Tập hợp lựa chọn cộng đồng

Lý lịch

CCA là một chương trình năng lượng đô thị được tiểu bang New York ủy quyền, cho phép các cộng đồng kết hợp sức mua của người tiêu dùng đồng thời cho phép bất kỳ cá nhân nào cũng có thể từ chối tham gia, để có được các điều khoản tốt hơn cho dịch vụ điện và/hoặc khí đốt. Được thành lập lần đầu tiên tại Massachusetts, hiện nay gần 2000 đô thị đang sử dụng CCA để phục vụ khoảng 10% dân số Hoa Kỳ tại New York, California, Ohio, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Illinois, Virginia, Rhode Island và Maryland. Trên khắp Hoa Kỳ, CCA được công nhận vì mang lại lợi ích tiết kiệm cho người tiêu dùng, đạt được mức năng lượng tái tạo cao hơn, xây dựng thêm nhiều nguồn năng lượng tái tạo và tăng cường tài trợ cho các dự án năng lượng tái tạo địa phương và khu vực. Năm 2024, sáu trong mười người Mỹ lựa chọn năng lượng xanh là khách hàng của CCA, và một nhóm gồm nửa tá CCA ở California là những nhà phát hành trái phiếu xanh lớn nhất tại Hoa Kỳ và đứng thứ mười trên thế giới.

Lịch sử

Paul Fenn, founder and president of Local Power, drafted both the nation's original version of CCA legislation, in Massachusetts, and its most advanced and powerful form in California. Local Power also developed original solar finance authority legislation approved at the municipal level to offer green bond financing to customer-owned renewables and efficiency. Originally designing CCA for a retail market in which municipalities would hire brokers to procure cheaper or greener power from wholesale suppliers, Fenn redesigned the policy for his home state California and won sponsorship of new "wholesale" CCA legislation, which was adopted during California's energy crisis in 2002. Writing and organizing support for Massachusetts' landmark CCA as a Climate Protection policy platform, he was disappointed with the "superficial" outcome of CCA in Massachusetts and Ohio in the late 1990's, in which CCAs narrowly focused on short-term discounts for small customers (saving on average 5-15%), ultimately delaying action on energy localization. In this early period, CCA had proven the superior economics of CCA over deregulation, but not changed the basic business model.

The new "wholesale" form of CCA for California put municipal programs into an "operational" role with CCA implementation. Based on his earlier experience, Fenn saw that rather than merely hiring a broker or wholesaler, California CCAs could handle and control more components of the energy service to make a longer-term approach to energy procurement possible. They could hire staff and contractors contractors for transmission scheduling, resource adequacy, data management and back office operators in addition to procurement planning, offering energy efficiency products and supervising renewable energy development. It was a new wireless kind of utility.

But getting California CCA to focus on localization required a new building block as well. Local Power had focused particularly on financing local renewables and efficiency there. Local Power founders Paul Fenn drafted, and Julia Peters led the successful campaign for San Francisco’s voter approved "Solar Bonds" in 2001 to augment his earlier law so that CCAs could not merely purchase grid power but finance and install customer-owned local renewables and energy efficiency. The Proposition H Bond, Solar Bond, was passed by voters in 2001.

The next ten years witnessed the progressive marriage of Solar Bonds with CCA into a whole new model for energy - "CCA 2.0." This led to the formation by Paul Fenn and Julia Peters of Local Power LLC. There was a need to demonstrate by creating business models and solutions in law and regulation to empower the local municipal authority to finance construction and operation of renewable distributed energy resources. To achieve localization with CCA, Local Power began to work directly for local governments to lay out, step by step, a path to recentering the production of power on the city and its population - and recentering the business model away from sales and around regional demand reduction.

Starting in 2002, Local Power went into the details of making localization possible by developing the policy and program design paths to implement local "build-outs" by CCAs as consultant to municipalities. Local Power won favorable state rules and data access from the California Public Utilities Commission to pursue CCA 2.0, and worked with leading CCAs including San Francisco, Sonoma County and emerging CCAs in California and other states to make CCA 2.0 a reality. Both regions are now pursuing ambitious programs designed specifically for localization of renewables and accelerated, scaled demand and carbon reduction.

