GLORIA OPTS FOR RENEWABLE OPTION FOR CITY FACILITIES

Mayor chooses program offered by San Diego Community Power

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria announced Tuesday that the energy accounts from city facilities served by a new community choice energy program will enroll in a greener but slightly more expensive plan that uses power from 100 percent renewable energy sources.

San Diego Community Power, a community choice aggregation, or

CCA, energy program encompassing five cities in the region officially began operations Monday. Like the 23 other CCAs that have launched in California in the past decade, San Diego Community Power buys power for the jurisdictions it serves.

San Diego Community Power, or SDCP for short, offers two rates plans — PowerOn, which delivers power from 50 percent renewable sources and 5 percent from sources that are free of greenhouse gas emissions; and Power100, which promises to deliver power from 100 percent renewable and carbon-free

sources.

PowerOn offers rates estimated to be about 2 percent to 3 percent lower than San Diego Gas & Electric while Power100’s rates are about equal to SDG&E.

Saying the city is “leading by example,” Gloria said all the city’s energy accounts will sign up for SDCP’s 100 percent renewable program.

“Our landmark Climate Action Plan set one of the most aggressive renewable energy goals in the nation and today, we’re one step closer to achieving it,” Gloria said in a statement. Under its climate initiative, the city is legally mandated to go to 100 percent renewables and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2035.

SDCP officially began operations Monday, serving about 700 municipal accounts in the cities of San Diego, Chula Vista, La Mesa, Encinitas and Imperial Beach. In June, it will add about 72,000 commercial and industrial accounts and then in January 2022 it is scheduled to phase in the vast majority of its accounts — 695,000 residential customers.

All told, SDCP expects to have a customer base of about 767,700, which will make it the second-largest CCA in the state.

Under the CCA model, community choice energy programs are designed to increase the purchase of cleaner energy sources, such as wind, solar and battery storage.

Wind and solar are intermittent energy sources — that is, solar does not generate electricity when the sun is not shining and wind production lags when the breezes don’t blow. And while energy storage is growing, it still make up a relatively small percentage of the state’s power mix.

So how can an operation — be it a CCA, a utility or a business — validate that a given program is comprised of 100 percent renewables?

Since the electric grid does not distinguish where the electrons from given power sources come from, the entities need to show on their books that they have purchased enough electricity from renewable energy sources to cover their power needs.

“It’s a paper transaction,” SDCP interim CEO Bill Carnahan said, “but we have to prove it, we have to show it.”