A Boston-based energy nonprofit announced Tuesday it’s helping a pair of San Diego community organizations by issuing grants that totaled $684,000 for the groups to purchase electric vehicles.
Citizens Energy Corporation donated four Ford F-150 Lightning trucks to San Diego Canyonlands, a nonprofit that restores natural habitats in canyons and creeks across the country.
The brush, waste and other debris “that we pull up, we take it with the trucks to the dump yard and dispose of it,” said Clayton Tschudy, executive director of Canyonlands. “It also takes our tools out” to various clean-up sites.
The donation comes to roughly $265,000 and expands the number of vehicles in Canyonlands’ fleet from three to seven.
“It’s a big deal for us in terms of our capacity,” Tschudy. “And it also means we’re not burning fossil fuels, so as an environmental organization it’s very important for us.”
Citizens Energy also funded six Kia Niro SUVs and two electric transit vans to the Neighborhood House Association, which provides programs such as early childhood and youth development, healthcare, senior services around the San Diego area.
The grant for the six SUVs and two vans came to $419,000.
“The vehicles are a needed extension of our ‘Go Green Initiative,’ an agencywide effort to increase efficiency and lower our carbon footprint,” Neighborhood House Association CEO Rudy Johnson, said in a statement, adding his organization delivers nearly a million meals and travels more than 90,000 miles each year.
The Citizens Energy grants come out of the profits the company earns from its investments in high-voltage transmission lines, including San Diego Gas & Electric’s 230-kilovolt Sycamore-Peñasquitos line that runs for about 14 miles and connects two substations in the area.
“We’ll partner with a developer like San Diego Gas & Electric, we finance a portion of our project, but our promise is that we give away at least 50% of our profits back to the communities” where the infrastructure is located, particularly low-income areas, said Joe Kennedy III, president of Citizens Energy.
Kennedy is the son of the founder and chairman of Citizens Energy, Joseph P. Kennedy II, the eldest son of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
Launched in 1979, the company invests in the wind, solar, battery storage, microgrid and high-voltage transmission industries.
“The real power of the partnership that Citizens has is a long-term commitment to communities,” Kennedy said after the grants were announced at a news conference at Azalea Park in City Heights on Tuesday morning. “It’s not a one-and-done thing.”
Kennedy said Citizens has about 50 similar programs with communities across the country, including Massachusetts, New York, Georgia and transmission-line related projects elsewhere in California.
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