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.

When IRESN took up the topic of “integrated renewable energy systems” a decade ago, we imagined an expanding renewable integration challenge driven by community-scale and building-scale renewable energy systems as well by utility-scale power plants.  Now new technologies are changing what we imagined into a real and urgent challenge.  The figure summarizes vectors of energy sector change that are already in effect.  Collaborative planning will need to be local as well as regional.

There is anecdotal evidence of the need for collaboration. For proponents of local clean energy resources there is an even more basic question. Why energy resources that are both clean and local? The case is compelling.

Simply put, local¹ clean energy resources are happening, unevenly around the world, mostly, except for California, outside the US. They come in many sizes. So do utilities. So do cities. Maybe we need a common denominator if we are to connect dots more strategically and less anecdotally.

In an era of big data, the trade-off between local economic optimization and utility system-wide optimization can be readily informed by data-driven economic analysis. There is no motivation to do the analysis now because no adjustments are possible. But if local energy franchise agreements were mandated by the state to consider the possibility of city/utility collaboration on local economic and carbon footprint reduction goals, the parties would be motivated to engage.

In California, state regulators are starting to assert jurisdiction over Community Choice business planning, citing the need for consistency between the supply plans of all energy service providers. Does this solve a real, on-going problem?