The Foundation For What We Do
What guides our vision for a community-based and democratized energy system?
Our Values and Principles for Community Energy
The California Alliance for Community Energy utilizes the knowledge, expertise, and commitment of its members to promote a more equitable, affordable, reliable, and resilient clean energy future.
The following values and principles are the foundation of the practices for everything we advocate.
Distributed Energy Resource (DER) Development
Maximize development and integration of local renewable energy resources on both the customer-side and grid-side of the meter.
Economic and Workforce Development
Encourage new business development, workforce development, and family-sustaining careers by providing high standards of work, quality working conditions, union jobs, local hire, and career pathways.
Social Equity
Include programs and projects that prioritize benefits to low-income communities and communities that have been most impacted, economically and environmentally, by the fossil fuel economy.
Community Asset Ownership
Maximize the development of community-owned (both private and collective) and publicly-owned local energy assets to give the community more control over the use of these assets.
Build-out Planning
Achieve community environmental, economic, and social justice benefits through community-focused resource development planning.
Community Engagement
Provide for all-inclusive community engagement in energy program decision-making, design, and implementation.
Sustainability
Respect ecological integrity and the limited restorative capacity of the biosphere, while creating the environmental conditions needed to support present and future generations.
Demand Reduction
Make aggressive energy demand reduction explicit in all build-out planning and implementation, including compensating developers in proportion to demand reduction performance.
Internal Technical Capability
Favor contractors who support community development on a fee-for-service basis and who strengthen the technical know-how of the community.
Innovative, Transparent Contracting
Employ a transparent, competitive solicitation process for hiring contractors to help launch and operate energy programs. The making of contracts should be free of any conflicts of interest and encourage competition and innovation.
Long-term Program Stability
Acquire utility-grade power service capabilities to support long-term stability in a rapidly changing energy market.
Regional Collaboration
Strive to collaborate with Community Choice and other community energy programs to develop common resources and economies of scale.