CPA offices and contact center will be closed December 31 and January 1 in celebration of the holidays.

Solving for the Known – And the Unknown

Ted Bardacke

The holiday season is often a time for reflection, looking back on all that has transpired in the previous year. And in 2024, Clean Power Alliance was full of accomplishments, including expanding service with 100% Green Power to three new cities, launching new community programs which prompted record customer participation, and continuing to invest in renewable energy and battery storage projects that bring reliable power free of greenhouse gas emissions to those we serve. For the second year in a row, we were recognized by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory as the nation’s top retail provider of green energy in the county. 

However, in the fast moving and dynamic energy industry, a successful organization must always be forward-looking, particularly when political winds of change are stirring. So as we prepare for the coming year, here’s a quick look at some things on the horizon for CPA in 2025. 

First of all, in October we’ll begin service to over 30,000 new customers in three new communities – La Cañada Flintridge, Lynwood, and the City of Port Hueneme. To serve these new customers – and our existing ones – with high levels of reliable and renewable power, CPA and its developer partners will soon bring online 648 MW of new solar energy generation paired with 436 MW of battery storage via the Rexford, Desert Quartzite and Solar Star 3 and 4 projects. This is enough energy to power 302,000 homes in Southern California each year. 

While providing a reliable low-carbon energy mix to our customers is our core business, we’ve also heard from them that rising energy bills are a challenge they want our help to overcome. It will be up to state leaders to agree on plans to reduce the cost of the main drivers of recent electricity bill increases – investments in wildfire liability and mitigation along with a more resilient electricity grid – while CPA continues to work with our customers at the individual level to reduce their electricity bills in several ways. 

Throughout 2025, we will improve access to clean energy for underserved residents when as many as 10 local projects on warehouses in Pico Rivera and the South Bay will start delivering 100% renewable energy to low-income customers via our Power Share program. This new capacity will allow Power Share to increase enrollment to over 10,000 customers, each of whom receive a 20% monthly bill discount through the program. 

In addition to our long-standing Power Response program, two new programs will launch in 2025 that will help customers manage their demand – and their electricity costs. CPA, working through our development partner Haven Energy, will install up to 300 solar plus storage systems in single family homes owned by low-income customers. These systems will significantly lower energy bills for those customers, while CPA will operate the installed batteries as a Virtual Power Plant, reducing stress on the grid at peak times and lowering the costs of providing critical reliability services for all our customers. 

CPA will also debut its EV Smart Charge program for customers who own electric vehicles. The program will pay customers to use a CPA app to manage what time of day their vehicles draw power from the grid, always prioritizing having enough charge for their upcoming drives but then optimizing vehicle charging times to reduce customer costs and greenhouse gas emissions. 

These are some of the “known knowns” for 2025. We are also poised to deal with the “known unknowns” of an increasingly warming climate as well as changes in energy policy that could come out of the new federal administration. And then there are the “unknown unknowns.” Responding and adapting to those is one of CPA’s hallmarks, where we we’ve been nimble and able to solve for volatile market changes by swiftly developing new solutions in the decarbonization path, including our award-winning bond issuance program that lowers our renewable energy procurement costs by approximately $45 million annually. 

Stay tuned for all these known developments, and the solutions we devise to confront the unknowns. To all our customers and stakeholders, you are in good hands.