Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Community choice aggregation (CCA) is an energy policy growing in popularity across the United States that shifts decision-making power over energy procurement from centralized investor-owned utilities to locally controlled public agencies. As mechanisms for local control, CCAs present opportunities to decentralize both (1) hard energy infrastructures through locally-situated, bio- and technoregionally responsive energy systems, and (2) soft energy infrastructures through local, democratic control over energy questions. However, four years of ethnographic field work studying CCAs in California have shown that within the CCA movement, a dominant strategy of centralization has emerged that undermines this CCA doctrine and its grassroots proponents. They have centralized their hard infrastructures by pursuing ecocidal and sociotechnically conservative megaprojects rather than local, small-scale, antifragile energy systems; they have centralized soft infrastructures by territorially expanding and federating into ‘super’-CCAs, buffering public involvement and forcing grassroots advocates to chase between local and central entities to make demands. In this paper, I use anarchist, democratic, organization, and systems theories to answer, How do tendencies dominant in CCA operations undermine CCA doctrine? My findings illustrate that CCAs recreate centralization by failing to challenge an economic paradigm oriented toward securing high return-on-investments through the sale of cheap and abundant energy. This paradigm encourages two major tendencies of state-capital formations: (1) bureaucratic management that protects the organization’s technical core by buffering uninvited publics and (2) financial strategies designed to achieve economies of scale. To counter this trend, I recommend strategies designed to support grassroots advocates.