Gerald Braun
Can San Diego Drive Electricity Prices Down ...

For-profit California electric utilities charge high prices and take minimal climate action. Three state-regulated for-profits, PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E, charge two to three times more for the electricity they deliver than large city regulated counterparts charge.  The giant for-profits aim for carbon neutrality in 2040 or 2045.  Large locally regulated electric utilities, SMUD and LADWP, aim for carbon neutrality by 2030 or 2035. 

Can San Diego Drive Electricity Prices Down While Neutralizing Carbon?
Energy Transition
Gerald Braun
Integrated Implementation of Community Solar ...

California and other states need a way to capture the environmental and economic benefits of community solar. Other states have found a way. California’s CCE industry should ask the California legislature to consider allowing California CCEs to use all or a portion of annual CPUC mandated PCIA charges to put local renewable projects on an equal economic footing with projects that require new high voltage transmission capacity to deliver electricity locally. This will increase CCE capacity and flexibility to address local energy resilience needs and to provide equitable access locally to the environmental and economic benefits of solar electricity.

Integrated Implementation of Community Solar and Community Choice
Analysis, News, Energy Transition
Gerald Braun
Can Colorado Take Community Choice Energy to ...

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.


Can Colorado Take Community Choice Energy to the Next Level?
Op-Ed, Analysis
Gerald Braun
Community Choice Electricity is a Better Way to ...

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.

Community Choice Electricity is a Better Way to Meet 21st Century Challenges
Blog, Analysis
Gerald Braun
California Energy Democracy's Last Stand

California has ramped up a seventy-six billion dollar investment in all types of solar generation capacity over the past decade. California’s retail solar industry enabled half of the total investment. Rooftop solar has been a bright spot for California’s renewable energy transition even as state regulators and California utilities continue to make other energy democracy enablers - community choice, community solar, community microgrids - hard or impossible to finance.

Regulators are now considering rule changes that impose punitive “grid access” fees on rooftop solar adoption, plus drastic reductions in compensation for electricity that feeds into the grid from rooftop solar arrays. The future of energy democracy in California hangs in the balance.


[1] The proposed CPUC decision is not accompanied by case studies indicating how it will work out for ratepayers.

California Energy Democracy's Last Stand

Presentations

Community Choice: Shaping Future Energy Ecosystems?

Community Choice: Shaping Future Energy Ecosystems?

(The following article is based on a presentation by Gerry Braun at the California CCA Forum in Los Angeles California on May 19, 2015)

Decentralized energy technologies will transform the electricity sector over the next couple decades.  Community choice aggregators (CCAs) can be leading agents of the transformation to the extent they push for, and secure, the freedom to transform themselves.  The extent to which they evolve to take a more and more integrative role may determine whether local clean energy resources are developed or held back. 

States lacks the capacity to account for decisive and locally specific factors affecting on-site and community based energy supply.  Meanwhile increasing numbers of local jurisdictions are aiming for sustainability and resiliency in their goals and plans.  In order to follow through they must have policies and programs in place that are responsive to on-the-ground energy trends and opportunities in their communities.