What is Community Choice Aggregation?
Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) is a policy tool that allows local communities to combine its purchasing power into a single block and buy electricity from competitive markets to best meet their environmental and financial goals. Throughout America, 1.5 million customers are already receiving their energy through CCAs. CCAs breaks the monopolistic model that dominates most cities' electricity contracts and opens up opportunities for companies called energy service providers (ESP) who can provide more renewable energy, stronger energy efficiency programs, and/or greater benefit to the local economy.
CCA can be structured in a variety of ways to meet the interests of each community. In San Francisco, CCA is designed to:
- Use 51% local and/or renewable energy, tripling San Francisco's green energy to 360 megawatts by 2017!
- Place the risks of the energy market on the new Energy Service Provider, as opposed to the City, County, and its ratepayers!
- Establishes stable and reasonable rates, unlike PG&E's rates that spike along with the global gas markets!
- Meet or beat PG&E's rates!
PG&E is making large-scale investments in nuclear and liquid natural gas (LNG), and is not making many investments in building solar or wind generation capacity. Its stated plan is to meet the bare minimum of state mandated renewable energy laws by purchasing it from other green energy companies. Should our San Francisco community continue to support PG&E - which is single handedly responsible for a quarter of the greenhouse gas pollution in San Francisco - or move to a policy that encourages green energy companies to thrive?