I just got my first bill since going to a community choice power provider. Here in California, the investor owned utilities (commercial companies, not the publicly-owned utilities) act as retailers of energy. They buy power on the open market from generators, then sell it to their customers. They bill both for the cost to generate the power, and also for power delivery (which includes maintaining the grid). An option that recently became available is for a city government to join a community choice power provider, which then buys power from generators on our behalf. The utility still delivers it, so it’s not real competition, but partway there. The community choice provider then bills the utility, who passes that bill along to individual customers.

So, the generation cost went down by about 30% for power used during the day, and a few percent for power delivered at night (three different time-of-use categories). Our community choice provider has an option for 100% renewable power, which I chose, so this is a pretty tangible demonstration that renewable power really is cheaper than fossil fuels.

I noticed that my projected bill will be much cheaper than my last, even though I haven’t changed my habits, so I did some math. At this same point in last month’s billing cycle (71.4% through the cycle), I used a net of 550kWh. As of the end of the day yesterday, I have used 122.5kWh. As I said, I haven’t changed my habits and have even used my electric oven more since I have family visiting that likes to bake. SDG&E has long said that they don’t make money on the generation charge, just the delivery charge, but none of that would change how much power they say I am using. Even though they have a natural monopoly on power delivery with regulatory capture of CPUC guaranteeing them whatever increases they ask for, I wouldn’t put it past them and Sempra to fuck around with how much power they say we are using. I don’t think any of us would be surprised to wake up some day to headlines about SDG&E and Sempra under investigation for fraud.