By Tom Macdonald
It’s a good feeling that Boston’s Community Choice Electricity program (CCE) has succeeded over its first 14 months. It’s one compelling piece of evidence that the City is actively in pursuit of climate justice.
CCE’s stated purpose is to increase the amount of renewably sourced electricity Boston residents consume without any increase in monthly bill totals. Last I heard, about 200,000 of Boston’s 300,000 residential and small business electricity accounts are now enrolled in the City’s CCE account. The leverage of bulk purchasing through municipal aggregation has enabled the City to negotiate a choice of three electricity supply rates for CCE enrollees: Basic, Standard, and Green 100. The majority of CCE participants remain enrolled in Standard, the default program tier, which offers a 10% increase above the legally required 20% renewably sourced electricity that Eversource Basic delivers. And the CCE bonus: the relatively small number of CCE participants who have opted-up to Green 100 (CCE’s highest rate tier) are consuming 100% renewably sourced electricity and still paying less than the Eversource Basic rate.
What remains to be accomplished is enrolling the outstanding 100,000 Boston electric accounts which are not yet part of CCE. The City estimates that about 70,000 of these accounts are contracted to competitive or “third-party” electricity supply companies. Many of these competitive suppliers have been called out for their predatory practices in low-income and linguistic minority communities. Their customers are lulled by initially discounted electricity rates into signing contracts whose fine print allows for adjustable rates which become outrageously high.
Having learned to decipher the hieroglyphics of an Eversource bill, I recently encouraged my ESL students to scrutinize their bills. Sure enough, one student’s bill showed that her electricity supplier was neither Eversource nor Constellation (Boston CCE’s supplier) but a company named Clear Choice Energy. And her electric rate? $0.35 per kilowatt hour, over two times more than the Eversource Basic rate ($0.15/kwh) and over three times more than the CCE Standard rate ($0.11/kwh). (The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office estimates that state-wide, average households with third-party supplier contracts are paying an extra $226 per year for their electricity, more than $426 million in total across the state since 2015.)
To switch to Community Choice Electricity, the 70,000 Boston third-party account holders need to either pay a cancellation fee to terminate their contract or exit the third party program at the contract expiration date — but before the company has the chance to (probably automatically) renew their contract. It’s worth noting the City’s estimate: if all 300,000 Boston electricity ratepayers were enrolled in CCE and opted-up to the highest tier rate - Green 100, supplying 100% renewably sourced electricity - Boston’s total CO2 emissions would be reduced by 8%, and at current rates everyone would be saving money on their monthly bills.
The City’s Community Choice Energy office is making an all-out effort to reach maximum CCE enrollment through education and outreach in multiple languages. Locally, the West Roxbury chapter of Mothers Out Front has been active in disseminating CCE information especially through highly informative virtual presentations. Keep a look out for these and attend!
I’ve been to a couple of online presentations in the past couple of months. Becoming informed about the community-centered power of municipal aggregation is in itself a small climate action. Learning enough about CCE to extol its benefits neighbor-to-neighbor-to-neighbor is climate action powerful enough to contribute significantly to City-wide CO2 emissions reduction - all while helping Boston neighbors save money on their electric bill.
