Lawmakers: Look closely at our energy landscape

The clean energy revolution is here, now, and California is a trailblazer of its success. Solar and wind power, electric vehicle use, rooftop photovoltaics, and community choice aggregation are all on the rise in California.

The traditional centralized, fossil-fuel power plants are now competing with renewable and distributed energy sources, forcing the industry and regulators to adapt, and upending close to one hundred years of power generation and distribution.

The critical question now is what impact this will have on the grid that keeps power flowing to every corner of our state, and how policymakers can balance the multitude of details required to maximize the promise of these technologies to the benefit of all stakeholders.

Next 10’s report The Growth of Community Choice Aggregation: Impacts to California’s Grid, authored by a team of researchers at UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation, finds that if current growth trends continue, CCAs may serve a majority of California’s power consumers within the next 10 years, transforming California’s retail electricity sector.

While the study finds that CCAs have had a negligible impact on the grid to date, in the long-term, these CCAs can help minimize some grid issues.

Thanks to their public and local nature, they may be able to help reduce or shift energy consumption. By focusing on locally generated energy and demand-side measures, they will relieve stress on the grid. They are also offering consumers electricity with higher renewable energy content, compared to investor-owned utilities (IOUs).

Read more here: Lawmakers: Look closely at our energy landscape