When our South Bay Clean Power Working Group first started meeting in May of 2014 our first order of business was to study and analyze the goals and objectives of other Community Choice Power programs we admired to see what we could learn.

Having decided that we wanted our partnership to include organized labor, specifically the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 11 and the Los Angeles National Electrical Contractors Association, we soon found the commitments that bound us together on common ground:

Over the course of designing a CCA to achieve these goals, we were determined to answer the critical determining questions, including:

Asking the Toughest Questions

1. What is the optimal governance and organizational structure of the program, both for South Bay Clean Power and in terms of a county-wide approach to implementing Community Choice?
2. What practical capabilities will the CCA deploy, to align the program’s operational activities with its strategic goals?
3. In order to maximize local economic development and job creation in Los Angeles, how will this design ensure that the CCA can accelerate Distributed Energy Resources (energy efficiency, distributed renewable generation, energy storage, electric vehicles, and demand response technologies), both in its power planning and market operations and by leveraging the land use and transportation authorities of local governments?
4. Does the size of South Bay Clean Power (twice as large as any CCA under formation to date) impact how the CCA should approach power planning and energy risk management activities?
5. Does this scale, and the broader transition to Community Choice service throughout the Los Angeles region (and much of Southern California Edison’s territory) necessitate closer collaboration with the utility than smaller CCA’s to date have experienced? How does this impact the design of the CCA?
6. What is the most transparent and competitive process to use in contracting for all necessary services, which capabilities should transition to staff over time, and how can this process be accelerated?
7. Given the complex nature of launching a CCA, how should at-risk and performance-based contracting strategies be applied to incentivize expert contractors and enhance the overall quality of services provided to the CCA?
8. What is the best strategy to finance the CCA, while lowering local government upfront expenses and overall financial liability?
9. What are the best practices and lessons-learned from the existing CCAs and other public power initiatives in California that should be applied for South Bay Clean Power?
   To find out the answers to these critical questions… read our plan!