Voltage & Violets 

Imagine that five years from now when a light switch is flipped on in a Santa Rosa home, the electricity comes straight from solar panels mounted on the roof of a nearby school; and when it's too cloudy to generate solar juice, turbines roar at the geothermal plants near Geyserville; and when demand for wattage is highest, a power plant near the airport that runs on methane extracted from chicken poop kicks in; and during the winter's storms, wave-generated electricity streams across lines from Bodega—all low-carbon, with not a watt of nuclear power in sight.

Unfortunately, Sonoma County residents currently get the biggest chunk of their electricity from enormous natural gas plants located far away, and another major source of PG&E-supplied energy is the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. Effectively, PG&E monopolizes Sonoma County's energy market. Even taking into consideration existing solar, wind and hydroelectric power, our current power supply is environmentally ruinous and almost entirely generated outside the county. Unless things drastically change, this region's already bloated carbon footprint will only grow.

Now imagine not only an ecologically sensitive and economically robust alternative to business as usual, but add this kicker: all of it could be owned and democratically controlled by Sonoma County's residents and local investors, and built by local workers.

On March 22, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors may have set in motion just such a future by tasking the water agency to study the feasibility of developing a Community Choice Aggregation program. It marks the beginning of what could be a dramatically positive transformation of Sonoma County's entire economy, but the path forward is highly complex and full of potential pitfalls.

Local, clean energy is an obtainable goal thanks to a little-known piece of legislation, Assembly Bill 117, passed in 2002, which enables local governments to establish Community Choice Aggregation programs (CCA or "Community Choice"). "I like to call it Community Choice Energy," says Woody Hastings of the Climate Protection Campaign, a local nonprofit involved in shaping energy policy. "It's less jargony than 'Aggregation,' and captures what it's really about: locally developed clean energy."

The only precedent in California to what Sonoma County seeks exists in Marin County. And while dozens of other communities across the state have explored the possibility of creating their own CCA, and some have even taken steps to set one up, only San Francisco leads Sonoma County as of today.

"We're in the very beginning stages," says Cordel Stillman, capital projects manager for the Sonoma County Water Agency. Stillman's team is heading the feasibility study partly because the water agency is a utility in its own right, with several megawatts of solar and hydropower already online. "The purpose is to see if CCA is financially viable. It's strictly a numbers game. If it pencils out and we go with a CCA, then developing local sources will become a focus."

Parallel to Stillman's feasibility study is another water agency-led effort to explore potential renewable energy resources from Petaluma to Cloverdale. Called Renewable Energy for Secure Communities, or RESCO, the mission of the state energy commission, in its own words, is "to advance the implementation of a locally owned, cost-effective renewable portfolio." Already on the shelf is another blueprint for the development of local renewable energy, the Climate Action Plan, developed by the Climate Protection Campaign. Built into these studies, and the ethos of the officials and activists driving them, is the notion that renewable, low-carbon projects, located within the county, should be a core component from the very beginning.

In this respect, Sonoma County's reasons for pursuing a CCA are somewhat different from previous efforts. For example, in Ohio and Massachusetts, where two successful CCAs were founded in the early 2000s, green energy and localization were overshadowed by the primary drive to reduce ratepayer bills.

Just a year old, the Marin Energy Authority is the first operational CCA in California. It took a gargantuan effort. "When we got close to launch, PG&E did an anti-marketing campaign," recalls Jamie Tuckey, spokesperson for the Marin Energy Authority (MEA). "They were sending out direct mailers to everyone in Marin. It was a fear-based campaign where they were spreading rumors that households would go into debt by $5,000 if they joined our agency, saying that the lights would go out, that we weren't actually going to be supplying clean energy." After PG&E failed to scuttle the MEA, the utility attempted to prevent other communities from following Marin's lead by sponsoring Proposition 16, a ballot initiative that would have established virtually insurmountable obstacles to establishing CCAs.