CCA and Solar in California: What Changes on Your Bill

Two of the three California utility bills I looked at recently had something in common that neither homeowner had likely noticed. The dollar total at the top was not what their electricity cost. Both were served by a Community Choice Aggregator, and on a CCA account the utility bills you for delivery while somebody else bills you for the power itself. That matters more than it sounds like it should, because almost every quick solar estimate starts by asking what you pay per month. A Community Choice Aggregation, or CCA, is a local agency that buys your electricity while your existing utility still delivers it and maintains the lines. Solar works the same way it always did, and you still interconnect through the utility. What changes is your bill layout, who credits you for exported power, and the fact that any estimate built from your monthly dollar amount is probably wrong. Use kilowatt-hours instead. What a CCA actually is California lets cities and counties form an agency that purchases electricity on behalf of everyone in the area. Your utility, PG&E or Southern California Edison or SDG&E, keeps doing everything physical. It owns the poles and wires, reads your meter, restores your power after an outage, and handles your solar interconnection. The CCA only replaces the supply half. Names you might recognize include MCE, Clean Power Alliance, Ava Community Energy, San Diego Community Power, Peninsula Clean Energy and Sonoma Clean Power, among a couple of dozen others. Enrollment is automatic when a CCA launches in your area. You can opt out and return to full utility service, but most people never do anything, which is why a lot of Californians are on a CCA without having chosen it or thought about it since. Why your bill total is not what your electricity costs This is the part that trips people up. On an SDG&E bill I read through, the "Summary of Current Charges" listed Electric Delivery of $85.76 for 868 kWh. Right below it, on its own line, sat CCA Electric Generation at $212.70. The delivery line is the one with the kWh printed next to it, so a quick glance reads as though 868 kWh cost $85.76. A PG&E bill from a different household did it differently. It showed a Generation Credit as a negative number, backing out the generation PG&E would otherwise have charged, with the CCA billing separately. That bill's total was under $75, for a house that plainly spends more than that on electricity. Neither bill is wrong or misleading. They are doing exactly what they should, which is charge you only for the part each entity provides. But if you hand that number to a calculator that converts dollars to usage, you get a system sized for a fraction of your actual consumption. Does a CCA change how solar works? Mostly no, and this is the reassuring part. You interconnect through your utility, not the CCA. The application, the permission to operate, the meter, the timeline, all of it runs through PG&E or SCE or SDG&E exactly as it would otherwise. Your rate schedule and time-of-use windows are still the utility's. NEM 3.0, properly called the Net Billing Tariff, applies the same way. Exported power earns export credits rather than full retail value, so the economics still favor using your own production and sizing to your actual usage instead of filling the roof. Being on a CCA is not a reason to go solar or to avoid it. It mostly changes paperwork you will not see. What a CCA does change: who pays you for exports Here is the real difference. When your system sends power to the grid, the credit for that energy comes from whoever supplies your energy. On a CCA account, that is the CCA. Most CCAs publish their own net surplus compensation terms, and several have offered a small premium over the utility's export rate. Some have not. The rates get revisited, and what one CCA offers has nothing to do with what another does. So it is a fair question to ask, and a specific one: what does my CCA pay for exported power, and how does that compare to the utility's rate. Your CCA publishes this. It is worth ten minutes before you sign anything, and it is not a question most salespeople will raise on their own. The PCIA, and why it does not go away If you scan a CCA customer's bill you will find a line called the Power Charge Indifference Adjustment. On the PG&E bill I mentioned, it was $1.61. It is an exit fee. When you left utility generation service, the utility had already contracted for power on your behalf, and the PCIA covers that stranded cost so remaining customers do not absorb it. It changes annually and it applies whether or not you have solar. Worth knowing for one reason: it is a non-bypassable charge, which means solar production does not erase it. Any projection that shows your bill going to zero is not accounting for charges like this one. Real post-solar bills in California are small, not absent. How to size a system when you're on a CCA The fix is simple, and it applies to everyone, CCA or not. Work in kilowatt-hours, never dollars. Every bill prints your kWh somewhere. On a CCA account the dollar figure is split across lines or across two bills entirely, and the kWh number is the one that survives that. Get twelve months, not one. A single summer bill overstates your annual usage badly, because summer is the peak. Most California utilities print a twelve-month usage history right on the bill, usually as a small bar chart near your account summary. That is the number that should drive system size. Check both halves. If your utility bill looks suspiciously cheap, look for a generation credit or a separate CCA statement. You may be reading half your electricity cost. Ask about the export rate. Not the utility's. Your CCA's. None of this changes whether solar makes sense for you. It changes whether the numbers you are shown describe your house. Enter your actual usage and compare quotes from multiple installers at solarconnect.com. No calls, no pressure, and you decide who you talk to.