In 2022, the Claremont City Council acted according to the city’s stated values. It voted to enroll in the Clean Power Alliance’s (CPA) 100% Green Power Plan. CPA is a community choice aggregator: a non-profit that allows its customers to select from multiple combinations of energy sources. Customers who enroll in CPA’s 100% Green Power Plan receive electricity associated with zero (literally zero) pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.

Peer institutions like Pepperdine University and the UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center have taken the right step and partnered with CPA, drastically cutting their emissions. The non-profit currently procures energy for more than three million residents in 38 communities, but when the City of Claremont opted in, the Claremont Colleges opted out. Wait, what?!

Climate change is a daunting reality. Creating alternatives to fossil fuel dependency is intimidating. But if the Claremont Colleges want to make good on their professed ethos of environmental and social consciousness, the role they must play is simple. This fall, as CPA prices become more competitive, facilities directors and Chief Financial Officers must transition our energy purchasing away from Southern California Edison’s (SCE) dirty and obscurely-sourced electricity to the CPA’s 100% Green Power Plan. We have another chance to make the right choice, but only if decision-makers know you care.

Our utility company, SCE, sources a mere 37 percent of renewable energy. As a result, our colleges consume a lot of fossil fuels: 491 pounds of CO2 flow into the atmosphere for every thousand kilowatt hours of electricity consumed by our college. Every year, our switch to CPA’s Green Power Plan would reduce CO2 emissions by a degree equivalent to the annual energy consumption of over 1,800 US households.

The colleges’ complacency in continuing business with SCE enables the company to prolong its fossil fuel dependence until 2045, per California’s net-zero goal. While SCE bides its time and our colleges fail to act, California will face the consequences. By 2050, Californians will experience a daily maximum temperature rise of 4.4°F-5.8°F. Fossil fuel extraction, processing, transport and combustion will continue to pollute air and water, while majority-people of color and low-income communities bear the brunt of the burden. 

As the Trump administration strips renewable energy incentives and greenlights fossil fuel projects, our college administrations could comply, or they can resist. SCE faces multiple tens-of-million dollar lawsuits that allege faulty SCE power lines contributed to the 2025 LA fires amidst a “troubling pattern of negligence resulting in death [and] destruction.” 

Why are the Claremont Colleges cooperating with energy companies that profit from us while destroying our environment and our communities? 

Considering the consortium’s stated commitments to social responsibility and environmental sustainability, we envision the shift away from fossil fuels and cutting ties with SCE’s dirty energy at the Claremont Colleges as a form of economic and social justice. 

When we invest in fossil fuels, we trap ourselves in multi-decade life cycles incompatible with state-outlined emissions goals and marked by volatile prices. Short-term, we ignore that dirty energy simply passes emissions to another part of the economy, transferring long-term costs at multiples while endangering livelihoods. Neglecting the consequences of our actions because they seem to fall beyond job titles and their reflection schedules is neither socially nor financially responsible. 

To be clear, we appreciate that facilities staff and sustainability officers coordinate creative solutions to reduce consumption and engage students, all while keeping our campuses running. Their hard work is undeniable and impactful. However, their efforts can only serve as band-aids while our college administrations struggle to take systemic action.

As it stands, Pomona intends to meet its 2030 carbon neutrality goal by escalating investment in carbon offset companies, known for their lack of accountability and preference for growth over the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous people, tenants and workers. 

For perspective, in fiscal year 2025, electricity emissions were responsible for 29 percent of Pomona’s carbon footprint. That’s the largest share of emissions, with air travel representing 26 percent and natural gas at 21 percent. Can we really reconcile CMC’s 2050 carbon neutrality goal with its plans to double its campus size? Meanwhile, Scripps and Pitzer have yet to finalize a clear plan to reach zero emissions, or even carbon neutrality. Mudd has made investments in solar power but lacks a clear path to further change. 

In our classes, we talk about climate change and our responsibility to address it. How can we use this rhetoric while we prepare to act like Shell and Amazon, making small short-term investments in carbon offsets so that we can keep powering our commitment to business-as-usual?

As of September 2025, the initial switch to 100 percent renewable energy meant an 8 percent increase in the utilities bill, split between the six colleges that purchase electricity together (Keck Graduate Institution purchases its energy separately). That put the Colleges’ total energy bill at $13,897,822 per year: 33 percent for Pomona, 18 percent for Claremont McKenna, 13 percent for Scripps, 12 percent for Harvey Mudd, 11 percent for Pitzer, 7 percent for the Claremont Colleges Services and 6 percent for Claremont Graduate University. 

But SCE keeps hiking prices. Over the past 10 years, SCE electricity rates have risen by an average of 8.2 percent per year. As recently as earlier this month, SCE announced plans to further increase residential rates by 10 percent. When those rates were hiked on October 1, costs went up by closer to 13 percent, further emphasizing the volatility of SCE’s energy. 

Since the Claremont Colleges received their initial estimate on clean energy purchasing in May 2022, the cost difference between embracing renewable energy with CPA and maintaining the status quo with SCE decreased by 7 percent, down from 15 percent. And with the latest rate hikes, that number will be smaller, making the Colleges’ decision to switch to renewables even easier.

Across the country, a growing number of jurisdictions are joining community choice aggregators to challenge their role as passive consumers of energy. They are challenging the dominance — and the whims — of investor-owned utility services like SCE. They are committing to funding the growth of renewable energy today, rather than waiting in hopes that local utilities meet the insufficiently ambitious and more uncertain state renewable energy deadlines. 

After months of discussions with key stakeholders — facilities directors, sustainability directors, students, faculty, energy experts and more — we believe that this drastic emissions reduction would be a meaningful step in our transition away from fossil fuel dependency. While it is by no means a perfect solution, climate action is incremental, not all-or-nothing. The catastrophe is complacency.

Everyone here has a responsibility to support our shift to renewable energy, but we expect key decision-makers to set an example for students and treat these commitments like the serious obligations that they are, not marketing tools that can be obscured or extended indefinitely. By choosing climate action today, our colleges can be leaders in higher education. Join us — tell our administrators that you care. Sign the petition to switch our electricity purchasing and commit to 100 percent renewable energy.

• Learn more about community choice aggregators + check out SoCal Edison and Clean Power Alliance power content labels
• See our full presentation
• June 2025 CPA cost and energy estimates for the Claremont Colleges

Questions? Comments? Want to join the effort? We’d love to have you! 

Contact 5cenvirojustice@gmail.com and/or follow us on Instagram: @5cenvirojustice.