The City of Coronado has officially joined San Diego Community Power, a nonprofit alternative to San Diego Gas & Electric.
That means Coronado residents will eventually be able to source more renewable energy for their electricity needs. They’ll have access to three different plans with varying price tags depending on how much green energy makes up their portfolio.
Coronado City Council Member Carrie Downey said the new arrangement was the single biggest move the city could make to meet its emissions reduction goals.
“When we adopted our climate action plan, we had a series of options the city could take -and all of the others added up would not have as significant a difference as just joining a CCA would,” Downey said.
The California Legislature created CCAs, or community choice aggregators, to spur renewable energy development. The program allows municipalities to band together and decide what kind of power to buy. Households then pay to have that electricity distributed over the local utility’s existing power lines.
Coronado Council Member Kelly Purvis said joining San Diego Community Power makes the city more green — and provides more control over its energy destiny.
“We're finally going to have a choice,” Purvis said. “For 40 years I've lived in Coronado and my bill has always said SDG&E. And I didn't have an opportunity to pick from a different provider, or to look at where that power is being provided from.”
Purvis will represent Coronado on San Diego Community Power’s board of directors, with Downey as an alternate.
Joe Kaatz is a senior attorney with the University of San Diego’s Energy and Policy Clinic, which worked with local elected officials to create San Diego Community Power. He said CCAs generally offer slightly lower utility rates, but savings are limited because infrastructure costs make up a majority of the typical power bill.
“CCAs need to be cheaper on the commodity side of the bill, which is only really 25% of the bill now,” he said. “Transmission [and] distribution is like 75%, 80% of the bill — and it's where all the cost drivers are. Rising rates.”
Still, SDG&E is an investor-owned utility. San Diego Community Power is a nonprofit, run by a board of local elected officials. Kaatz says that impacts how the two entities operate.
“They're doing risk management completely different,” he said. “They're not deploying capital at the same amount. And they're looking at ways to leverage financing and other things to save costs and to lower costs for their customers. And that's foundational to why they exist.”
San Diego Community Power is expected to begin offering service to Coronado in early 2028, pending approval by the California Public Utilities Commission.
The nonprofit currently provides their optional power service to the cities of Chula Vista, Encinitas, Imperial Beach, La Mesa, National City and San Diego, along with unincorporated sections of San Diego County.
