What the PCIA is
The Power Charge Indifference Adjustment (PCIA) is the exit fee paid by customers of Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs) and Direct Access providers. Its purpose is indifference: customers who depart utility bundled service should neither escape the costs of generation the utility procured on their behalf nor subsidize the customers who remain — and, equally, bundled customers should not be left carrying costs that departed load fairly owes.
CLECA is unusual in this debate because it has members on both sides of it — some taking bundled utility service and others served through Direct Access or a CCA — so the organization loses from any allocation error in either direction. That makes CLECA a genuinely even-handed advocate: it does not seek to advantage departed load at bundled customers' expense, or the reverse. CLECA supports reasonable PCIA reform — reform that makes the methodology more accurate, transparent, and verifiable — provided it achieves true indifference between bundled and unbundled (Direct Access and CCA) customers rather than shifting cost from one group to the other.
Alongside that, CLECA supports Direct Access and expanded customer choice options. Direct Access is capped in California and is not open to every customer that would choose it, so CLECA advocates to preserve and expand these choice options — and to ensure that the exit fee accompanying departure is set at the level that makes remaining and departing customers whole, no higher and no lower.
Vintaging and D.18-10-019
The institutional precedent CLECA cites most often in PCIA work is D.18-10-019, the decision modifying the PCIA methodology that established vintaging — assigning departing customers cost responsibility according to when they left. That decision appears in thirty-six CLECA filings, the third-most-cited authority in the association's entire record, and it was built on a robust record in R.17-06-026 that included five days of evidentiary hearings.
CLECA's substantive positions follow from it: oppose shifting trueup costs from departing load to bundled customers; oppose CalCCA's claim that PCIA-paying load-serving entities are entitled to proportional access to utility-procured Resource Adequacy resources; and require that any change to the Market Price Benchmark calculation apply prospectively, not to historical trueups.
The stakes of implementation detail are not small. In the 2019 brown-power trueup dispute, CLECA calculated that the utilities' interpretation of the PCIA decision was worth a $13 million refund to departing load at SCE and a $122 million reduction at PG&E — and it noted that pre-2009 Direct Access customers had by then been paying the PCIA for almost twenty years. CLECA has also pressed for data access and workpaper transparency so that PCIA rates can actually be verified by the parties who pay them.
A sunset, not an expansion
In the current ERRA reform proceeding, R.25-02-005, CLECA supported including a PCIA sunset concept in the Track 2 scope. The argument is structural: a charge designed for a transitional period should at some point be wound down rather than expanded indefinitely. CLECA has also argued in that docket that retroactive changes to the RA Market Price Benchmark would improperly roll back rates already approved in the 2025 ERRA forecast decisions, D.24-12-038 and D.24-12-039, and that Track 3 PCIA reforms must be coordinated with Slice of Day implementation.
Direct Access and SB 237
CLECA has long supported retail choice for large customers. When SB 237 raised the Direct Access cap by 4,000 gigawatt-hours — roughly two percent of statewide load — CLECA moved to become a party to the implementing rulemaking, R.19-03-009, supported prompt implementation, and advocated accelerating the second phase of the expansion to June 2020. CLECA has since petitioned in the same docket on the electric service provider procurement framework as it has matured through the IRP proceedings.
The consistent principle across the Direct Access and PCIA work is symmetry: CLECA supports Direct Access and expanded customer choice, and neither bundled nor departed customers should pay for the other's service.