Community Choice energy is rolling out in Humboldt County next month, bringing customers cleaner electricity at a lower price.
Redwood Coast Energy Authority recently sent out notices to PG&E customers letting them know that in May their services will switch over to Community Choice. Monthly bills will still come from PG&E, but the program will automatically enroll existing customers in the “REpower” program, which provides electricity from 37 percent renewable sources.
RCEA says that’s because PG&E will still maintain power poles and lines, fix outages and deliver monthly bills — and because community choice will honor discount programs like CARE, Medical Baseline and FERA — customers won’t notice a difference, other than possibly “a slight decrease in your electricity bill.”
Customers have the option of opting out of the program — by calling RCEA or visiting its website — but they also have the option of opting up to “REpower+,” which offers customers 100 percent renewable electricity for an additional charge of 1 cent per kilowatt hour. That works out to about $5 extra a month for the average California household.
For more information on the program, or on how to opt out or opt up, visit RCEA’s website here. Check out past Journal coverage of Community Choice here.
This article appears in Slip, Sliding Away.
There’s nothing “cleaner” about this program.
We’ll actually be having less solar with the Community Choice Energy plan than we currently have with PG&E — 5% vs our current 11%, using the RCEA’s own figures. Yet the RCEA keeps showing everyone images of solar panels and telling them they’ll be having “cleaner” and more “renewable” power. What we’ll actually be getting is more biomass — industrial wood incineration. Biomass electric is very polluting and inefficient, and emits more CO2 per unit of energy produced than coal.
The main beneficiaries of this new program will be Humboldt Redwood Company and DG Fairhaven. These two plants also happen to be the two largest stationary sources of health-damaging pollution in our county. According to figures from the EPA, these two biomass plants combined emit 61% of our air pollution from stationary sources.
These plants emit a stunning amount of carcinogenic benzene — 20,000 lbs per year combined, which is 86% of benzene emissions from stationary sources in our county. These plants are also, by far, our largest stationary sources of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, toluene and fine particulate pollution that is linked to asthma attacks, strokes, cancers, and heart attacks.
And this pollution will increase as these plants ramp up production to meet more of our energy needs with the CCE. We’ll be having more pollution, not “cleaner” power.
The only reasonable “choice” is to show the RCEA that we value clean air and a healthy environment, and to opt out of this cynical, Orwellian version of a community choice energy plan.