By Melissa Yu
The Sierra Club SF Bay Chapter, along with representatives from the East Bay Clean Power Alliance, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Communities for a Better Environment, Food and Water Watch, Youth vs. the Apocalypse, Local Clean Energy Alliance and many more, have successfully advocated for more money for the East Bay's Local Development Business Plan (LDBP).
The LDBP is a comprehensive plan within East Bay Community Energy (EBCE) that identifies ways in which EBCE can foster local economic benefits such as job creation and community energy programs right here in Alameda County.
Community Choice energy programs like EBCE allow communities to join together to purchase electricity on behalf of their residents and businesses. Community Choice are administered by local governments as an alternative to investor-owned utilities like PG&E — meaning profits flow back into the community. If you don’t live in Alameda County, click here to find your local program. (Nearly all Bay Area residents are now served by a locally run Community Choice program.)
The LDBP is essentially Alameda County’s Green New Deal. While that movement is being held hostage at the national level, locally we are setting the precedent to lead the state away from our reliance on fossil fuels. We made the case that more of EBCE's revenue should go towards local clean energy projects and successfully got the final LDBP budget to be $5.1 million dollars for fiscal year 2019-2020 — $1.5 million more than the original proposal.
The LDBP budget is allocated to go towards vehicle electrification, building electrification, collaborative procurement, community investment funds, enhanced net energy metering, demand response, and energy efficiency programs. Here’s more information about these funded programs:
- Demand Response (DR) – Pilot project designed to test innovative applications of DR programming in the Community Choice energy context that yield mutually beneficial outcomes for EBCE and participating customers.
- Energy Efficiency (EE) – Project to create synergy with established EE Program Administrators and community benefit organizations by leveraging customer data to significantly increase participation levels in existing EE programs.
- Building Electrification – An innovative approach to Building Electrification programing which achieves deep decarbonization through permanent natural gas demand destruction.
- Transportation Electrification – Develop and implement an innovation pilot project for medium and/or heavy-duty fleet vehicle electrification to determine the costs and benefits, and to provide a solid foundation for implementation of a programmatic approach to fleet electrification that delivers lasting and substantial local benefits.
- Collaborative Procurement – A comprehensive program for working collaboratively with local government agencies, school districts, nonprofit organizations, as well as residential and nonresidential customers to develop beneficial clean energy projects that achieve lower costs through combined economies of scale.
- Enhanced Net Energy Metering (NEM) – Develop an innovative NEM structure that seeks to incentivize local renewable energy and energy storage deployment in ways that overcome market failures and barriers, enhance the value of NEM to EBCE, and maximize community benefits achieved through the program.
- Community Investment Fund – A new approach to directly supporting community innovations and local development which involves setting up an internal revenue-supported fund for providing grant funding to local governments, workforce training organizations engaging disadvantaged workers, community organizations, and entrepreneurs who are working on developing projects and/or services that align with EBCE’s core mission, values and objectives.
The full, comprehensive plan can be found here: www.ebce.org/local-development-business-plan.
With these funds, we can more easily push for ways to maximize local environmental, economic, and social benefits! For more information, reach out to community organizer Melissa Yu at melissa.yu@sierraclub.org.