ventura, February 6, 2018

Southern California Edison (SCE) is proposing to develop renewable energy and energy storage projects in Southern Santa Barbara County and Ventura County.

Benefits to Property Owners Businesses, local governments, and property managers have the opportunity to host solar or energy storage projects through an upcoming solicitation ( a Request for Proposals or RFP) from SCE.  Property owners that become sites for energy generation and/or storage can significantly reduce energy costs, while also earning additional revenue by selling energy and other related services directly to the utility.  The CleanEnergy805.org website is one of two places for interested people to sign up. The other is the SCE MG RFP website.  The RFP will open in a week or so and close toward the end of summer.

100% Renewable Energy is Our Climate Action Goal  More and more cities across the country are pledging. That becomes difficult here if SCE builds a 4th  transmission line to import dirty energy. We need enough acceptable proposals to produce a total of 308 MW of clean energy (of which 95 MW must be in the area around Goleta).

Preventing Construction of the 4th Transmission Line  We need enough substantial local energy projects, called Distributed Energy Resources or DER, because of these 3 reasons:

• It is more costly for the future electricity needs of our region to build a new line than to develop DER.
• The 4th line forces us to take SCE’s fossil fuel energy from big, less cost-effective sources coming over long wires that lose efficiency with every mile traveled.
• The long transmission lines are vulnerable to storms, fires and earthquakes.

If we want to achieve 100% renewable energy, we cannot allow a 4th line. If we want resilience in natural disasters, we need local energy generation. If we don’t want people here to be saddled with unnecessarily high energy costs for the next 20 years, we need enough DER to keep SCE from investing in any new fossil fuel infrastructure including transmission lines from out of the area.

Preference for “Disadvantaged Communities” or DAC  There are three DAC areas in the SCE RFP where it is a priority to encourage proposals–two in Oxnard and one in West Ventura. Here is CalEnviroScreen 3 map showing the boundaries of the three DACs.

Intersection with the Imminent Development of Community Microgrids  Accepted projects may become the cornerstones of future Community Microgrids to localize energy generation. We are learning about Community Microgrids. Here is a great webinar.

Property Owners Need to be Awakened  The ultimate Clean Energy 805 goal can be to get SCE to pay for all the DER that local property owners can propose! The limiting factor is property owners.  So, if you see a large roof or parking lot or otherwise unusable space that looks like it would be good for solar panels, find the property owner and give them the CleanEnergy805.org website. Then revisit to see if they are investigating how they can be a project site. Ask them to come to the workshop soon to be announced to meet energy developers. They get announcements about workshops by signing up here.

Property owners must be alerted to this first time ever opportunity to get savings and be part of our clean energy future.

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