Hudson Valley Community Power is back in the game of playing middleman for renewable electricity.
Having secured new energy contracts with a dozen municipalities, Ulster County town and village of Saugerties, Gardiner, Marbletown, and town and village of New Paltz among them, HVCP anticipates facilitating an estimated 350,000 MWh over the course of the next year.
For the more than 35,000 households and small businesses in the participating communities, electricity supply rates will be fixed in place, immune to the price swings experienced by customers who receive their electricity directly from utilities like Central Hudson. Joule Community Power will be the administrator for the program.
Envisioned as a way to spur investment in clean energy by providing for an option to select a renewable source of electricity different than that offered by a local utility, HVCP is what’s known as a CCA program (Community Choice Aggregation), a model which became available throughout New York State in 2014.
With the goal of securing favorable, stabilized rates, local governments may join together join together to procure power in bulk, putting out for bid a total amount of power to be purchased by customers within their jurisdictions.
Grant funding to support additional clean energy projects also becomes available for those municipalities designated as Clean Energy Communities by New York State’s Energy Research and Development Agency (Nyserda).
In Ulster County municipalities, transmission, repair and distribution services will continue to be fulfilled by Central Hudson. The only real changes for customers are the source and price of electricity generation. The goal is to lower a community’s carbon footprint while supporting clean energy resources in New York State.
“It’s a 24-month contract for energy. The physical thing you’re going to be buying is going to be a mix of everything that’s in the grid,” says Jessica Stromback, CEO of HVCP, “because you can’t just separate out and only get electrons from hydro, for instance. They all come together, same grid. They’re like, cream of vegetable soup. It’s as if the money only goes to the carrots. Right?”
That is, Central Hudson will continue electricity transmission with the mix of electricity from a variety of sources, some renewable and some not.
When Stromback speaks of an energy provider, she is speaking of the energy supply company (ESCO) Direct Energy, a national player in the business with a local entity registered in the state.
“So if we’re going to do 500,000 megawatt hours, they buy 500,000 worth of renewable energy certificates, which in New York are called RECs. It buoys up the price for renewables, the fossil fuels are not getting that money.
Because this is a government-enabled program, the definitions of the percentages of renewable are strict. A municipality can only count the renewables where the money goes to power plants in New York State. “For those municipalities which have done 100 percent all the REC money will go to power plants in New York State, ” says Stromback.
“Kingston has a different CCA provider than us,” explains Stromback, “and I think that provider is still waiting for their [approval] to come through. They seem like a good group. They’re just new.”
The City of Kingston is partnered with Mid Hudson Energy Transition.
Woodstock is not one of the municipalities included on the HVCP list. “They are not a CCA yet that I know of,” says Stromback. “I’d happily reach out to Woodstock.”
Currently, the Department of Public Service identifies four authorized CCA administrators in the State of New York- Sustainable Westchester, Municipal Electric and Alliance, Inc, Good Energy, L.P. and Joule Assets, Inc.
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