The concept of Community Choice Aggregation allows communities in some states of the US to act as electricity suppliers to their residents. By bundling electricity demand, better prices can be archieved. Additionally, municipal Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs) argue that they allow more local control over pricing mechanisms and composition of the electricity mix. Many CCAs explicitly offer green electricity models that go beyond the policy requirements of the states.
California stands out among the states where community choice aggregation is possible: Its retail electricity market is not liberalized. Thus, CCAs break up the previous local monopolies in the power supply and question the current regulatory framework.
In the first part, this study gives an overview of both the functioning of CCAs and the legal framework, and discusses the goals of CCAs. The second part of the study highlights the special case of California in more detail: The authors discuss the new competition in the electricity retail market, the expansion of CCAs, their relationship to the previous monopolists in the power supply as well as regulatory implications.