The Agricultural Energy Consumers Association (AECA) represents the interests of more than 40,000 agricultural operations from Redding to San Diego. AECA members include the state’s leading agricultural associations, water agencies, farmers, ranchers, producers and food processors. AECA members share a common concern of ensuring affordable and reliable energy sources throughout California.

Controlling the rising costs of energy continues to be our primary goal.

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Key Issues

There are many state mandated programs and requirements that are rapidly increasing energy costs for California farming and food processing operations compared to the rest of the nation – making our business climate more challenging. In addition, increased reliance on water pumping continues to drive energy usage and cost.

AECA’s primary mission is simple and straight forward:

• Advocate for fair, just, reasonable, stable and competitive energy rates and policies.
• Encourage energy efficiency and renewable energy development.
• Educate the farming and food processing community on energy option and programs.

If left unchecked, California’s already expensive energy rates will continue to rise.

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Wins

AECA was formed more than 20 years ago by California farmers and ranchers concerned about rapidly rising energy rates and constantly changing rate structures and price signals.

AECA has been highly successful to date. A few of our major accomplishments include:

• Effectively advocating for fair and reasonable rates before the California Public Utilities Commission. To date, AECA’s rate setting efforts have saved agricultural and food processing customers over $1 billion.
• Creation of diesel-to-electric conversion programs (AG-ICE) to encourage voluntary deployment of cleaner and less expensive technologies.
• Gaining lower-cost agricultural rate eligibility for food processing and fiber processing customers.
• Creation and expansion of energy programs to encourage deployment of renewable energy by the state’s farms and food processing facilities.
• Leader in the development and expansion of the Self Generation Incentive Program (SGIP), Net-Energy Metering (NEM) and Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) programs to facilitate participation by agricultural enterprises.
• Passage of the landmark Senate Bill 1122 (Rubio) Bioenergy Incubation Program which provides power purchase contracts for 90 megawatts of small agricultural biogas and biomas projects.

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