Rural Voices Part 1 | RCEA

The Redwood Coast Energy Authority (RCEA) is a local government Joint Powers Agency (JPA) and Community Choice Aggregator (CCA) serving Humboldt County in rural Northern California. I began my position as Director of Demand Side Management in May 2020 during the beginning phases of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to joining RCEA, I worked for local Native American Tribes in energy, natural resources, and infrastructure fields, and I am also an elected Humboldt Bay Harbor Commissioner, so I am familiar with many of the issues facing our rural community. The COVID pandemic has highlighted many of the challenges and strengths of rural California. Lack of essential services such as hospital beds and other medical services underscores the vulnerability of the region, while the less dense population and abundant outdoor recreation activities have helped retain a more normal pace of life.

Humboldt County has just over 130,000 residents in an area of approximately 4,000 square miles. Stretching along 110 miles of the Pacific Coast, Humboldt is located about 250 miles north of San Francisco and 50 miles south of Oregon. With just two major highways out of the county, Humboldt can feel very remote and has frequently been completely cut off from the rest of California due to landslides, floods, or fires. Working with service providers who might consider the San Francisco Bay Area the top extent of Northern California, getting energy efficiency programs to our customers can prove challenging. Much of our population resides in remote corners of the county down narrow, curvy roads, increasing the travel time required for assessments and services. While we have many commercial and public agency energy customers, they are often smaller than comparable customers in urban areas, which decreases the cost-effectiveness of energy upgrades. RCEA was created in 2003 to help bring energy services to these hard-to-reach rural customers, and three years ago we were able to leverage our successes to create the CCA with the goal of procuring electric power that is both less expensive and less carbon-intensive than the state average.  That experience of growing from a small JPA providing energy efficiency services to the current CCA managing an annual budget over $50 million reflects the possibilities for a Rural Regional Energy Network (REN) to grow to serve the rural California population beyond energy efficiency services.

Rural California regions are unique, both from the more urban areas of the state and from each other. Rural California has many contrasts. Humboldt County, for example, is a region that has experienced the collapse of an economy based solely on natural resource extraction. While there are still active fishing and timber industries, they are greatly diminished. On the other hand, much of the population, especially around Arcata and Eureka, is highly educated and politically and socially engaged. Humboldt State University is a leader in STEM education and hosts the renowned Schatz Energy Research Center. Dairy farming, ranching, and agriculture, including cannabis cultivation, are also major industries in Humboldt and have their particular energy efficiency needs.

Humboldt County also has seven Native American reservations and rancherias, which are distinct sovereign governments with unique needs and populations. As a graduate student doing energy assessments on the Yurok reservation, it was eye-opening to me that much of the reservation lacked grid connectivity. In more recent years they have made significant infrastructure developments. The Hoopa Reservation in the eastern portion of the county is also striving to develop resilient energy infrastructure for its citizens.  Another Tribe, the Blue Lake Rancheria is a recognized energy innovation leader, with two, state-of-the-art solar plus storage microgrids. Other Tribes are pursuing their own energy efficiency initiatives, and RCEA is proud to be working with many of them.

Services designed with the urban customer in mind often cannot meet rural needs and reach rural customers. For more regionally specific RENs and other energy efficiency service providers, it just doesn’t make economic sense to expend the resources to provide services to hard-to-reach areas, especially when there are so many opportunities in more densely populated areas. By focusing on the rural hard-to-reach sector across the entire state, leveraging the expertise of the seven Rural REN partners, we will be able to provide services to these often-overlooked segments. Rural ratepayers deserve the same level of service as those in more densely populated areas, even if it requires greater effort, and we are creating the Rural REN to fulfill that need.

Stephen Kullmann
Director of Demand Side Management
Redwood Coast Energy Authority