There is a New Utility in Town - Silicon Valley Clean Energy

Copyright 2018 - The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon. All Rights Reserved. There is a new type of utility in town. Utilities generate power, purchase power from merchant power producers, and they distribute electricity to businesses and homes. Now there use to be only two types of utilities. One is called an investor owned which is the dominant form. It is owned by stockholders, and PG&E is a good example of that. The other kind of utility is a municipal utility. These are owned by cities and communities like Silicon Valley Power in the city of Santa Clara, and the Palo Alto Utility. With investor owned utilities (or IOUs) they try to maximize their investors’ profits. They are working for their stockholders. Their executives get bonuses when they hit their profit goals. They don’t provide inexpensive electricity and they are opposed to customers installing their own solar power and batteries because that encroaches on their revenue and profits. They spend millions of dollars on electric rate cases to maximize their profits, often at the expense of solar and battery storage customers. They are trying to do away with net metering, shifting peak rate times to the evening when the sun is not shining, and other things to maintain their profits. And I’ve been battling with utilities over rooftop solar for over twenty years. Now there is a new kind of hybrid utility called a community choice aggregation utility or CCA. CCAs buy power from large solar and wind farms as well as other power plants in the evening and distribute this power over the existing utility lines. So the existing utility does the billing and maintains the power lines, and since the CCAs are not trying to maximize profits, they can offer slightly cheaper electricity, and they have a much better deal for solar customers. Silicon Valley Clean Energy is the new CCA serving most of the Silicon Valley area and my guest this week is John Supp, Manager of Accounts Services at Silicon Valley Energy. John has a great background that includes behind the meter solar and distributed energy with clean energy utilities. So listen up to this week’s Energy Show to learn more about how CCAs like Silicon Valley Clean Energy are changing the way you buy electricity and helping us move to cleaner, lower cost renewable power.