Values and Principles

A Community Choice program should commit to the goal of transitioning rapidly to 100% carbon-free, clean energy, surpassing the timelines of the incumbent monopoly utilities and state law.

A key goal of a Community Choice program’s energy portfolio is to maximize development and integration of local renewable energy resources. These resources include demand reduction, new generation, storage, and other system optimizations, on both the customer-side and grid-side of the meter. Community-based resource development opens the door to many other community benefits, including those that derive from community ownership of energy assets.

A Community Choice program should spur new local business development, clean energy jobs, workforce development, and family-sustaining careers. The transition to renewable energy resources needs to provide high standards of work, quality working conditions, union jobs, job training, apprenticeship programs, local hire, and pathways out of poverty. Hiring opportunities should be provided for women, people of color, veterans, and formerly incarcerated individuals and community members impacted by the fossil fuel economy, including workers displaced by new local renewable energy development, as well as residents of heavily polluted and climate-disrupted areas.

A Community Choice program should include community-based projects and programs that prioritize benefits to low-income communities and communities that have been most impacted, economically and environmentally, by the fossil fuel economy. Programs that address the needs of these communities, in particular, also benefit other working class and small business communities, foster social justice, and build community participation and resilience. This includes increasing energy security by making special provisions for those people unable to afford energy services at normal rates.

An important goal of a Community Choice program is to maximize development of community-owned (both private and collective) and publicly owned local energy assets. This can include ownership of behind-the-meter residential or business resources, community shared solar facilities, cooperative-based ownership, and, eventually, assets built and owned by the Community Choice program itself. Ownership of resources such as renewable energy generation, energy-efficient buildings, storage, micro grids, and so forth, gives the community more control over the use of these assets, more local energy independence, more energy resilience, and a bigger stake in developing beneficial energy and climate policies.

A Community Choice program should respect ecological integrity and the limited restorative capacity of the biosphere, while creating the environmental conditions needed to support present and future generations. This means that a project, policy, or decision should not be pursued if its impact on human and environmental health is risky or unknown.

A Community Choice program should provide for all-inclusive community engagement, collaboration, and involvement in decision-making regarding program design and implementation. Making the community a key element of Community Choice, especially those most impacted by the fossil fuel economy and climate change, is essential to building community support and to achieving the economic, social equity, and other goals of the program. It is important to have an engaged community to serve as a watchdog over the agency before, during and after Community Choice program formation.

To achieve a Community Choice program that advances local clean energy for community environmental, economic, and social justice benefits requires explicit planning and program design, preferably before launch. Distributed energy resource development requires explicit planning to integrate local generation, load reduction, and load reshaping technologies into the program’s energy portfolio as early as possible.

Demand reduction programs are more effective in providing affordable energy than procuring the cheapest possible mix of electricity. They also result in greenhouse gas reductions and local economic benefits. Aggressive demand reduction should be made explicit in all build-out planning and implementation, including incentivizing steep demand reductions through a “negawatt” reward structure that compensates developers in proportion to the megawatts of demand reduced year over year.

A Community Choice program should strive to develop internal technical capability to run the program for long-term success. When contracting, the program should favor contractors willing to partner with the Community Choice agency to provide both management services (not just advice) and training that strengthen the technical know-how of program staff. This long-term approach contrasts with contracting administrators, brokers, or supply contractors who provide short-term services or energy to the program based on maximizing their own financial interests.

A Community Choice program should employ a transparent, competitive solicitation process for hiring any contractors needed to help launch and operate the program. The making of contracts should be free of any conflicts of interest, encourage robust competition and innovation, and promote a marketplace of vendors who have the vision, creativity, and experience to advance Community Choice programs. Specifically, contractors who assist in Community Choice planning or preparation of requests for proposals (RFPs) generally have conflicts of interest that should bar them from being awarded long-term operational contracts. In addition, at-risk and/or performance-based contracting, if designed appropriately, can incentivize contractors to perform services to the best of their abilities by shifting financial risks of under-performance from the Community Choice program to the contractor.

A Community Choice program should acquire utility-grade energy service capabilities that enhance long-term program stability. These services include load, market price, and DER forecasting; power procurement and 24/7 power scheduling; integrated resource planning (including DER) and portfolio management; financial settlement services; and long-term financial planning and risk management. These capabilities are necessary in a rapidly changing energy market.