BY ADAM ATKINSON
North Country This Week

POTSDAM — The town board has approved setting up a program that is essentially an electricity buying club that has the potential to supply town residences and businesses with renewable energy, perhaps at a cheaper rate than current electricity costs.

The Community Choice Aggregation program approved by the board at their meeting Tuesday, May 17, allows the town to contract with an outside firm, likely the firm Joule Community Power, to serve as a middleman or broker that looks for cheaper power and power sourced from renewable sources available on the grid. The firm will then negotiate a rate on behalf of town residents to purchase that power source.

Joule Community Power, based in Bedford Hills, NY, administers renewable energy CCA buying programs for more than 40 communities across New York, including the village of Canton and town of Waddington.

The town board hosted John Wadach, Village of Lima deputy mayor, whose community has established a CCA with Joule, and Alexia Lamb from Joule, at its May 17th meeting for a Q&A session on CCA programs prior to approval of the Town of Potsdam’s program later in the meeting.

“This is a way of bringing a direct financial benefit to your residents, and we’ve done that in Lima. And we’ve been running it for probably a little less than half a year now,” Wadach told the board. “But it brings approximately a 10 percent discount or credit to each of our residents’ National Grid bills.”

“‘What does it cost them?’ Nothing,” Wadach said.

The Lima deputy mayor said that about 90 percent of the residents are enrolled in the program and 10 percent opted out. “People are happy with it,” he said.

Lamb told the board that Joule vets and bids on electricity supplies on the open market about twice a year. She said that once the town approves its CCA program, if they decide to work with the firm, then it could potentially be purchasing power for the community sometime this fall.

Lamb clarified that if other local communities choose to implement CCAs in St. Lawrence County and contract with the firm, Potsdam and its neighbors could opt to aggregate further with those communities as a group for even more bidding power on the energy market. “The more the merrier,” she said.

The town board later approved the local law establishing a CCA at the meeting. The law will take effect once it’s filed with the Department of State.

The idea behind CCA programs is to incentivize renewable energy production around the state.

New York is one of only eight states that allow CCAs, which are essentially buying clubs for renewable energy.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, CCAs “allow local governments to procure power on behalf of their residents, businesses, and municipal accounts from an alternative supplier while still receiving transmission and distribution service from their existing utility provider. CCAs are an attractive option for communities that want more local control over their electricity sources, more green power than is offered by the default utility, and/or lower electricity prices. By aggregating demand, communities gain leverage to negotiate better rates with competitive suppliers and choose greener power sources.”

However, critics of CCA programs point out that the power town residents get is still coming directly off the grid, which takes in power from every type of power producer without discrimination, and that the state authorized CCA programs ultimately allow municipalities to fund power suppliers and choose which ones to support.

Other criticisms of CCAs are that the power residents choose may not necessarily be the cheapest they can obtain, and that administrative costs of involving a separate contractor outside of the town and local utility provider are extra costs potentially. Finally, another criticism is that town residents are automatically enrolled in the program and have to take action on their part to opt out once municipalities approve a CCA.

For more information on CCAs visit https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/community-choice-aggregation .

For more information on Joule Community Power visit www.joulecommunitypower.com.