L.A. County Board of Supervisors’ Motion SuperCharges Community Choice Power

Thanks to the diligence, perseverance and responsiveness of Los Angeles County Supervisors Don Knabe and Sheila Kuehl and their staffs, our comments and recommendations on the Los Angeles County Community Choice Energy Business Plan were considered and addressed by this new motion being introduced at the LA County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, September 27, 2016.

We are deeply appreciative that South Bay Clean Power’s formal response, comments and recommendations report was so thoroughly considered and addressed by this new motion by Supervisors Knabe and Kuehl along with the supporting responses to the LACCE Business Plan also submitted by the Sierra Club, by the International Brotherhood of Electricians Local 11 along with the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Electrical Contractors Association, by GRID Alternatives and by Food & Water Watch.

We are especially pleased that the next steps in LA County’s Community Choice program development will be under the able direction of the CEO of the County and will be assisted by the new LA County Chief Officer of Sustainability (still to be hired) and the County Counsel. Our only disappointment is with the continued involvement of ISD who we believe did an inadequate job on their last assignment on this project.

You’ll find the motion here on the September 27, 2016 agenda. Some of what the motion says, after the break –  Read More

L.A. County’s Internal Services Department Disappoints With Off-Target CCA “Business Plan” Delivery

The consultants hired by L.A. County’s Internal Service Department to produce a Los Angeles County Community Choice Energy Business Plan have done so and we found it thoroughly disappointing and a failure to deliver on the Board of Supervisors direction.

On this day we have delivered our formal response comments and recommendations to the proposed plan and as you will read we found much to be lacking in the work by the consultants who were hired without a request for proposals process and without having any viable experience in producing a CCA business plan before.

Here is an excerpt from our cover letter in our response document:

Unfortunately, this process has fallen short of the above objectives. In general, stakeholders and municipalities were kept at “arms-length”. This stands sharply in contrast to CCA launch efforts in other jurisdictions that have adhered to a much higher level of transparency and stakeholder engagement. As a result, the Business Plan:

• Disregarded substantial input from stakeholders on workforce development and green jobs, and only included a generic discussions of distributed resources (which is so high-level as to be without practical use);
• Proposed a governance structure wholly controlled by the County;
• Excluded cities from the financial forecasts and provided no practical guidance on how cities would join the LACCE.

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