The following is the first of a four-part series looking at the challenges faced in the first decade of Sonoma Clean Power
Sonoma Clean Power is celebrating 10 years of bringing clean energy to the residents of Sonoma and Mendocino counties, as the public power provider serving about half a million residents. Now, more than a decade in (the official launch day was May 1, 2014), 87% of eligible homes and businesses in Sonoma and Mendocino counties are customers—an indication of user satisfaction and SCP’s success in providing cleaner electricity, like solar and geothermal power, aimed at reducing carbon and greenhouse gas emissions at comparable costs to traditional providers.
But the road to cleaner power has been long and sometimes rocky—marked by an energy crisis, opposition from utilities and the ever-encroaching threat of climate change. Here’s how Sonoma Clean Power came to be.
Community Choice—born under punches
The advent of Sonoma Clean Power and clean-energy providers like it was never a sure thing. In fact, only a few years before SCP launched, the reliability of the energy industry in California was hitting its low point. The seeds of the problem were laid in 1997, when California, by way of Assembly Bill 1890, deregulated its energy market in the hopes that more competition would lower prices. What it led to, instead, were regulatory failures and manipulation of the market by companies like Enron in their quests to increase profits. By 2000, state residents became all-too familiar with the term “rolling blackout”—when high energy demand coupled with limited supply, led utilities like PG&E to schedule temporary power cuts to certain areas in order to reduce demand. The public was incensed and faith in such companies as PG&E and other investor-owned utilities hit an all-time low. (Some say the energy fiasco was the motivating factor in the recall of then-Gov. Gray Davis, who was voted out of office in 2003.)…