraged. And so yeah the PCIA is just one of many many problems that come from PG&E. And just for people who unlike you and I aren't more into the weeds here about how community choice works so we'll talk a little bit more about the whole concept of community choice but this PCIA charge is basically some people have described it as an exit fee. So these communities are now going off to make their own energy plans like the East Bay community choice energy and the incumbent utility, the investor on utility says, but we made all these plans to sell you power for many years and we built things in anticipation. You guys would remain our customers and now they're saying, oh we need to recoup more of that money because you're leaving and the dispute is really about whether or not the utility can have expected to keep those customers or not given that the reason communities are doing us is that they were dissatisfied with what the utilities were up to. Right. Yeah and I think I initially was calling it an exit fee but now just really understanding, most exit fees are usually like a one time fee. Sure. The PCIA is a fee that never goes away and has recently been pretty much the CPC allowed it to be raised. So it's very problematic. I see it really as an attack on community choice. They're literally taking money from us and taking money away from our opportunities of actually creating more local clean energy benefits in our community. So yeah, it's really problematic. It is often complicated and the language that's used is really designed for people to understand what's going on but at the end of the day it's just PG&E taking more money from ratepayers. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, I ask Jessica about the community engagement process behind the business plan, how community choice differs from how most Americans receive their electricity and whether this community run model means more clean energy on the grid. Hey, thanks for listening to local energy rules. If you've made it this far, you're obviously a fan and we could use your help for just two minutes. As you've probably noticed, we don't have any corporate sponsors or ads for any of our podcasts. The reason is that our mission at ILSR is to reinvigorate democracy by decentralizing economic power. Instead, we rely on you, our listeners. Your donations not only underwrite this podcast, but also help us produce all of the research and resources that we make available on our website and all of the technical assistance we provide to grassroots organizations. Every year, ILSR's small staff helps hundreds of communities challenge monopoly power directly and rebuild their local economies. So please take a minute and go to ILSR.org and click on the donate button. And if making a donation isn't something you can do, please consider helping us in other ways. You can help other folks find this podcast by telling them about it or by giving it a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. The more ratings from listeners like you, the more folks can find this podcast and ILSR's other podcasts, community broadband bids, and building local power. Thanks again for listening. Now, back to the program. One of the things that I thought was so interesting about East Bay in particular is that the equitable focus on jobs and local economic benefits comes out of to some degree an inclusive process in creating the community choice agency. Could you tell me a little bit about kind of what community engagement efforts took place before you even had this agency created to focus on local energy and local jobs? Sure. Well, the local clean energy alliance has been engaged for years at advocating for community choice energy. And in its earlier time, there was an alliance called Clean Energy Jobs Oakland and the intent was to advocate for a community choice program in Oakland through East Bay mud and then there was some talk about pursuing it at the city level, but eventually the community advocates were able to get the attention of the county board of supervisors. And once the county board of supervisors for Alameda County showed interest and put money towards a feasibility study on community choice, then folks reorganized and said, oh, this is going to be bigger than we thought. And now we need a bigger alliance. And so the East Bay Clean Power Alliance was formed to be able to include organizations and advocates from different parts of the county. And so there was a lot of obvious lobby efforts with local elected officials to become interested in community choice. It ended up being that county board supervisor Scott Hagerty showed interest and became kind of the champion for community choice in Alameda County. And so there was a lot of efforts and really advocating for a community choice program, but all along the interest was not just in having a community choice program, but having a community choice program that offers community benefit and really invest in developing local clean energy over time so that we're not just buying energy off of the market, we're not just reducing greenhouse gases and providing cheap energy that's bought off of the market, but that there's so many more opportunities to create this clean energy infrastructure and create jobs for the community. But also have other environmental justice and social benefits like reducing our local pollution, creating a community that's obviously safer and healthier and certainly addressing the needs for having more safer jobs in the community, right? More dignified words, family sustaining paid wage, union wage jobs were some of the goals that we were very much interested in. And certainly one of the things that we really empathize was the only way to have a good community choice program would be to have community at the center of the governance of the program. So initially we were actually advocating for community to be part of the board of the program and it turns out that, according to the long California, the only people who could be board members of any state community energy program would have to be elected officials. So we said, well, we still make community to be part of this governance and so what was created was a community advisory committee made up of nine different stakeholders and the chair of the community advisory committee sits on the board with the rest of the elected to advocate and claim the board vote. So that's what we have right now. And that person is actually an Olivia Eldred, who's part of the California Nurses Association when she's been really incredible at really emphasizing the advocacy of the community advisory committee that's made up of nine different people with nine different angles, but ultimately everybody agrees that we need local clean energy development. So that's been working really well. The other thing we wanted to see is just more local community ownership and control. And so part of that is having the participation of the community, but also having incentives for creating energy co-operatives. For example, community shared solar and then other incentives are keeping the lung local and boosting our local economy. And then also recognizing that we could be producing so much more local green global better than PG&E and better than what the California state mandates, right? So I was interested just taking a quick step back. We dove right into the details about East Bay community energy in part because of my own excitement about this. But I want to just explain for people this basic concept of community choice energy. So East Bay is one of several communities like Sonoma County or Marin Clean Energy that are now doing this community choice model where they get to pick their own electricity sources. They get to be the buyer. They say, do we want local wind power? Do we want to buy from the big hydro? That kind of thing. What legal authority allows communities in California to do this? And how is that different from how say folks in Minnesota or Iowa or Florida are able to make their energy choices? Right. So I guess California really is the regulated state