California Clean Energy Ownership Initiative

The Strategic Opportunity

California's energy affordability crisis is colliding with a wave of new data-center demand— creating public backlash but also a rare policy opening. By requiring data centers to pay their fair share of grid costs, we can redirect capital to community solar, reducing rates and protecting ratepayers from the cost-allocation logic utilities have wielded against solar ownership.

Our goal is a genuinely clean grid — not a fossil-fueled one built to meet AI's timeline. Data centers are already locking in high-emission power to move fast. Distributed solar is the affordability hedge we control today — it's the clean energy resource we can deploy at the speed and scale this moment demands.

Our Approach

01 Develop rigorous legal and data analysis on how clean-energy ownership can help solve the energy affordability crisis — building the evidentiary foundation for legislation.
02 Develop targeted policy advocacy — simultaneously advancing the DEPP Act and building the coalition to scale distributed ownership statewide.

Why This Coalition Wins

Fiscal conservatives	skeptical of IOU monopoly cost-shifting
Housing & renters' rights advocates	seeking bill relief
TPO providers & financiers	aligned against utility arguments
Clean energy, labor & local government	as coalitions
Tribal & low-income communities	as direct beneficiaries

01 Track

Data & Legal Foundation

"Make AI Data Centers Pay Their Fair Share — and Solar and Ratepayers Win Too" A Legal and Data Analysis of Utility Cost Allocation & the Path to Affordable Clean Energy

This report builds the evidentiary foundation and answers the legal and economic questions regulators, legislators, and opponents will raise. It:

Quantifies California data-center load growth and the associated grid costs (transmission, distribution, and generation) and how those costs are socialized to ratepayers through volumetric rate design
Deconstructs the cost-shift argument by isolating the real drivers of California rate increases: IOU capital expenditures, wildfire mitigation, authorized return on equity, and holding-company profit margins
Surveys state and federal laws requiring large energy users to offset demand with distributed or renewable generation
Maps underutilized distribution capacity between substations and end users, cross-referenced with CAISO interconnection queue signals, to identify optimal sites for distributed solar deployment
Provides a 25-year cost model comparing solar-owning and non-solar households, incorporating rate trajectories, equipment costs, and available financing structures
Releases all data, models, and code open-source for independent verification

02 Track

Policy Action

Policy Item 1

Distributed Energy Participation Program (DEPP) Act

Primary legislation — SolarWAVE Action takes the lead.

The DEPP Act creates a voluntary, market-driven program that solves California's energy affordability crisis by channeling data-center capital directly into community solar — with no new taxes or utility rate increases.

The program connects data centers needing fast, reliable energy supply with communities needing affordable solar. It works through private contracts and public-private partnerships, and creates tangible benefits for data centers, host sites, community members, and local energy agencies alike.

Policy Item 2

Data-Center Feed-In Tariff Bill

Supporting role — parallel legislative vehicle.

Support third-party effort routing data-center load onto clean energy through a Feed-In Tariff legislative approach.