The Road to Renewables: Climate Week from San Diego to New York
By Matthew Batista
I. Community Choice Aggregation Comes to San Diego
What is Community Choice Aggregation? Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) are programs that allow individual or collective municipal governments to purchase energy on behalf of their residents. Local governments assume the procurement role of investor owned utilities (IOU), like SDG&E locally, while continuing to rely on IOU’s existing infrastructure to distribute the energy. The two main advantages to these CCA programs are: (1) the ability to choose the energy source (generally from renewable sources like solar and wind) and (2) aggregating demand in order to negotiate better purchase prices, and thus a lower cost to the consumer.
A Growing Energy Procurement Strategy. The ability to form and operate CCA’s must be enacted within state legislatures. To date, eight states: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia have enacted CCA legislation. Additionally, five other states, Connecticut, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Oregon, have introduced such legislation.
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