In a June 27th report for the Green Energy Consumers Alliance, Larry Chretien and Mikaela Hondros-McCarthy underscore the upsides of Community Choice Aggregation, defined as “the process by which a city or town purchases its electricity in bulk on behalf of it community, including residential and commercial customers, often with the goal of reducing costs to ratepayers.” Across Massachusetts, 215 cities and towns (out of 315) currently have an aggregation plan in place.
Now, the authors report, the results are unequivocal: aggregation results in lower costs to consumers. “In particular, we looked at the 39 cities and towns that had between 5 and 11% additional renewable energy in their default product. We found that this cohort was able to stabilize their electricity costs over the past seven years and saved an average of 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in comparison to consumers on utility Basic Service. For the average household using 500-600 kWh per month, this equates to $138-$165 saved per year. If these savings per kWh were extrapolated to all residential households served by the investor-owned utilities (Eversource, National Grid, and Unitil), the savings would total about $350 million per year.”
This should convince cities and towns to enroll in a program to switch from a basic service or from a retail supplier.
“If your city or town does not have an aggregation, contact your municipal officials and ask them why not. Show them this blog and the reports from the Attorney General’s Office.
Finally, help us ban the retail electricity suppliers that prey on people. Green Energy Consumers Alliance, along with dozens of other community and environmental groups, support An Act relative to electric ratepayer protections, H.3534 and S.2255. This bill would protect people from these predatory companies by prohibiting third-party suppliers from signing contracts with residential customers.”
Read the full report.