For three years, 21 municipal and county governments in Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties have been striving to promote renewable energy, as well as to give their residents a choice besides Pacific Gas & Electric.
They’ve been working on creating a Community Choice Energy program, which allows cities and counties to buy energy in bulk, often with a higher percentage of renewable energy than what PG&E offers, then sell the energy to residents. Profits from CCEs can then be invested in the development of local solar, wind and geothermal energy projects. Advocates of the tri-county CCE called Monterey Bay Community Power say this will also lead to local job creation.
But disagreements over governance of the burgeoning agency have slowed down the process. The city of Salinas and Monterey County decided not participate in the first year of energy purchases.
“We certainly believe in the concept, but the question is how to implement it. And how will the governance be structured?” Salinas City Manager Ray Corpuz says. “The first plan didn’t seem as fair and equitable to Salinas.”
The biggest consumers would have the same voting power on MBCP’s board as the smallest. That hasn’t sat well with Corpuz and others.
“There are still some key topics like governance and finance that need further consideration,” Dan Bertoldi, sustainability coordinator for Monterey County, writes by email.
Officials in partnering bodies had been set to decide whether Monterey Bay Community Power should take the next step and become a joint powers authority, which would give it the authority to buy energy.
The original deadline for voting on the JPA was Oct 31. Passage of the JPA would have local government pool resources and make purchases on the California renewable energy markets by April 2017. The program will need participants to collectively come up with more than $2 million to make the first round of purchases.
Many city councils in Santa Cruz County were expecting to authorize the JPA soon; in Monterey County, the cities of Monterey and Gonzales had been poised to approve full participation by the Oct. 31 deadline.
But at an Aug. 31 meeting in Marina, the MBCP’s 21 members decided to push the timeline back by a year. The decision came after Monterey County and the city of Salinas, the agency’s second – and third-largest consumers of energy behind Santa Cruz County, respectively, decided not to act on joining the JPA before the end of October.
“We’re now looking at a 2018 timeframe,” says Ted Terrasas, sustainability coordinator for the city of Monterey. “Monterey was looking to push hard, but we’re glad there’s extra time.”
The city of Monterey had originally planned to put the decision to join the JPA and start making renewable energy purchases on the agenda for a Sept. 20 City Council meeting. That action will now be shelved until 2017.
“The schedule was pushed by Santa Cruz County,” Corpuz says. “It’s always a possibility we could do a CCE by ourselves in Monterey County. We want to be careful what we get ourselves into.”