Clean Power Alliance Approves New Five-Year Clean Energy Programs Plan
The Plan Calls for $200 million in Local Renewable Investment and a Mix of Programs Promoting Electric Vehicles and Buildings, Demand Response, and Low-Income Community Solar
Clean Power Alliance (CPA) released its first Local Programs for a Clean Energy Future strategic plan after its board approved the plan today. Intended to guide the next five years of customer programs, the visionary plan was finalized in partnership with Arup and Cadmus after a year of stakeholder input and rigorous quantitative analysis. The proposed programs are intended to help save customers money while achieving community goals such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting climate resiliency, creating jobs, and serving CPA’s broad and diverse customer base.
The plan’s three core categories and related programs are:
Resiliency and Grid Management: Programs include: Clean Back Up Power for Essential Facilities, which will target installing back-up battery storage energy at essential facilities, such as fire stations and community centers, in each of CPA’s member agencies. Another program area will focus on customer-owned energy storage, giving financial incentives to customers to adjust their battery storage units’ energy during peak times; this program is currently being piloted via the CPA Power Response Program. The final program, Peak Management Pricing, launching this summer, provides bill credits for commercial and public agency customers to reduce their energy during peak times.
Electrification: Programs include: Public Electric Vehicle Charging, which will provide incentives for publicly accessible electric vehicle chargers. CPA has requested funding through the California Energy Commission to install new electric vehicle charger installations in Ventura County and will seek to expand the program to Los Angeles County in the future. Another strategy is Building Electrification Code Incentives, which will provide technical assistance and incentives for cities and counties to develop local building codes to encourage building electrification.
Local Energy Procurement: Programs include Community Solar, in which CPA would develop small-scale solar projects sited in Disadvantaged Communities (DAC) that provide bill discounts only to residents in that community and 100% Green Discount, which would use larger local solar projects to provide bill discounts but be open to low-income residents across the service territory. These programs would be deployed with funding from the California Public Utilities Commission.
In conjunction with approval of the Local Programs for a Clean Energy Future plan, CPA’s Board also set a goal to procure 175 MW of new renewable energy and energy storage projects in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties over the next five years. Meeting this goal would result in over $200 million in investment in our local economy.
“We are proud to set into motion innovative programs that will benefit every customer segment and meaningfully address the needs we heard from our communities, like resiliency, job creation, and clean air,” said Ted Bardacke, Executive Director, Clean Power Alliance.
“Arup North America applauds CPA’s leadership in taking a comprehensive approach to developing their local programs through an extensive and inclusive stakeholder engagement process. Their commitment to providing local community benefits in Ventura and Los Angeles Counties through accessible clean power and local programs is redefining the role that community choice aggregators can play in a green economy,” said Doug Nordham, Associate Principal and Project Director, Arup. “Arup is very proud to have supported CPA in this important milestone in their history.”
To ensure the plan reflects the needs of its diverse service territory, CPA spent months engaging with hundreds of customers and stakeholders in-person and online in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Advocates applauded the plan.
“Clean Power Alliance’s Local Programs Strategic Plan is a strong commitment to re-invest ratepayer dollars back into the local community to build new clean energy and create good paying jobs. California is on a path to get off of fossil fuels, and this is a great example for other Community Choice agencies on how to transition to a clean energy economy, and simultaneously foster local benefits in communities that need it the most,” said Luis Amezcua, Senior Campaign Representative, Sierra Club.
“CPA’s innovative Local Programs Strategic Plan makes it possible for us to go from merely being energy customers to becoming actively engaged in creating a new energy future, an energy future that is both renewable and resilient, where energy consumption goes hand in hand with distributed generation and storage,” said David Haake, Chair of Clean Power Alliance’s Community Advisory Committee.
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