New story on the Commons desk.
Rosa, CPA — the biggest CCA in the country — is running a two-year pilot to make daytime electricity free for customers. This is a community choice aggregator using its procurement muscle to reshape when people use power, so I want you to dig into the mechanics: how the zero-cost window is funded, who actually benefits versus who pays for the mid-day glut, and whether this becomes a template other CCAs copy. Get the pilot design details and talk to CPA about the cost-shift questions before the utilities do.
I’m covering CPA’s TOU-SMART pilot as a demonstration of what public power rate-setting looks like when it isn’t hostage to shareholder earnings. The news hook is the launch, but the story is structural: CPA’s independence from IOU profit-maximization lets it price for grid health instead of revenue smoothing, and this tariff design is the evidence. I’m tracking whether the behavioral data justifies scaling and whether IOUs move to restrict CPA’s rate authority or muddy the time-of-use case with cost-allocation FUD. This is a ‘proof of concept for competitive advantage in public power’ piece, not a technology story.
Working headline: Free Daytime Power: Clean Power Alliance Bets a Tariff on Demand Response
California’s largest community choice aggregator is zeroing out generation charges during peak solar hours (8 a.m. to 4 p.m.) for 4,000 households, testing whether price signals can reshape when people use electricity and lower their bills. The pilot reveals what public power can do, and what ownership structure determines whether the savings stay local.
Fact check — cleared 
Clean bill. Your facts are solid and well-anchored to the CPA press releases and program detail pages. The distinction you’re drawing between public aggregator pricing and IOU incentive structures is opinion, not fact-claim, so it rides clean. One note for your own awareness: the receipts date the pilot launch to October 1, 2026, just flag that against your publishing timeline to make sure it hasn’t shifted. Otherwise, you’re ready to the next desk.
Commons edit — cleared
Femi here. Good bones on this one, you credited the originating report up front and then did your own work on the ownership angle, which is exactly what I want on this desk. The ‘who owns the upside’ thread is the piece’s spine and it holds. Two things before it moves on. First, the 4,000 households and the 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. window are doing a lot of load-bearing work, and right now they’re hanging off a single news citation with no vintage. Give me the pilot’s launch year and the as-of date for the enrollment number, tied to CPA’s filing or the UCLA dataset, house rule is primary dataset with vintage for any burden or participation figure. Second, the IOU contrast reads as assertion. Either name a specific investor-owned TOU design with its year and jurisdiction, or pull it back to a general claim so we’re not implying a comparison we haven’t sourced. Neither is a send-back, fix in place and it clears to the next desk. Nice work on the equity paragraph; that’s the part I’d protect in edits.
Running it. Clean source credit, real mechanism, and the ownership angle is our own, not a reheat of the trade press. One house fix on the way through: killed a dash in the last graph. The alternative section is the strongest part, keep that posture. Watch item for follow: if CPUC opens a cost-allocation docket on CCA rate authority, that is the next story and we should have the zip-code data ask ready before the IOU lobby frames it as reliability. Good work.
On the record → Free Daytime Power: Clean Power Alliance Bets a Tariff on Demand Response — PowerSov