What Is a CCA – Community Choice Energy Aggregation?
Animation brought to you by California Clean Power. CAcleanpower.com/whatiscca/ Community Choice, sometimes called CCA or Community Choice Energy, returns your community’s right to purchase your own energy supply, leading to cleaner choices, cheaper power, and greater energy investment and innovation. With the old setup, the private monopoly utility does everything for you, from buying power from energy producers, to fixing the lines, to billing customers, and you pay pretty much whatever you’re told to pay. The new model changes just one part of that formula – your community buys the power, right from energy producers. You still pay the utility to do the rest, uninterrupted. This change is possible when your town, city or county starts a CCA program. That’s community choice energy. Why is this a big deal? Because every day, communities send a lot of money to monopoly utilities, to buy energy for as low a price as they can, and then mark it up as high as they can to maximize profits, making themselves and their stockholders richer, with minimal environmental or local benefit. That’s how monopolies work – you have no choice. But CCA gives you choice. Because your CCA doesn’t need extra profit to pay shareholders, the energy your CCA buys is almost always cheaper, which means that even a small community can bring in millions of dollars a year. This opens up a world of new possibilities. Your community can use that savings to choose renewable energy – 33%, 50%, up to 100%! This drives clean energy production, nation-wide. Sources may be right in your neighborhood. Some options will be truly greenhouse-gas free. You can get lower electricity rates too, for both homes and businesses. And if you start your own CCA, you can go even bigger; you can fund municipal projects, like building local renewable energy infrastructure, right in your backyard. Just by taking this one step – buying your own power – your community gets more economic and environmental benefit than many other time-consuming and costly programs combined, bringing in millions of dollars that would have otherwise gone out to the utility, reducing your greenhouse gas emissions, and bringing local control back to your community. Imagine if everyone with the monopoly utility started a CCA... Learn more about CCA at CAcleanpower.com/whatiscca/ and see what it can do for your community.
