Could being its own power generator help Bakersfield residents with their energy bills and help spur development as the city grows?
That’s the question Ward 4 Councilman Bob Smith wants answered — even if some of his fellow council members are more skeptical — and energy experts say it’s a viable option, with caveats.
Cities have been able to set up their own local power generation projects and used them to power large commercial sites and residential developments, but only with careful planning and negotiations with state regulators and local utilities.
“There’s a business model there. It could it could work,” said Brendon Pierpont with Energy Innovation, a policy and technology consulting firm.
“These are fairly cost-effective resources and probably the customers that are using the solar and storage would probably enter into some sort of long-term contract to buy power from that,” Pierpont said.
“That is something that could certainly pay for itself depending on how it’s priced.”
The Bakersfield City Council has flirted with the idea of a new kind of energy program since at least 2023 when Smith first asked staff to research community choice aggregation, or CCAs.
Community choice aggregators allow municipalities more choice in where they purchase their power from, even as the energy infrastructure remains operated by the investor-owned utility.
Some CCAs have used that flexibility to increase their share of power from renewable resources, but forming one doesn’t necessarily result in lower utility bills. In some cases, CCAs have even caused rates to rise.
Council members have remained interested enough in the topic that it’s never been fully put to rest, but skeptical enough that members on more than one occasion have declined to fund further studies.
That’s what happened last month at the council’s March 25 meeting, when a double presentation on CCAs and another new energy program, distributed energy resources, or DERs, piqued some members’ interest even as they were hesitant to accept a proposal before them.
At that meeting, the council heard two back-to-back presentations, first from the California Energy Choice Authority, or CalChoice, the other from the Willdan Group, a municipal adviser.
It was a lot of new information for members to take in, and while members expressed hesitation or even outright opposition to CCAs, the DERs — smaller microgrids used to power a limited area — were more intriguing.
In a 4-2 vote, council members directed staff to research implementation for utility-scale DERs, sometimes known as microgrids or spot municipal utilities.
Speaking to The Californian, Smith said that lowering rates is only part of the goal. The other benefit he sees in CCAs and DERs is the ability to spur new development.
Local projects have been stymied, Smith said, because the local utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., is unable to provide service to a certain area within the developer’s timeframe.
If the city could provide the power, he said, more projects might be able to move forward.
“As a developer, I talk to other developers and PG&E is often the problem with finishing up subdivisions, getting houses finished, getting things finished,” Smith said.
“If the city was a municipal utility and we’ve got our solar fields right there, then we could run a line over and we could be the utility,” he said.
The Willdan Group said it could help with that. During a presentation, representatives said they had helped several California cities and private industrial projects to develop microgrids, and could offer the same for Bakersfield.
Working with Willdan was Jason Caudle, CEO of First Public Hydrogen Authority and a former city manager in Tehachapi and Lancaster.
Caudle oversaw the creation of a CCA in Lancaster, as well as that’s city’s Power Choice Program, which installs solar panels and batteries on homes from no money down. The same could be done in Bakersfield, he said at the meeting.
“If your residents are saying, my PG&E bills are too high, you can develop a program — I would say, with CCA, without CCA — that says, ‘we want to meet PG&E’s rates,’” Caudle said. “We can engage the developers, put solar battery on your rooftop for free.”
Willdan worked with the city of Rancho Cucamonga to develop a microgrid that powers the nearby Victoria Gardens Mall, and the city’s utility offers commercial electrical service to commercial and industrial sites nearby.
That was a fairly complicated process and took the city about three years, according to Matthias Fripp, also with Energy Innovation, and required the city to set up the utility as a legal entity, negotiate service boundaries and purchase some existing utility-owned assets, among other steps.
“Establishing a ‘spot muni’ for large, new developments within Bakersfield seems to be potentially viable, but it would need to be done carefully and with advance planning,” Fripp said. “On the other hand, there could be significant benefits for customers, taking advantage of low-cost solar and storage, and possibly leveraging those to speed up interconnections.”
Willdan — currently contracted with the city to do an energy audit of its assets — offered to do further analysis at no cost, but council members were hesitant to accept an offer from a group that might potentially be contracted for the work.
At the meeting, City Manager Christian Clegg said energy independence was a stated goal in the city’s strategic plan, and staff are looking at ways to managing ever-increasing energy rates.
“There’s a fair amount of work that would go into this process. Really in the big picture we’re trying to think about more creative solutions that could produce game-changing results,” Clegg said.
Ahmad Faruqui, an independent rate-design consultant, said while there are certainly legal and technical complications, municipal power is worth investigating, even as utilities have been known to push back.
“They’re fighting it tooth and nail, but if it’s not a CCA, you’ll have customer DER installations and they are fighting that too, or you’ll have micro grids and they’re fighting that too,” Faruqui said of power utilities in the state.
“And for better or for worse, they’ve got the (California Public Utilities Commission) on their side, unfortunately, so that’s really limiting the ability of communities to become energy independent.”
Still, if done thoughtfully, the venture could translate to real savings for the city, he said.
“This would be an innovation,” Faruqui said. “Someone has to have the courage and the boldness and the ability to convince others to move forward.”