MCE Community Choice Energy provides the generation of electrical energy for over 80 percent of Richmond residents and businesses. It is cheaper and cleaner than that provided by PG&E, although PG&E still provides the wires and poles that transmit that energy to your homes and businesses.

I currently represent Richmond and serve as the board chair for MCE Clean Energy, a half-billion-dollar joint powers authority serving Napa, Marin, Contra Costa and Solano Counties. MCE was the first community choice agency in the State of California, and Richmond was the first expansion out of Marin County where it all began.

This has been a big year for MCE:

• We celebrated our 10-year anniversary, a landmark for us and the CCA movement in California.

• We enrolled new customers from Solano County and welcomed two new communities into our family -- Vallejo and Pleasant Hill, and we approved the addition of Fairfield to our family, for a 2022 enrollment.

• We were able to pivot quickly to all remote work during the shelter in place while growing programs and activities and received an upgrade to our Fitch credit rating.

• We launched an energy storage resiliency program to help folks with outages and emergencies, securing more than $2.5M in state incentive program funds for installations in our communities. 

• We gave portable batteries to 100 medically vulnerable customers.

• We completed the installation of 500 EV charging stations at businesses and multifamily properties, with 500 more in the pipeline. This includes one in the City of Richmond at City Hall.

• We saw the CCA community across the state grow to 23 operational CCAs, and the tally of new renewable projects under contract is more than 6,000 MW, enough to power 2.5 million homes.

• Closer to home we saw three feed-in-tariff projects completed.
• 1 megawatt solar at the San Rafael Airport
• 2 megawatts solar at Soscol Ferry in Napa
• 3 megawatts solar at the Silveira Ranch in Novato

• And this month, we have two large projects reaching commercial operation (images shown):
• Little Bear in the Fresno area at 160 megawatts
• Desert Harvest in Riverside County at 80 megawatts

It is safe to say, that even in this year full of challenges, we are making a difference.

Figure 1 - 160 MW Little Bear Solar Farm