A ceremonial flipping of the switch on Thursday signaled the start of Central Coast Community Energy service for communities in northern Santa Barbara County and other areas.
Santa Maria Mayor Alice Patino and First District Supervisor Das Williams participated in the virtual ceremony to mark the addition of nine communities to the public agency known as 3CE.
“3CE will be offering a choice to our residents of how and where their energy is sourced, which is really important to us in government,” Patino said. “And as a region, we support the clean and renewable energy and certainly want energy resiliency.
“That’s one thing I’m sure we can all vote yes on — that we can have our lights on and not have to run for a candle and a match. I don’t know if any of us even have matches or candles in our home.”
Formerly Monterey Bay Community Power, 3CE is a public agency that offers an alternative to receiving electricity service solely from investor-owned utilities such as Pacific Gas & Electric or Southern California Edison.
Set to join this month are about 100,000 customers in Santa Maria, Solvang and unincorporated northern Santa Barbara County along with Arroyo Grande, Del Rey Oaks, Grover Beach, Guadalupe, Paso Robles and Pismo Beach.
Customers must opt out if they don’t want to be part of 3CE, but a representative said the enrollment rate continues to be about 98% in the nine enrolling communities, with information avaiilable by clicking here.
In October, Goleta, Carpinteria and unincorporated southern Santa Barbara County will join 3CE followed a few months later by Buellton. Enrollment for those communities will occur at that time.
Lompoc residents aren’t included since the city operates its own electrical utility.
Additionally, Santa Barbara chose to form Santa Barbara Clean Energy and join the California Choice Energy Authority.
Both PG&E and SCE still will transmit electricity and issue bills to customers of the new community choice aggregation groups. The two utilities also will be the contact during any outages.
“For more than 100 years, it has been PG&E’s privilege to provide our customers with clean, reliable and affordable energy, and we look forward to the opportunity to do so for many years to come. At the same time, we respect the energy choices that are available to our customers, and we will continue to cooperate with local governments as they consider pursuing, joining or developing a Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) program,” PG&E spokesman Mark Mesesan said.
“It’s important to remember that if a customer becomes a CCA customer, they are still a PG&E customer. We continue to deliver the electricity to CCA customers through our transmission and distribution system, and provide meter reading, billing, customer service and maintenance services.”
Williams, a member of the 3CE policy board and executive board, said he hopes the switch will bring living-wage jobs to the county.
“It has been my dream for some time that some of the prosperity that has taken place in clean energy jobs in the six counties of the Bay Area would start filtering southward. This has been a tremendous economic boon for those areas, but we need to find a vehicle to help bring it local. Central Coast Community Energy may be a big part of making that happen,” Williams said.
3CE has committed to 100% clean and renewable energy by 2030, 15 years ahead of the state’s goal, he said.
“This kind of investment could drive billions in reliable clean-energy technology and job creation, new renewable and energy storage projects here in California while achieving this goal in a cost competitive way while improving energy resilience and reliability in California,” Willams said.
He contended that since Santa Barbara County sits at the end of transmission lines for PG&E customers north of the tunnel and SCE customers south of the tunnel, the region may be more vulnerable to outages blamed on natural disasters.
“Local energy supplies also increases not just our ability to have cleaner energy but our ability to have more reliable energy sources,” Williams said.
He called climate change “an existential threat to our communities,” noting the ever-increasing amount of sundowner winds and fires associated with that weather phenomenon.
“We all have the moral duty to do something about it,” he said. “This effort will be the largest effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions locally, and it will have the added benefit of cleaning the air and water through electrification programs for residents and businesses in our community.”
Central Coast Community Energy is a public agency governed by board members who represent each community served by the agency. The organization 3CE serves more than 400,000 customers throughout the Central Coast, including agriculture, commercial and residential customers in communities located within Monterey, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz counties.
— Noozhawk North County editor Janene Scully can be reached at jscully@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.