PG&E provides customer information to RCEA. When you use electricity service, usage data is collected via PG&E’s metering systems (including the SmartMeter system).

In order to provide greater security for you on RCEA’s website, you may be asked to submit personal information such as your RCEA account number, your PG&E account number, name, address, phone number and email address. You may also be asked to submit additional personal information or financial information in order to use certain specific services. Our goal is to protect all information you provide us on the website, as set forth in this Privacy Policy. To that end, we have provided 128 bit encryption on this website with an SSL certificate (TLS 1.2).

We use customer information to administer your account and inform you about your energy usage, as well as to manage, provide, and improve our services and business operations including data management and customer service.

We use this information to generate the RCEA charges on your customer billing statement and to communicate with you about specific programs or opportunities offered by RCEA that may help you to lower your energy usage or realize other benefits. We may also aggregate data about your electric usage with other users in various formats so that the data becomes anonymous and cannot be identified directly with you.

For instance, aggregated data could be a summary of total energy usage for all homes and businesses in a certain geographic area or climate. Aggregated data is not subject to privacy restrictions and is used by us to manage, provide, and improve our services and business operations.

We ask you to provide personal information when you access customer services offered on the website, and that information enables us to provide you with better service. We may use this information to contact you to respond to an inquiry that you send to RCEA or to keep you informed about RCEA and its services. If you choose email as an approved method for communicating with us, then we will generally use your email to communicate with you.

In order to provide you with services offered on our website, or to complete transactions requested by you on the website, we may transfer you to outside services provided by third-party operators. In certain instances, the third-party content may be shown in such a way that it appears that you are still on RCEA’s website. In such cases, we will have agreements with those third parties where they agree to maintain the confidentiality of your personal information and to use it only to help us serve you.

Other than for the exceptions noted in the above section, it is RCEA’s policy to not release personal information about you to any other person or business entity without your prior written consent. Written consent may be obtained electronically.

 

We collect information about our website, such as the number of visitors to the website and the number of users that click on certain links or use certain services. For some applications, such as rate analysis, we link usage information with the customer visiting the website. We use industry standard software to create summary statistics of the usage data we collect, which may then be used to highlight what our visitors find interesting, to improve the website design and usability, to identify system performance issues, or for other internal purposes.

An Internet Protocol (“IP”) address is a number automatically assigned to your computer every time you browse the Internet. When you visit the website, our servers log your current IP address. We may use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our servers and to administer the website. Your IP address is not tied to your personal information and we do not use it to identify you when logging IP address data except to provide content to you.

When you visit the website, our server may create cookies , which are small files placed on your computer, making it easier for you to use the website by verifying when you travel from page to page. The data we collect on website usage from cookies is not tied to your personal information and we only use it in a collective form. We do not sell or transfer the data we obtain from cookies for any purpose other than to evaluate website usage or provide utility services to you, or to contact you to offer programs and/or services that you may be interested in.

While browsing the website, you may encounter and choose to access other third-party operated websites or online services through hypertext links. These third-party websites may send their own cookies to you, log your IP address, and otherwise collect data or personal information about you and your online activities. RCEA does not control and is not responsible for what third parties do in connection with their websites or online services, or how they handle your personal information. Please use caution and consult the privacy policies posted on each third-party website for further information.

Once you log in to RCEA’s online services, any account information you enter (or that is displayed on our website in your browser window) is secured using an industry standard security technology known as Secure Sockets Layer (“SSL”). By using SSL, we attempt to protect the confidentiality of your personal and financial information. Your browser must be capable of supporting SSL. Please check with your browser manufacturer for details.

RCEA may share customer data with contractors and vendors for purposes of providing you services and operating our programs. In these cases, we require that the contractors or vendors agree to only use customer data for program operational purposes and to protect it under the same confidentiality and privacy standards that we apply to our own employees and operations. RCEA does not release personal customer information for any other reason without your prior written consent, except as described below. RCEA does not sell or provide personal customer information to third parties for their commercial benefit. RCEA shares customer data on a continuing basis with its service providers, which currently include:
• The Energy Authority
• Calpine Energy Solutions
• Times Printing

RCEA maintains customer-specific energy usage and billing information for only as long as is reasonably necessary. As a general policy, we collect and retain personal information in minimal quantities and for limited periods of time such that are reasonably necessary to provide electric services to you. State law requires all public records to be retained for a minimum of two years with retention time periods of variable lengths thereafter, depending on the record. RCEA has chosen to follow the schedule of typical retention periods for administrative records as detailed in Attachment A of the California Secretary of State’s Local Government Records Management Guidelines.

We will notify you annually with an on-bill message to guide you to the most updated version of this Customer Confidentiality Policy, made available on our website. Between these notification periods, we will also notify you of any changes to this Customer Confidentiality Policy through communications on our website, www.redwoodenergy.org, including how to obtain prior versions of this Privacy Policy upon request.

If you have questions, concerns, or would like to view your disclosed information, please contact:
Richard Engel, Director of Power Resources
Redwood Coast Energy Authority
633 Third Street
Eureka, CA 95501
rengel@redwoodenergy.org
(707) 269-1700 ext. 354

We share our customers’ concern that children’s privacy is important. We do not monitor the age of users of the website. However, if you are under the age of 18, you should not submit personal information on the website or any websites without the consent of your parent or guardian.