Conference Agenda

Agents subject to regulation occasionally perform above and beyond the minimum imposed standard; this voluntary overcompliance can be especially important in the context of climate change mitigation, where each agent’s additional contributions benefit society by reducing cumulative damages from emissions. I study the case of California, which has both aggressive decarbonization regulation and high participation in voluntary green power providers called Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs). I find that CCAs procure more green power for their customers than is required, that higher income and pro-environmental political attitudes are strong predictors of selection into CCAs, and that measures of higher willingness-to-pay for decarbonized power among communities correlate with higher voluntary green procurement. However, in assessing CCAs’ impacts on statewide decarbonization progress, I find that CCAs amount to a reshuffling of voluntary greenness rather than statewide additionality. This is because California’s incumbent utilities were already engaged in voluntary green procurement prior to large-scale CCA entry. After CCAs began serving a larger proportion of statewide load, stagnation or backsliding in other parts of the sector occurred, such that the state performed 5% above the RPS in 2017 but 0% above it in 2022, while CCA load share grew from 2% to 21% of statewide sales in the same timeframe. I also provide evidence that CCAs’ elevated levels of renewable energy are mostly attributable to resources originally procured on behalf of other incumbents, such that CCAs fare no better than other types of retailers at adding new renewable generators to the system on a per-kWh basis. These findings suggest that the primary effect of voluntary green power is to affect the distribution rather than the overall magnitude of decarbonization.