Last night was MCE’s 2022 virtual Holiday party. Before the fun started, Executive Director Dawn Weisz, Vice-chair Shanelle Scales-Preston and I recalled the incredible acomplishmnents of MCE and thanked MCE staff and board members for their hard work.

• Launched service to 40,000 new customers in Fairfield in April 2022
• During the September heat wave and Flex Alerts, we engaged over 420,000 residents and businesses to reduce and shift load away from the evening peak.
• Successfully brought all of MCE’s customer service activities in-house, increasing customer satisfaction with shorter call times and faster email responses.
• Installed more than 1,400 Level 2 EV charging stations around our service area. 
• Received a $180,000 grant from the Marin Community Foundation to fund EV charging in affordable multifamily properties in Marin. 
• Submitted a $188 million energy efficiency business plan to the CPUC with new residential equity offerings in defined environmental justice communities.This plan builds on the almost 150% year-over-year increase in our energy efficiency programs.
• MCE’s Healthy Homes programs will receive $3 million over the next five years as part of Richmond Rising, a comprehensive Transformational Climate Communities proposal, to help provide energy efficiency and health and safety upgrades to homes in Richmond
• Won the 2022 Spare the Air Leadership Award for our Low-income Families and Tenants (LIFT) Program
• Received the East Bay Innovation Award in the Clean Tech category for our work in Contra Costa County!
• 3 new babies were welcomed to the MCE family.
• MCE signed a contract for our largest solar+storage project yet, the Golden Fields Solar project in Kern County in southern California. This 100 MW solar and 75 MW lithium-ion battery project will provide enough power for 52,000 homes each year.
• We signed our first contract for local battery storage at Ranch Sereno in Byron, unincorporated Contra Costa County, in late February. The project is part of our FIT Plus program and includes 2 megawatts of solar and an 800-kilowatt battery. Like MCE’s other FIT Plus projects, this will be constructed with union labor, prevailing wage, and pollinator-friendly requirements.
• MCE also contracted for over 175 megawatts of new battery storage resources, helping improve grid reliability across the state and decreasing the need for fossil fueled generation.
• Lastly, MCE just signed a contract for 7 megawatts of new geothermal energy, just 100 miles north of our service area, bringing 24/7 clean energy to our customers.
• We completed our second battery give-away program to medically vulnerable customers, ensuring that they can access clean power during an outage. MCE has now offered 200 portable batteries to make these customers more resilient and reduce pollution from diesel back-up generation.
• We announced our first Virtual Power Plant project in Richmond which will help low-income residents access clean energy technologies. The project will upgrade up to 100 homes and 20 businesses with new energy efficient and electrification technologies, including completely refurbishing 10 previously abandoned homes. The first of these homes was completed in October.
• Since MCE’s launch we have saved customers $31.5 million and expect that number to reach $90 million by the end of 2022.
• We issued one of the first-ever climate-friendly prepayment bonds for clean energy resources, helping reduce costs by 10%, or $3 million a year for the next 10 years.
• Our MCE Cares Credit program provided cost relief to over 30,000 customers, providing over $5 million in bill credits to income-qualified residents and small businesses
• We are helping Pittsburg Unified School District install 1.6 MW of storage across 10 of 13 school sites with over $715,000 in rebates from MCE. The school district will be using the savings, anticipated to be $2.8M over 7 years, from this project to fund other energy efficiency and clean technology improvements to benefit the 11,000 students in the district.
•   MCE also supported 10 kW of battery storage at the West Marin Medical Center, a critical facility located in Point Reyes.

As of 2022, MCE’s cumulative accomplishments over 12 years include:

• 700,000 MT of CO2 reduced
• 10,000+ MT of CO2e reduced through MCE’s energy efficiency programs
• $2.4 billion reinvested in new California renewables
• 914 MW of new renewables, including almost 48 megawatts of new local projects
• 2+ million labor hours supported
• Serving 580,000 accounts including 1.5 million residents and businesses