Opinion: Government-Controlled Energy Won't Get Cities to 100 Percent Renewable

Jerry Sanders, former mayor of San Diego and current president and CEO of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, writes an opinion piece for the Sacramento Bee that excoriates energy programs known as Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), or Community Choice Energy, in the state of California.  

These programs produce very little new renewable energy, instead buying from existing sources, including out-of-state wind and solar farms. They take credit for improving our environment but they’re not actually reducing carbon emissions. For example, Marin Clean Energy, California’s first CCA, was launched eight years ago and is held up as a model. Yet it has not delivered more than 10 percent of its power from new clean energy sources in any year.

Sanders writes this treatise against CCAs as San Diego considers a CCA of its own.