Phát triển mô hình

Today, because of the leading development of the policy by Paul Fenn and the design work of Local Power, California CCAs are localizing their energy supplies using our innovations, such as contracting for local renewable projects, innovative strategies for energy efficiency, virtual power plants, and customer ownership with on-bill financing arrangements. LPI continues to advocate and develop this bolder, scaled, accelerated and enduring approach to CCA and has won a significant following for its approach in the process, with more and more CCAs defining their purpose in terms of the benefits of physical localization: green jobs, substantial and permanent greenhouse gas reductions, and customer ownership. Local Power drafted CCA legislation for New York State in 2014, and has been working with state regulators and the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA) since Governor Cuomo subsequently issued an executive order authorizing CCA as a new platform for Distributed Energy Resources.

The Detailed Work of Real Localization

Growing nationwide interest in CCA is increasingly focused on physical localization in order to create more "real" benefits than greener energy supply or cheaper rates, such as local economic development, green jobs, and enduring greenhouse gas reductions, and even the Marin Energy Authority, which initially resisted this path, has adopted it as of 2014, and the same year three other CCAs had received Green Community awards from the Environmental Protection Agency.When Local Power shifted its focus to implementation in early 2000s, intervening with California Public Utilities Commission in 2004, and winning regulatory approval of full data access for CCAs to create models for energy localization, the company was as a result retained by Sonoma County to collect and analyze one of the first detailed Big Energy Data projects outside the utility space in the United States. Between 2011 and 2013 Local Power completed its CCA 2.0 program design for the City of San Francisco's CleanPowerSF program, preparing a business plan for the City to issue $1B in Solar Bonds to build a 25% localized energy system in five years, purchasing 100% renewable energy while maintaining rate parity with PG&E, and generating a $600M surplus in the tenth year of service. Since this, much of the 2.0 model has been realized in California.

Nationwide, as CCA has grown from just a few municipalities to over a thousand municipalities, Local Power has acted as Research & Development arm of the CCA movement, using CCA access to end-user data to create regional energy localization cost/financial models, and to prepare local governments like Sonoma County and San Francisco for their "soft landing" to implement city and countywide energy localizations and greenhouse gas reductions at rate parity or lower rates than incumbent utilities.

Today, with so many Americans living within CCAs, including well-known population centers like City of San Francisco and Cincinnati, rural areas like Sonoma County as well as many hundreds of less known small towns and rural counties, Local Power's CCA 3.0 Report has articulated a new local energy transition business model to implement municipally-run climate mobiliziations, through a "three dimensional" strategy that integrates electric vehicles and HVAC/hot water installations to augment widespread deployments of renewable microgrids.

In New York State, Local Power's community energy model consists of separate but parallel and complementary municipal program "rails" to form a clear local community path while keeping CCA electricity and gas supply costs and materials separate but linked for informational purposes.

Under municipally authorized DER Plans, Local Power's Tompkins Green Energy Network (T-GEN) is launching a "universal renewable shares" option for any energy users in the community, providing sites, onsite power off-takers and logistical and billing support for customer "advanced DER" cooperatives. Local Power is also engaging municipal governments to participate alongside neighborhoods - a community wide redevelopment process based on voluntary investments by energy users through a much more engaged OP-IN process that will be undertaken separately from legally but complementing an energy transition program called "Own Your Power.

The CCA program is authorized by the New York State Public Service Commission. The other program, being OPT-IN, is authorized by Municipal Local laws.

Designed to be implemented with smaller, more focused agencies than are required in California's CCA 2.0 (central generation) paradigm, Local Power LLC's new model for energy, involving these two separate but complementary activities to organize a local community wide energy transition, expands the technological horizon of potential regional decarbonization (how fast and how far climate action is possible), and we believe will exponentially expand the voluntary customer investment horizon as well, in this localization, for a maximum, sustained carbon impact on a magnitude and schedule beyond the pace of current markets, regulation or conventional municipal policy: a magnitude and schedule that is indeed commensurate with the United Nation's ten-year (2030) horizon for the worldwide transformation of energy in order to avert "irreversible damage to the earth's ecology," not to mention other destructive energy pathways out there in 2026.