Through Community Power, you can choose how much renewable energy is in your supply. At a minimum, any electricity supply must have enough renewable energy to meet New Hampshire’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), but your Community Power program can elect to include more renewable energy than the RPS.
In fact, Community Power programs are a powerful way to provide affordable, equitable access to clean energy for residents and businesses, especially renters and low-income residents that have limited/no means to buy or build renewable energy
on their own.
See our presentation from the Radically Rural conference in Keene, NH about renewable energy with Community Power.
Why Buy Extra Renewable Energy?
Often, purchasing extra renewable energy is intended to achieve two important goals:
- Accounting: reduce carbon footprint of your electricity
- Impact: help build new renewable energy
Unfortunately, impact is often overlooked or assumed to occur. On the contrary, to achieve impact requires careful evaluation and selection of your renewable energy purchasing strategy. And while it is tempting to maximize the amount of renewable energy by buying from the cheapest sources, that is unlikely to lead to meaningful impact.
At Good Energy, we believe that if you buy extra renewable energy, it should have an impact – adding new renewables to our grid, displacing fossil fuels, and combating climate change. Below, we discuss important factors to consider when thinking about buying extra renewable energy.
Impact: Importance of Going Local
Good Energy exclusively uses new, local renewable energy, known in New Hampshire as NH Class I & II, to supply aggregations with extra renewable energy. The State requires that every electricity supply, including Default Service, must have a minimum percentage of NH Class I & II renewable energy; that total percentage increases every year. This requirement, called the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), along with similar standards in other New England states, has been a major driver for the growth of renewable energy in our region.
When a Community Power program voluntarily purchases extra NH Class I & II renewable energy, it effectively makes the State requirement increase even faster. And as more and more Community Power programs adopt this approach, the impact multiplies.
Impact: Power of the Primary Rate
A Community Power program will have a primary rate and can also have optional rates. These typically vary based on percentage of renewable energy. The vast majority of participants stay in the primary rate, so that is where your buying power – and potential for impact – are greatest. Good Energy helps cities and towns select the optimal quantity of extra renewable energy for their primary rate, minimizing costs on individual bills, while maximizing total extra renewable energy purchased across the entire Community Power program.
Clean Energy Innovation
Good Energy launched some of the first green aggregations in New England over three years ago. Our programs’ success was built on innovative thinking, spurred by creative collaboration with local partners. We want to partner with you to develop and drive new ideas for supporting clean energy.