Project
Failure to Act: Electric Infrastructure Investment Gaps in a Rapidly Changing Environment, 2020
Year
Country
US
Project
Community Choice Energy Programs
The Community Choice Energy “CCE” (or Aggregation, CCA) is a hybrid energy supply model that enables local governments to pool (or aggregate) their electricity load in order to purchase and/or develop power on behalf of their residents, businesses, and municipal accounts. It is considered to offer local choice & control, cleaner more efficient supply portfolios, and perhaps more competitive electric rates. It is an energy supply model that works in partnership with the region’s existing utility, which continues to deliver power, maintain the grid, provide consolidated billing, and other customer services.EDR Group (now EBP) contributed to a technical and feasibility study for a West Coast county who was considering forming a program.
Besides the lower GHG footprint achieved by choosing to purchase energy supply from existing renewable systems connecting into the local grid, the CCE may also use some of the revenue it raises to site and build appropriate local renewable generating projects. The aspiration is ‘renewable investment as an economic development catalyst” — namely job creation. EBP provided a larger energy consulting team, working on behalf of a West Coast county, a macroeconomic impact and job impact assessment related to scenarios of varying levels of renewable supplies within a lower GHG energy portfolio. These scenarios examined the implications on the cost of energy, including the size of the existing utility’s power charge indifference adjustment,” as more of the renewable generating capacity would be proposed as “locally sited.” The jobs assessment took into account the displacement effects of capital as well as operations and maintenance deferrals by the serving utility as the county’s electric load was fulfilled by substitute (cleaner) resources and perhaps defrayed by additional energy-efficiency promotion by the CCE.
