Five Ulster communities honored as ECO-Action Champions

On Thursday, May 18, the New Paltz Courthouse played host to an awards ceremony in which five Ulster County municipalities were honored as ECO-Action Champions for their leadership as role models for clean energy use: the Town of New Paltz, Town of Gardiner, Town of Marbletown and both the Town and Village of Saugerties. Three other Hudson Valley communities – the City of Poughkeepsie, Village of New Paltz and Village of Nelsonville – were similarly honored on May 23 in Poughkeepsie. The Town of Philipstown and the Village of Cold Spring have also been designated recipients of the ECO-Action Champion award. The acronym ECO stands for Energy, Climate and Outcome.

This awards program is sponsored by the Community Choice Aggregation Administrators of New York (CCAANY), a consortium of agencies that run Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) networks statewide. As regular readers of Hudson Valley One will already know by now, a CCA is a group of municipalities that have banded together as a buying cooperative for electrical power. Using their collective clout as energy consumers, towns, villages and counties are able to negotiate favorable contracts with utility companies and decide what mix of renewable and nonrenewable sources of energy individual consumers participating in the CCA will have to choose from. In most cases, CCAs primarily encourage the use of renewable energy and are able to secure lower-than-average utility rates for their members over the period of the contract.

In the mid-Hudson, the CCA administrator of choice has been Joule Community Power, which organized the region’s first CCA under the aegis of Hudson Valley Community Power (HVCP) in 2021. Three of the honorees – the Towns of Marbletown, New Paltz and Saugerties – were participants in that initial venture, which saved program participants overall more than $6.8 million in electricity supply costs in 2022 by providing a fixed rate that was lower than Central Hudson’s variable electricity supply rate. By choosing renewable electricity sources through HVCP, the participating communities were able to avoid 70,210 metric tons of CO₂ emissions, equivalent to consuming 7.9 million fewer gallons of gasoline.

Unfortunately, that pioneering three-year program fell apart after only a year when the chosen energy provider, Brooklyn-based Columbia Utilities, LLC, got cold feet and breached its contract to supply power at a flat rate of just above six cents per kilowatt hour, transferring participating customers back to Central Hudson. The company is now embroiled in lawsuits and has been fined twice by the New York State Attorney General’s Office for deceptive marketing practices.

Since then, HVCP has found a new, more carefully vetted supplier – Direct Energy Services, LLC – and plans to relaunch the program with 12 participating municipalities this July, with 100 or 50 percent renewable electricity as the default offering. New local members of the HVCP consortium for this go-round are the Town of Gardiner and the Village of Saugerties.

Emceeing last week’s awards ceremony were Jessica Stromback, CEO of Joule Community Power and CCAANY Board member, and Glenn Weinberg, vice president for sales and market development at Joule Assets. Stromback explained that the awards program was “dedicated to highlighting the leadership that you local leaders make” and noted that as of 2021, CCAs were already accounting for more than a third of the purchasing power for renewable energy in New York State. “People like you really make the difference,” she told the honorees.

As he prepared to hand out the awards, Weinberg singled out the Hudson Valley as “a leader regionally for the whole state” in modeling clean energy use, while “New York State is really setting the pace for the country…. It’s a bottom-up approach. Local action is leading the way.”

The ECO-Action award recognizes communities and organizations that are actively accelerating the clean energy transition through actions such as CCA, and Weinberg had a long list prepared of the proactive steps toward greater environmental sustainability taken by each of the communities honored that day. The Towns of Gardiner, Marbletown, New Paltz and Saugerties are all Designated Clean Energy Communities and Bronze-Certified Climate Smart Communities, for example. He praised Gardiner, New Paltz and Saugerties for having conducted Greenhouse Gas Inventories and Natural Resource Inventories in recent years. Gardiner and New Paltz were both cited for establishing Community Preservation Plans and for pioneering local Repair Café programs.

According to Weinberg, in the initial launch phase of HVCP from July 2021 to July 2022, 1,725 Marbletown participants collectively were able to avoid 2,170 metric tons of CO₂ and saved $614,590 over 13 months. In New Paltz, 1,571 participants reduced their CO₂ consumption by 2,125 metric tons and saved $607,100; and in Saugerties, 3,893 participants shrank their carbon footprint by 3,330 metric tons and saved $971,203.

Accepting the awards on behalf of their municipalities were Village of Saugerties trustee Terry Parisian; Gardiner Town supervisor Marybeth Majestic and councilman Franco Carucci; Marbletown Town supervisor Rich Parete; and New Paltz Town supervisor Neil Bettez. Glenn Weinberg of Joule stepped in on behalf of Saugerties Town supervisor Fred Costello, who was unable to attend the ceremony due to an emergency.

“What I really like about the CCA program is that it makes it easy for people to do the right thing,” said Supervisor Bettez as he accepted his award. “They save the planet, but they also save you money.”

For more information about how CCAs work, the new HVCP contract set to begin this summer, how your community will implement it and what your options are with regard to participating, visit www.hudsonvalleycommunitypower.com.