And congratulations go out to San Joaquin Valley Power Authority, which has reached a settlement agreement with PG&E over how the utility company has been behaving itself with regards to Community Choice Aggregation (CCA.) Best part: PG&E has to pay.
I’m giving a nod to the Associated Press here, which described SJVPA as a “public electricity cooperative,” because that’s essentially what a CCA is – a group of cities and counties getting together to buy or build their own power, and then run it through the grid that’s already established. Many CCAs say they can bring us cheaper, greener power. According to Tim Rosenfeld, who’s working on Marin’s CCA, “Public power can simply do things cheaper than investor-owned utilities.” For example, he says, the cost of financing a new power plant is about 5.5 percent for a municipality issuing a bond, and it’s more like 12 percent for a private company. “Apples to apples, building the same power plant we have a huge cost advantage,” said Rosenfeld.
As one might imagine, PG&E has some issues with CCAs because it means losing customers, and they’ve been lobbying hard against them throughout their service territory. They were so effective in San Joaquin that Fresno and Tulare backed out of the deal, meaning the SJVPA had less customers.
As we reported last year, SJVPA filed a complaint with the California Public Utilities Commission, which had already decided that it was a conflict of interest for utilities to expound on the pros and cons of CCAs, and if they were going to bitch about it they better do it with their shareholders’ piggy banks. SJVPA had evidence to the contrary and now they’ve settled with PG&E. The terms: PG&E agrees to make sure their investors pay for the marketing and lobbying and that said lobbying will be “truthful and non-misleading” – which makes my job more boring. Best part: they’re also paying up to $450K of SJVPA’s litigation fees.
The other interesting aspect of this is PG&E admits they changed horses midstream.