In Mountain View, city officials have described the new community-choice start-up as the most effective tool available to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions. Despite its potential, remarkably few people so far know about the program -- Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian described it as "the best-kept secret in the county."

Early adopters, including Marin and Sonoma counties, demonstrated they could offer similar energy packages to PG&E at a savings to ratepayers. Additionally, these programs also empowered local authorities to swiftly boost the amount of renewable energy available for consumers.

The idea was legally sanctioned by the state Legislation in 2002; however, jump-starting the program has taken years, in part due to challenges from PG&E.

The South Bay utility partnership is operating under a new program known as community-choice energy. This initiative -- gaining ground in communities across the state -- pools local households together to buy power on the energy market, giving customers new leverage to find cost savings or promote renewable sources of energy.

Officials from Mountain View and nearly a dozen other South Bay cities met for the first time last week to launch a new local energy utility that would rival Pacific Gas & Electric. The new agency -- dubbed the Silicon Valley Clean Energy Partnership -- still has a long way to go before it begins feeding electricity to local residents, but the coming months will involve a string of formative decisions on how the nascent utility will source its power.

Pooling money from its members, the South Bay utility is starting out with a budget of just over $2 million that will go almost entirely toward hiring staff and consultants to begin plotting a strategy. Early on, the clean-energy partnership will rely heavily on staffing from its member cities. In the partnership's inaugural meeting, members agreed to a $225,000 contract with Sunnyvale for administrative and financial services, and a $155,000 contract with Cupertino for community outreach and human resources.

"The cost of renewables is going down as their efficiency is improving with every passing day; I see them as key to our future," he said. "The world's going to change. You have to plan for the long haul but in planning for that, there's also going to be changes that we can't predict."

Perhaps its most crucial decision of all, the new energy partnership will need to make purchases on the power market and choose whether to aim for cost savings or higher-priced renewable energy. In all likelihood, local cities will work to create a menu of options that would give individual households the choice to pay extra to lower their carbon footprint.

"When this is available, it will be a wholly new choice," he said. "We need to make sure we reach out to the community and explain the benefits of community-choice energy."

"It's exciting; it's new; it's innovative. I'm glad to see the region is going this direction," he said. "This is really exciting news."

The dozen board members governing the new agency voted last week to elect Mountain View City Councilman John McAlister as the interim chairman. In an interview, McAlister said that he would likely be replaced by a permanent board chair at the next meeting.

Mountain View city staff have been working on behalf of the new agency to secure new funding, possibly through a bank loan. A staff report noted that the new energy partnership would need up to $15 million for its initial power-supply purchase. Options for borrowing this sum could be presented to the utility's board next month.

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