Straight out of Cape Cod: The origin of community choice aggregation and its spread to other states

Planning the Built Environment and Land Use Towards Deep Decarbonization of the United States

“…Local governance of energy systems through municipally owned utilities, privately owned cooperatives, community choice aggregations, and/or microgrids may better enable end-use electrification, energy efficiency, and the building of distributed energy resources by allowing integrated planning for energy and BELU (Kristov 2014;Hsu 2022).…”

“…Despite efforts in the 1990s to introduce competition to wholesale markets and allow customer choice, distribution of electricity is still dominated by monopolies that have little or no incentive to allow innovation by users at the edge of the grid or behind the meter (Wara 2017). Local governance of energy systems through municipally owned utilities, privately owned cooperatives, community choice aggregations, and/or microgrids may better enable end-use electrification, energy efficiency, and the building of distributed energy resources by allowing integrated planning for energy and BELU (Kristov 2014;Hsu 2022).…”

“…Planners and other government agencies can reduce the risks associated with adoption by subsidizing trials to gain experience, avoid unintended consequences, and support regional demonstration projects that make innovations widely and locally observable (Späth and Rohracher 2010). Larger scales such as districts and campuses allow experimentation with new technologies such as ground source (“geothermal”) heat pumps that can then be generalized to wider urban applications (Shaffer et al 2018; Revesz et al 2020).…”

Shifting partisan public opinion towards Community Choice Aggregation through outreach and awareness

“…In 2020, CCAs procured about 13 billion kWh of electricity for roughly 5 million customers [ 2 ]; in 2021, CCAs served over 11 million customers in California alone [ 5 ]. CCAs have “since been adopted by more than 1800 local governments that represent more than 36 million people in six states” [ 6 ]. CCAs have been authorized in ten states: California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Virginia [ 2 ].…”

“…Additionally, a nationwide survey allows us to compare potential differences in attitudes between residents in states with and without CCA-enabling legislation. Hsu [ 6 ] writes that “formation of CCAs in multiple states proves that there is a widespread desire for local control of energy policy, utilities, and infrastructure,” but is this desire confined to the ten states with CCA-enabling legislation? Or does this desire extend to other states that have not yet enacted CCA-enabling legislation?…”