South Bay Clean Power

South Bay Clean Power Presents JPA Agreement to Cities

One of the key steps in forming a Community Choice Aggregation program is the Joint Powers Authority (JPA) agreement that participating cities and counties sign to formalize their nonprofit partnership.

On December 15 in the presentation theatre of the South Bay Cities Council of Governments in Torrance, we held our 2nd meeting of the SBCP Advisory Committee with members attending both in person and on-line to review the details of the draft JPA our Working Group had submitted to cities to form a South Bay Clean Power CCA

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The SBCP JPA draft was based on review of other CCAs Joint Power Authority agreements and selected the best elements for the South Bay Clean Power effort.

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LA County Presses Reset Button on CCA Effort

On Wednesday, December 7 at the Clean Tech Incubator in Downtown Los Angeles, L.A. County’s new Chief Sustainability Officer, Gary Gero, held the first public workshop of the County’s newly reconstituted Community Choice Aggregation effort. The County is essentially starting over and beginning with the basics.

A far more inclusive and interactive approach and execution was evident at this meeting – in marked contrast to the previous year-long CCA task force meetings in which there were no tasks, no committees and no action items for participants to engage in.  In this first meeting under Gero’s direction, a professional facilitator was employed and breakout sessions allowed for full participation by all attending.

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Unanimous Vote YES by LA County Board of Supervisors for CCA Next Steps Motion

We’ll have the complete story for you tomorrow including video of the outstanding and supportive comments made by Supervisors Don Knabe, Sheila Kuehl, Mark Ridley-Thomas and Hilda Solis.

We’ll also have the public remarks made by the Sierra Club, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 11, Food and Water Watch and others.

We are exceptionally grateful to our CCA Champions Knabe and Kuehl and to their all star staffs!

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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