The Clean Energy Alliance, a community choice energy program with member cities concentrated in North County, has a new chief executive officer.
Board members on Thursday, Sept. 28, approved the hiring of Greg Wade, who has served as Solana Beach city manager for the past eight years, on a 7-0 vote. During his tenure, Solana Beach in 2018 created its own stand-alone community choice energy program.
“We’re really happy with his knowledge and his experience so that we can have someone who can hit the ground running,” said David Druker, board chair of the Clean Energy Alliance, known as CEA for short.
Wade will replace Barbara Boswell, who helped launch CEA in 2021 and guided it through two iterations of growth.
CEA’s original member cities of Carlsbad, Del Mar and Solana Beach expanded earlier this year, adding customers in San Marcos and Escondido. Oceanside and Vista are scheduled to join in April 2024, which will grow CEA’s enrollment to 220,000 accounts, making it the 10th-largest community energy program in California.
Boswell, who had been thinking of retiring, felt CEA needed a chief executive based in the San Diego region. Boswell lives in Santa Clarita in northern Los Angeles County.
“Barbara will help us with the transition,” Druker said, “and doing some consulting afterward so we don’t lose all that expertise.”
Wade, who will leave his Solana Beach post and take the CEA reins in early December, will be one of at least four full-time staffers the alliance will hire in the coming months.
“We’re going to be logical about it,” Wade said. “I’ve always worked for lean and efficient agencies and we’re interested in making this a viable and community-responsive organization.”
CEA’s board received 53 applications for the CEO position and interviewed four candidates before selecting Wade, who will be paid $325,000 per year and will receive a $25,000 signing bonus.
CEA is one of 25 community choice aggregation programs, or CCAs, that have sprung up across the state in recent years that purchase electricity generation for the residents and businesses in their respective municipalities.
There is one other CCA in the San Diego region — San Diego Community Power, whose roster is composed of customers in San Diego, Chula Vista, Encinitas, La Mesa, Imperial Beach, National City and the unincorporated areas of San Diego County.
CCAs were created by the California Legislature in 2002 to encourage the growth of renewable energy and provide competition to traditional investor-owned utilities such as San Diego Gas & Electric
by offering customers higher percentages of renewable sources at comparable or slightly lower rates.
The Clean Energy Alliance board aims to achieve at least a 2 percent cost savings for power generation compared to SDG&E.
Under the CCA model, the decisions to buy power contracts become the responsibility of local government officials.
Utilities such as SDG&E do not go away, though. They still perform every other duty outside of power generation purchases — such as maintaining poles, wires and power lines in their respective transmission and distribution systems, plus handling customer services, such as billing.
As per state rules, once a jurisdiction establishes a CCA, customers are automatically enrolled. But if customers want to remain with the incumbent investor-owned utility, they can opt out for free.
In other business Sept. 28, the CEA board approved an 11-year “resource adequacy” agreement with Terra-Gen, a renewable energy company based in San Diego.
To make sure there is enough energy capacity and reserves to maintain the state’s electric system, CCAs and other “load-serving entities” have to meet annual resource adequacy thresholds set by the California Public Utilities Commission.
The CEA board approved a power purchase contract not to exceed $14.3 million at Terra-Gen’s Edwards Sanbon solar and energy storage facility in Kern County.
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