OAKLAND — By this time next year, those monthly bills with PG&E’s blue and gold logo will be a thing of the past in much of Alameda County.

There will still be monthly power bills, though. They just should be a little bit smaller, for one, and they’ll likely sport another color scheme, as Oakland goes green and the county adopts the Community Choice Aggregation Program.

At its Nov. 29 meeting, the City Council endorsed Councilman Dan Kalb and Mayor Libby Schaaf’s motion to sign onto the Community Choice Aggregation Program to end PG&E’s monopoly in much of Alameda County’s energy market.

The community choice program, envisioned to begin in a year’s time, promises to provide cleaner energy at a lower price than what’s available through PG&E, and provide hundreds of local jobs.

The proposal to sign onto the community choice planning process won 8-0 support from the council after 10 public speakers made their opinions known. There was not a dissenting voice to be heard.

With the council’s backing, and that of Hayward earlier in the evening, the community choice now has the county and 11 of its 14 cities, with only Pleasanton and Newark yet to get on board. The city of Alameda already has its own municipal power agency.

It is still a long way to the state’s goal to reduce greenhouse gases by a third by 2020 and by 50 percent by 2030, but the city is winning accolades for its efforts.

Ratings developed by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy ranked Oakland sixth among the 50 largest U.S. cities in the country for energy efficiency.

“The CCA is the single biggest action any city can take to address the climate change impacts of energy,” said Daniel Hamilton, the city’s sustainability manager.

Oakland has been down this road before, though. In 2005 the council agreed to look into a similar program, but four years later decided it was not feasible.

With renewable energy now less expensive, Alameda County on board, and the near-unanimous adoption of the plan by most cities in the county, the anticipated participation level of 90 percent is many times more than what is needed for the project to pencil out financially, Hamilton said in an email.

In 2014, the county took up the mantel, with Kalb representing Oakland on the 39-member steering committee.

Four scenarios will be considered once the new agency’s board of directors is seated in January. Those include: 1) only meeting the state’s minimum level of greenhouse gas reductions — 33 percent less by 2020, 50 percent less by 2030; 2) hitting a 50 percent reduction in the first year; 3) hitting 50 percent the first year and 80 percent by the fifth; or 4) reducing greenhouses gases by 50 percent in the first year and generating half of the agency’s renewable energy within the county by 2030 instead of buying it on the open market.

The options promise to create 165 to 579 full-time jobs, according to Hamilton’s presentation to the council. The majority of those jobs would be in the installation and maintenance of clean energy sources such as solar photovoltaic systems, he told the Tribune.

The communities served by the new power agency, the East Bay Clean Energy Authority, would be proportionately represented in its board of directors. At 25 percent of the customer base, Oakland is the biggest piece of the puzzle, and so also would have the loudest voice in the room, Hamilton said.

Individual customers, or the city as a whole, retain the ability to opt out of the plan before the power starts flowing, and can expect to receive three mailings describing the various processes for doing so, Hamilton said.

The agency’s localized management is expected to provide more public accountability than PG&E does, along with cleaner energy and jobs, according to Hamilton and a report by Oakland Director of Public Works Brooke Levin. It will cost individual Oakland customers an estimated $81 less a year, for a citywide savings of $20-$24 million a year, they said.

Oakland city government alone would cut $530,000 off its $7.58 million annual electricity cost, Hamilton said.

Those savings factor into estimates of hundreds of additional jobs promised beyond the 165 to 579 directly related to the project itself.

Levin’s report estimated 1,322 to 1,617 jobs would be created, as energy cost savings work their way through the economy.

Hamilton pointed out there is also language in the Joint Powers Agreement that governs community choice operations to assist potentially displaced workers with transitioning to clean energy jobs, although the plan is expected to be a job creator.

Energy from the new system would be distributed through existing PG&E infrastructure, he said.

Community choice programs are already operating in San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin and Sonoma counties.

“I think it’ll produce tremendous benefits in many respects for all of us in Oakland,” Kalb told his colleagues.

Contact Mark Hedin at 501-293-2452, 408-759-2132 or mhedin@bayareanewsgroup.com.