Open Letter to Irvine City Council: Time Will Not Fix OCPA
The problems at the Orange County Power Authority (OCPA) are systemic — shared by all community choice aggregators (CCAs) — because CCAs use many of the same high-paid consultants promoting the same so-called “best practices.”
Four of these “best practices” mirror unscrupulous practices notoriously employed by Enron, in the run-up to its multi-billion-dollar bankruptcy 20 years ago:
1. OCPA games the California electricity grid via Resource Adequacy (RA) for financial gain while putting its ratepayers at risk of blackouts.
2. Mirroring Enron behavior, OCPA takes the monetary savings from each Irvine ratepayer and transfers them to OCPA’s own accounts through a price-manipulation practice known as “benchmarking.”
3. Reminiscent of Enron, OCPA declines to open all of its energy books to public scrutiny, denying consumers independent verification of just how much brown power (gas-fired) is being delivered.
4. Mayor Khan sought to eliminate “greenwashing” with Renewable Energy Certificates. But, similar to Enron’s gaming, OCPA is heavily engaged in greenwashing.
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