Faces of EBCE — Melissa Brandt

Melissa Brandt is on Zoom again, where she has spent much of the past year, and she is fired up.

As Senior Director of Public Policy and Deputy General Counsel, she represents EBCE in state regulatory and legislative proceedings, and the ongoing struggles have kept her busy.

“Our biggest challenge is when people question our fundamental right to exist and perform as our communities intend us to,” she says, with frustration in her voice. “Our ability to do that is constantly threatened and eroded. That’s what we spend our energy on.”

“What I’d rather be doing is working on our positive role for the state and for the energy transition. We need innovation, and I think CCAs need to be understood as powerful agents of change in helping the state meet its goals.”

Brandt has herself become an agent of change, pushing the envelope for new policies to enable a smooth transition to a clean energy future.

PUBLIC SERVICE FROM DAY ONE

Brandt came to EBCE after a decade at PG&E, a stint with federal agencies in Washington, DC, and a stellar academic career.

After studying environmental science at U.C. Berkeley, she collected joint degrees from Columbia Law and Harvard’s public policy school in 2004, then headed off to the corridors of power.

“I went to DC to change the world, like every new grad,” she says. “To create good public policy and help people.”

She started as a Presidential Management Fellow at the Bureau of Land Management, where she used dispute resolution techniques to solve land management conflicts. “The goal was to engage communities to create more buy-in and less suing,” she recalls.

After a short stint at the State Department, her interest in international environmental issues led her to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where she spent a year working on the budgets for the climate change science, weather, and satellite programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as well as the budget for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

But being a small part of the huge DC bureaucracy left her unsatisfied. An opening at PG&E negotiating carbon offset contracts fortuitously combined her previous work on negotiation and on climate change and gave her the chance to come home to California.

Over the next decade, she moved around the company, with six different roles altogether. After negotiating first-of-their-kind carbon offset contacts, she took her negotiation and contract skills over to energy procurement, helping with renewable energy contracts. The next big thing was cap and trade, so she shifted to a role making sure that the company understood the climate regulations, and that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) made the regulations workable.

Her move to the regulatory department allowed her to have different portfolios. She ended up leading the regulatory team focused on customer programs and rates, dealing with distributed energy resources, net metering, energy efficiency, and other behind-the-meter policies.

CROSSING OVER

In 2017, a new opportunity emerged, working for the community choice energy provider in her backyard — East Bay Community Energy.

“I was looking at other community-based options but this was a good opportunity to take on a leadership position and return to public service roots and help the community,” she says.

Coming to EBCE from PG&E was a dramatic shift for Brandt, given the animosity that marked the early years of community choice aggregation.

Brandt became employee #6 at EBCE.

“My first day I had to figure out what my job was going to do,” she says. “There was no manual!”

Brandt now manages a small public policy team that engages in regulatory issues at the state utility commission, energy agency, air regulator, and grid operator. Brandt herself takes the lead on issues at the legislature.

“After so many years of working in big organizations it feels good to be hands-on, making things happen day today,” she says.

DIFFERENCES AND FRUSTRATIONS

Brandt certainly has no bad feelings about her time at PG&E, but she thinks that customer service is naturally more deeply embedded in EBCE’s mission.

“We are a government agency and the wellbeing of our community is primary,” she says. “Clean air and low-carbon power are important to our local citizens. Low rates are a form of local investment. Our board internalizes the role of consumer advocate, and we play that role for customers at the PUC.”

“We can also create local programs that are more nimble and responsive. We can talk to communities, find what they need, test things and see what works, and expand on them. We are more able to do that than PG&E, which is larger and therefore less able to tailor its programs to local needs.”

Indeed, EBCE offers a growing number of local programs, promoting solar and storage, electric vehicles, and building electrification, along with community grants and sponsorships. EBCE showed its ability to be nimble in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing funds to local organizations.

What gets Brandt frustrated now is when regulators put barriers in front of CCAs, such as by limiting the value of CCA investments in clean and local products or failing to ensure that CCA customers have the same access to socialized program funds and benefits as the investor-owned utility customers enjoy. Such conflicts are the latest expression of a fundamental change that has yet to fully sink in with some state officials. The massive growth of CCAs — now serving over 11 million customers in 200 cities, towns, and counties — has upended California’s energy policy.

“The CPUC is used to regulating a very different entity,” Brandt says. “EBCE has a board of elected officials, and the board is directly accountable to the voters. They’ll be voted out if they raise rates too much or don’t take action on climate change. We would like to see more trust in the capability of CCA boards, especially since elected officials make decisions on infrastructure investments and budgets all the time.”

But Brandt sees attitudes shifting as CCAs mature, especially in the legislature. She hopes that will permeate the regulatory arena, and let EBCE get down to the work it was created to do.

“We are starting to show results with our energy projects and programs, demonstrating that we are contributing in a very real way to California’s clean energy future.”