Business View Magazine | September 2019

208 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019 just our jurisdiction - the residents and businesses of Lancaster,” explains Kathy Wells, the city’s Energy Projects Coordinator for Lancaster Choice Energy. “Most CCAs are part of a joint power authority, so they can be comprised of multiple cities or multiple counties, and they are ever-growing and evolving. As a stand-alone, municipal CCA, we have a finite group of customers. Lancaster was the first CCA in Southern California and also the first to launch in Southern California Edison’s territory. We began serving customers in 2015 and since we’ve launched, we’ve offered a 100-percent renewable energy product, while our base product is 38 percent renewable. We’re also 60-percent carbon- free. Our goal is to eventually meet the state’s goal of being 100-percent carbon-free by 2045.” “Now that we’ve launched and we serve our customers cleaner, greener energy, we’re looking at what other value we can bring,” Wells continues. “One of the exciting things is that we’ve been supporting the state’s transportation electrification goal. For example, in our city, our Antelope Valley Transit Authority (AVTA) is going to be the first all-electric bus fleet in the nation. We’ve already got 41 electric buses on the road and the fleet is slated to completely transition to 83 all-electric buses by the end of this year. “As the energy provider for the Transit Authority, Lancaster can help incentivize the cost of transitioning to an all-electric bus fleet. We are looking at installing some distributed energy resources to provide for the additional load, because having an all-electric bus fleet is going to use a lot more electricity. One option is designing a solar and battery storage system to put on-site at the bus depot. Once we have that up and going,