Mid Hudson Energy Transition (MHET), the Kingston-based non-profit which will act as the administrator for Kingston Community Energy (the City of Kingston’s Community Choice Aggregation program) has hired Jasmine Graham as its first full-time executive director.
Graham assumes the role just as a power struggle refereed by the Public Service Commission (PSC) between conventional gas and electric utility companies and a new breed of plucky power-brokering upstarts is taking place. At stake is how energy is produced and delivered across New York State.
To act as administrator for Kingston’s CCA, MHET currently awaits approval by the PSC.
“In order to be approved,” says Graham, “you need to submit a master implementation plan. Once you submit that, the Public Service Commission allows 60 days for public comment. At which point, the Public Service Commission looks at the public comments, and then drafts their response.”
MHET filed its petition with the PSC on February 27. The 60-day period has just wrapped up. What comes next is a waiting game.
“It could be weeks,” notes Graham, “Or months. We would expect and hope to see it within the month, but it’s not required on their part.”
A master implementation plan consists of a mission statement on a timeline, broken down into smaller steps. Municipal officials, Community Choice Aggregation teams and their partners, Nyserda and the PSC need to understand the goals, milestones, and deliverables being promised to the community.
The plan also defines the approach to public engagement, outreach, and education.
“Typically what a CCA does is, they go out for an electricity supply contract,” explains Graham. “They get all these bids from Energy Service Companies (ESCOs), and choose the lowest fixed price. And you get your bill, and you have a fixed rate. But what we’re really hoping to do is provide opt-out community solar.”
Community solar, a.k.a. Community Distributed Generation (CDG), can be thought of as a project or a purchasing program in which energy generated by solar panels at an off-site array flows to multiple customers within a geographic area. This precludes individually owned and operated rooftop solar.
The opt-out pause
Among CCA service administrators, enrolling everyone within that geographic area and providing them with the option to opt out is standard industry protocol which saves a great deal of time and money as compared to convincing each individual customer to opt in.
A letter arrives in the mail which lets residents know what they are being enrolled in. If they don’t want any part of it, they can opt out.
The opt-out model for solar first appeared when the Finger Lake Villages of Brockport and Lima became the first municipalities in New York State to adopt the practice on February 2021. Because of the money saved by enrolling customers throughout the municipalities, Community solar was able to offer lower rates out of the gate automatically rather than expend resources through outreach and materials and time spent convincing residents to opt in.
The idea proved so popular that numerous other CCA’s petitioned to adopt the opt-out model. The PSC put the brakes on, saying it wished to consider alternatives. It promised to make a decision on whether to approve opt-in’s reinstatement within months.
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The PSC acknowledged in a white paper that access to CCA programs offered “mass-market customers” an opportunity to receive benefits not been readily available to them in the past, including more affordable or cleaner energy supply choices.
Other interests weighed in. Penning their communications to the PSC under a shared letterhead, a consortium of four global power giants who operate in New York State were unified in opposition to the opt-out option for community solar. The four companies are National Grid plc (British multinational), Central Hudson (Canadian holding company Fortis), NYSEG (Spanish multinational Iberdrola S.A.), and Orange and Rockland (Consolidated Edison, Manhattan).
The large companies worry that customers across the state will be unequally served if individual municipalities are allowed to choose whether to take part in community solar for themselves under the opt-out model. As a result, some municipalities will be more attractive to solar energy developers and some less so. Referring back to a proposal submitted jointly by Nyserda and Con Edison in April 2021 called Expanded Solar-For-All, the utilities suggested offering a similar solution for providing solar energy to the entire state.
The pause PSC has implemented on opt-out now has gone on for almost a year and half, exasperating municipalities eager to adopt the model.
Noble, Metzger support opt-out
In February 2023, Kingston mayor Steve Noble wrote letter to the PSC and the governor, touting opt-out solar as a key strategy in Kingston’s sustainability agenda.
“While Expanded Solar-For-All has potential to benefit low-income residents throughout the state,” said Noble, “it is a utility-led initiative that will require new billing processes to be developed by companies with a record of deficient billing performance and a history of failing to meet their obligations. In addition, Expanded Solar-For-All will do little to encourage greater community engagement and local support for clean energy.”
Kingston was first among all New York State municipalities to earn Nyserda’s Clean Energy Community designation.
On the ides of March, Ulster County executive Jen Metzger chimed in with her own letter, making reference to the 17 climate-smart communities in Ulster County to emphasize the regional commitment already demonstrated to renewable power and progressive environmental policy. Metzger, former director of Citizens for Local Power, says she has been a party to this proceeding from the beginning. She noted that the county government itself was a silver-certified Climate Smart Community.
“To reach the ambitious renewable energy goals of the Climate Act,” said Metzger, “including the near-term target of generating 70 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030 … … opt-out CDG is a shelf-ready tool for equitably reducing community-wide emissions and expanding the benefits of renewable energy to our residents and small businesses.”
Unsurprisingly, director Graham agrees.
“Our only, real roadblock right now, is that it’s not approved by the Public Service [Commission],” says Graham. “There are solar projects available. There’s room for people to be enrolled, but we just can’t do it on that opt-out basis, so what we will be doing in coming week is exploring how we can at least start with opt-in and start to get out in the community. You don’t need PSC approvals [for] that.”
MHET is also ramping up its advocacy for the reinstatement of opt-out community solar. She has organized a coalition of non-profits, environmental and equity-focused organizations, municipalities, and other industry stakeholders.
Beyond bringing a renewable-power future to Kingston, Graham returns again and again to the primacy of community engagement. She has plans to empower communities through wealth building opportunities in which residents and businesses can purchase shares as part of a co-operative community-solar project. There are schemes to design a fund that low-income and moderate-income folks across Kingston will have access to at low interest.
“The CCA is certainly a tool for us,” says Graham. “But it’s not the end-all be-all. We have this much greater vision of how we can incorporate energy justice and energy democracy into the local clean-energy transition here in Kingston. It’s not like some faraway dream. It is happening.”
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