Why? Many felt the state\u2019s three biggest and privately held energy utilities weren\u2019t moving fast enough to transition the grid off fossil fuels like natural gas and onto renewable energy like solar. CCAs were a solution.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
A few years ago, I started referring to community choice aggregators as public or government-run power companies because I thought it would make more sense to readers. San Diegans know the private or shareholder-run company San Diego Gas and Electric, which until recently bought and sold the region\u2019s energy and built and maintained the electric grid and gas lines. The latter is how SDG&E makes its money \u2013 it profits by building things or maintaining things. It can\u2019t profit off of the energy itself and must sell it for what it costs. (That\u2019s because the state forbid it after a huge scandal involving Enron and the manipulation of electricity markets<\/a>.)\u00a0<\/p>\n CCAs basically took over SDG&E\u2019s business of energy buying. And because it\u2019s government-run, any money it makes should be reinvested back into the community or used to lower rates.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n There are similarities between what CCAs and SDG&E do. While CCAs don\u2019t answer to a board of shareholders, they are governed by a board of elected leaders from each member city that makes decisions about rates. CCAs hired experts away from for-profit utilities to build their own power-buying teams, operating in the same energy markets as private companies. And when CCAs bid out new solar or battery projects, for-profit companies answer to build them. Members of the public can request copies of energy contracts, which would likely never be produced by a private company. But, like private companies, the price of these contracts remains private.\u00a0<\/p>\n As the saying goes, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck \u2013 then it\u2019s probably a duck.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n But in this case, San Diego Community Power pursued me relentlessly to prove they are not a duck \u2013 in other words, we are not a company, they say. Please, stop calling us that.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are a government agency,\u201d said Jen Lebron, the spokesperson for San Diego Community Power.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n She said the main reason San Diego Community Power doesn\u2019t want to be called a company is to differentiate itself from SDG&E.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSDG&E is a for-profit company. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. They\u2019re supposed to make money. That\u2019s their job,\u201d Lebron said. \u201cOur job is to keep costs as low as possible. Any revenue we have is intended to go straight to our buying power and providing benefit programs that help everybody.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n CCAs are subject to California public records law; SDG&E is not \u2013 except for most of the documents (of which there is a lot) provided to SDG&E\u2019s regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission. CCAs are not regulated in the same way by the CPUC. The state approves all of SDG&E\u2019s spending and the price they charge customers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n A CCA\u2019s governing board approves rate by vote at a public meeting.\u00a0 And San Diego Community Power is also not a nonprofit corporation, Lebron said, because we can\u2019t accept donations, she said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n San Diego Community Power could create a corporation if it wants to, however. Its bylaws state that it can do so to execute energy supply and conservation programs, which would still be \u201cpublic entities,\u201d Lebron added.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf they were going to build their own power plant, they might structure it for tax or financing reasons (as a corporation),\u201d said Joseph Kaatz, an attorney at University of San Diego\u2019s Energy Policy Initiatives Center.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n But San Diego Community Power is also not a public utility because it doesn\u2019t build and maintain the grid. Sacramento has one of those called Sacramento Municipal Utility District or SMUD. Citizens voted in 1923 to create SMUD which bought its local electrical grid from Pacific Gas and Electric. That took about 23 years and a state Supreme Court battle to achieve.\u00a0<\/p>\n SMUD is like a publicly-run SDG&E, meaning it both owns and maintains Sacramento\u2019s grid and buys all the power. Public utilities in California also have some of the lowest electric rates in the state.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n But something else stumped me. SMUD\u2019s website has a page called \u201ccompany information\u201d<\/a> that describes what their \u201ccommunity-owned, not-for-profit electric service\u201d provider is.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I asked SMUD to explain.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we sometimes use the term company, it\u2019s to describe how we operate day-to-day \u2013 focused on reliability, innovation and customer service \u2013 not our ownership or purpose, which remain entirely public,\u201d said Gamaliel Ortiz, a spokesperson for SMUD.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Kaatz, from the University of San Diego, said he ran a legal clinic that worked on the original framework for San Diego Community Power.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n He pointed out that the city of San Diego is technically a \u201cmunicipal corporation\u201d under its city charter<\/a>, Article I, \u201ccorporate powers.\u201d The term stuck around since the 1800s<\/a> when cities were defining their individual rights to self-govern outside the authority of state Legislatures.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n When it comes to San Diego Community Power, he said: \u201cI would call them a public agency that\u2019s in the business of supplying electricity,\u201d Kaatz said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tLoad more posts\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\tSomething went wrong. Please refresh the page and\/or try again.\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve been covering San Diego\u2019s public, not-for-profit, government-run, renewable energy buying and selling entities since they began circa…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[32149,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-156874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-community-power","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Balboa-Park_0028-1024x683.jpg\")
Power lines in Bankers Hill on Sept. 15, 2025. \/ Ariana Drehsler for Voice of San Diego<\/p>\n![\"Derrick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/untitled-00968-1024x683.jpg\")
Members of the public speak at a California Public Utilities Commission public forum at Sherman Heights Community Center in Sherman Heights on March 23, 2023 about a rate hike that SDG&E is proposing to start in 2024. \/ Photo by Ariana Drehsler<\/p>\n