Business View Magazine | September 2019

209 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019 we’re going to develop a special energy rate for the transit fleet. Through this partnership, Lancaster is supporting AVTA as our energy customer, and AVTA is supporting the city’s electrification efforts. We’ve also installed, over the past year, 30 public electric vehicle charging stations, available 24/7, and half of them are free for use. “We are also developing a new incentive program with our local auto dealers, scheduled to launch in September, which will offer cash discounts for purchasing electric vehicles. So, if you’re a Lancaster Energy Choice customer, we’re going to give you a discount voucher and, on top of that, the auto dealers are going to provide their own discount to bring the total purchase cost down. We think that’s going to help incentivize people to adopt electric vehicles. As a department of the City of Lancaster, we have $300,000 set aside to roll out this pilot program. We have modeled this after a program created by a northern California CCA - Sonoma Clean Energy’s ‘Drive Evergreen.’ Sonoma offered an incentive voucher discount and their auto dealers saw the electric vehicle sales increase by 50 percent. “Another project opportunity we have on tap is through the California Energy Commission. Lancaster was a recipient of the EPIC (Electric Program Investment Charge) Grant for Advanced Energy Community. We successfully completed Phase One in 2018, and we recently received Phase Two funding of $5 million to deploy a designed Advanced Energy Community. The idea of the EPIC grant is to design innovative energy projects and programs that can be easily replicated and rolled out to other communities and cities to move everybody towards a renewable energy future. “We came up with a few programs and one of them is called The Green District, which provides battery storage for our commercial customers at no cost to them. In fact, they’ll get incentive payments to be a site host. Lancaster Choice Energy will own and control those batteries that we put on those commercial businesses and all of those batteries can be aggregated into a virtual power plant. The draw for the business customer is savings on their energy, savings on their use from the grid, LANCASTER , CAL I FORNI A CLEANER POWER, AFFORDABLE RATES, AND LOCAL CONTROL. Lancaster Choice Energy is putting the YOU back in utility. www.LancasterChoiceEnergy.com 844.288.4523