Join Green Newton in the Druker Auditorium of the Newton Free Library on Monday, Nov. 27 at 7pm for ‘Newton Power Choice: Going Green’, the latest talk in the Greening Our Community Series.
The City of Newton is working on “Newton Power Choice” a program that would enable the City to purchase electricity on behalf of all Newton residents— a practice known as municipal aggregation. This is an opportunity for the City to increase the amount of electricity produced in New England from renewables such as solar and wind.
Massachusetts currently requires 12% of our electricity to be generated by renewables. The goal of Newton Power Choice is to give residents the chance to buy electricity generated with a higher percentage of renewable content. Higher levels of renewables might add a few dollars to a resident’s monthly electric bill, but the program will give consumers the choice of opting out or choosing from different levels of renewable energy.
The City’s co-director of sustainability, Ann Berwick, will lead a discussion of Newton Power Choice with a panel of representatives from Newton Citizens Commission on Energy (NCCE), including Eric Olson, Jim Purdy and Halina Brown. Berwick served as chair of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities from 2010 until 2015. Olson, senior lecturer at Brandeis University’s Heller School, chairs the NCCE, which keeps City energy bills down by monitoring Newton’s energy consumption and making energy-saving recommendations. Purdy, Vice President of Green Newton, is a planning consultant who works with communities to incorporate sustainability into their comprehensive plans. Brown, vice chair of NCCE, is a retired professor of environmental science and policy at Clark University and co-founder of Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative
yes
Ditto with Denis
We are fortunate to have solar panels that throw off more electricity than we need. If your house is properly situated, and you plan on being there for awhile, I highly recommend going solar.
We probably pay more for petro energy in terms of pollution. But, no one included this in their calculations.
Yep. I pay a lot of money for energy and this energy are polluzes the environment very hard!
Maybe. The devil is in the details, as the phrase “add a few dollars to a resident’s monthly electric bill” is terribly vague. I sense that many residents would accept an additional $5-7 per month for green energy. Once the expense gets beyond that (e.g. $100 per year or more), I would expect many opt outs.
I attended a meeting on this program that indicated that it could be a few dollars less a month because of the flexibility of timing city purchasing contracts.
If this passes, every household has a choice – go with the program’s initial level of renewable energy (which I hope will start out at 52%, that is, 40% higher than the current 12%); opt-out and stay with their current plan; or opt-up beyond the default level. I’m going to lobby my household to opt-up to 100%.
I heard a fascinating idea last night at our 350 Newton meeting. Someone asked if it would be possible to opt-up beyond 100%, with the overage helping a lower income household go a little bit greener.
Newton should have been doing this for the past decade. I first proposed aggregation as a mayoral candidate in 2005, before any Massachusetts municipality had tried it. If it had been fully implemented in a timely fashion, the City of Newton would have made more than $100M profit from the distribution of electricity by 2017…
Aggregation should be principally used in that way– as an alternative source of revenue for the city. It should not be manipulated into a renewable energy program that costs Newton consumers even more on their electric bills. Renewable energy is important. But it’s more important that the city keeps property taxes down by developing aggregation as an alternative source of revenue.
I’m with George. The devil is in the details. I work hard to be eco-friendly in my day-to-day life and would love to have green electricity, but what it boils down to is whether it’s prohibitively expensive or not. If it’s costing hundreds of extra dollars a year, my family simply couldn’t afford that.
An idea I advanced with the NVA , when the city tried to denude the library parking lot and install its pathetic solar farm , was to instead consider the Massachusetts Turnpike.
Running east – west for a good 5 miles, there is on its north side a perfect resource available for a solar panel farm that would put Newton on the map. I’m not sure what it would take with approvals, negotiations with the state / Turnpike authorities etc. but it’s time to thing big and realistically about solar energy if we are really serious about it !