and so we are able to literally purchase energy off of the market. And that's pretty much what East Bay community energy is is buying energy off the market and selling it. That's to our local rate payers. But one of the things that we're really emphasizing is that we need to change that, right? We need to start producing our own energy and incentivizing people to be producing energy for our local program. So that's something that we really emphasize in creating our community choice program because we really want to see the infrastructure change to where we actually know that the energy is truly clean. And the only way to do that is to be producing it locally through wind and solar. And so that's something that we is very valuable to us and that's something we really want to see. East Bay community energy invested more over time with the money that they're generating from buying and selling energy that they're currently doing right now. We've talked a lot about the local jobs and economic development that have been a big priority. But I noticed there are like three choices that a customer has when they sign up. There's a default option which has some state cost savings but also more renewable energy than PG&E offers. I noticed there's also a carbon free and a 100% renewable energy option. Why are there multiple options? What's the goal of having those choices for customers? So initially East Bay community energy when it first launched for commercial and municipal, it offered what they call a bright choice default. And it pretty much has a 1.5% discount in comparison to PG&E's rates, right? Because the community choice program has said from the very beginning that we would have rates that are cheaper and competitive in compared to PG&E. So bright choice has that 1.5% discount. And then the second option is called brilliant 100. And this is where the advocates were not happy. Apparently the city officials that are part of this East Bay community energy program thought it would be a good idea to kind of address their climate action plans and reduce greenhouse gases through this community choice option. And so they created a quote unquote carbon free option that they call brilliant 100. And we really actually thought that because a lot of it is large hydroelectric. And that's something that we're, again, not supportive of. It's not something we want to see. It isn't. The BL endo when it comes to addressing climate change. And so we were really upset about that. But there is a demand from the community to want more renewables. And certainly, you know, off the bat, we're not producing local renewables, right? So folks really wanted some kind of renewable option. So a third option was created as a results of advocacy and it's called renewable 100. But again, you know, market purchase energy is not necessarily completely 100% clean energy. And so as a result of that, you know, we keep our eyes on the prize and really say, look, this local development is something we really need to implement in the community because until we're actually generating our own local clean energy, the stuff is not going to be truly clean. And so most community choice programs have options like that. And it has to do with demand. A lot of people do want to purchase more clean energy options. And they're willing to pay a little bit more. So my understanding is that the renewable 100 cost a few bucks more a month. And some people have signed up for that. But ultimately, what we like to say is people should have a choice and be able to choose whichever option they want to go with. We certainly support people to either sticking with the right choice at the 1.5% discount or if they want to do more, then they can opt up to the renewable 100. And that thing in between, I refer to like Bogus 100, don't even bother with it. Oh my gosh, that's great. So one of the questions that I think comes up for a lot of folks about this is there's been some things in the news now saying that as many as like two thirds of electric customers of the big three investor owned utilities in California may have some sort of community run option like East Bay within the next five years. Why do you think so many communities are doing this? Why are so many communities choosing to make their own energy choices rather than sticking with the incumbent utilities? You know, I think people know that climate change as a real issue, you know, in our community. And certainly we are seeing that in Northern California specifically with the recent wildfires. And so people do want to actually be part of the change, right? And they want to see cleaner options in our community. So I think that as people are becoming more educated and understanding and seeing that these corporations are not accountable to our communities, more people are advocating for community choice and for alternatives. And one of the things that we've been sharing with folks is if we had local clean energy or as they call it distributed energy resources, there wouldn't be a need for that transmission infrastructure that caused the fires in the first place. So we know that that's where we want to go. We want to create an infrastructure that's actually accountable to the people and not to shareholders. So there are a lot of other communities as Sierra Club actually just today announced their 100th city that has committed to 100% renewable energy. What advice would you give to the folks in those cities, whether it's activists or whether it's elected officials based on your experience helping launch East Bay community energy? Yeah, I think what I would say is, you know, if you're doing some kind of 100% clean energy commitment in your community, if it's not about actually producing local clean energy in the community, then you have a lot more work to do because I think some people don't understand or are getting too comfortable with market-based solutions and what we really need to do is really emphasize that we need to develop local clean energy in our communities because that's the only way we're going to have affordable clean energy and actually have resilience in our communities. So for communities that really want to go, that 100%, it starts with producing energy locally. One of the things that I think is really important to keep in mind is that we're making decisions, not that undercut other communities and that's something that I really, I see with a lot of these market-based fall solutions, is that it's often shifting burdens in the name of claiming 100% clean energy, which is really not that. So I think the best way to do that is to include communities that are often shut out of the clean energy economy and communities that are often bearing the burdens of being dumped on. And so in order for us to have a true 100% clean energy infrastructure, it has to include those communities that are often bearing the brunt of pollution. And so if we do it that way, that's the only way to do it right. Because climate change is really hurting a lot of low income communities. And it's just a matter of time. And we have to really look out for each other. And we need to stop making these market-based solutions and kind of wiping our hands and calling it a day. We really need to uplift all communities. Well, Jessica, thank you so much for talking to me. It's really exciting to see the work that you have both already accomplished in the East Bay and are going to continue accomplishing and inspiration to those of us who are trying to help communities do this kind of thing across the country. Thank you very much for your time. Yeah, for sure. Thank you, John Fobai. This is John Feral, Director of ILSR's Energy Democracy Initiative. I was speaking with Jessica Tovar of the East Bay Clean Power Alliance about her community's Community Choice Energy Program. You can read more about Community Choice Energy Programs in ILSR's February 2020 report on this subject. While you're at our website, you can also find more than 90 past episodes of the local energy rules podcast. Until next time, keep your energy local. And thanks for listening.