The Local Green New Deal Project

A Platform for Climate Mobilization

In the past quarter century, Local Power founder Paul Fenn created a whole new energy market based on local municipal control - "Community Choice Aggregations," ("CCA") in nine states comprising half of U.S. power demand, in order to usher a new business model into America's electric (and gas) utility industry. Today about 30 million Americans receive their electricity service from CCAs, including major cities like San Francisco and Cincinnati to rural counties like Sonoma County or Athens, Ohio. While CCA has achieved both record carbon reductions and saved consumers billions of dollars in energy bills, most CCAs continue to maintain conventional energy supplies. This collection of cities, counties and towns possess unique power to transform energy today, representing an unparalleled opportunity for climate mobilization. The Local Green New Deal Project will provide a new business model and technical resources to help communities make this happen.

CCAs account for 67 of 72 U.S. cities and counties with 100% Renewable Energy in 2020 - UCLA Luskin Center/Sierra Club USA Ready for 100, 2019 (link)

"The combination of local power providers and rooftop solar panels last year took an estimated 25 percent of California’s retail electricity business away from the big, investor-owned utilities. That could rise to 85 percent within about 10 years, regulators say. In other parts of the country, the shift has been slower. Still, hundreds of cities in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Ohio have formed local energy providers. In Westchester County, N.Y., one began in 2016 that serves 20 municipalities, and Governor Andrew Cuomo is keen for more. Boston is poised to start one shortly. At least seven states now allow the programs.”
- Bloomberg Businessweek, 2018

Having Proven The Case, The Real Work Begins

CCAs across the U.S. have indeed proven uniquely able to transform energy, but the vast majority have missed the boat. While California CCAs have committed three Gigawatts of new renewable development in the state, San Francisco's CCA claims carbon reductions of 1 million metric tons per year, and 91 towns in Illinois have removed the carbon equivalent of a million cars from the road, most CCAs continue to buy conventional energy, or buy ineffective Renewable Energy Credits to mitigate the environmental damage of fossil supplies. Local Power's continuing survey of CCAs across the nation has shown that a failure to engage internal municipal expertise and human infrastructure is the main barrier to transformation. We created The Local Green New Deal Project to fill these resource gaps and make community-wide energy transformation implementable by any CCA in the United States that wants to mobilize for the climate.

"Paul Fenn is a little-known consultant with an academic bent, but he may be the utility industry’s enemy Number 1. For more than 25 years he’s been pushing the idea that local communities ought to be able to set up their own power agencies to compete with established utilities.”

- Bloomberg Businessweek, 2018

"Local control, he says, can produce lower rates and greater use of renewable energy. 'I wanted a solution that harnessed the power of local democracy,' says Fenn, 52.”

- Bloomberg Businessweek, 2018

"Fenn’s campaign is finally getting traction, especially in green-minded California. What looks like complexity to utilities is, for CCA advocates, one of the selling points: local control."

- Bloomberg Businessweek, 2018

" 'People who care about climate change have been waiting for the federal government to act conclusively, and it hasn’t,' says Fenn. 'So there’s a refocus on the local level, where action is possible.'"

- Bloomberg Businessweek, 2018

“Enter CCA 3.0, a new utility platform for clean energy finance, smart grid and customer ownership. Local Power Inc. laid out a vision of Community Choice Aggregation..."

- CleanTechnica, 2015

“ 'Community aggregators used to only be supply-centric,' Fenn said. ‘Now they are also looking for demand-side benefits that only clean energy finance can deliver.’ In addition to financing mechanisms, they focus on the need to build local planning capacities."

- CleanTechnica, 2015

“Paul Fenn, the author of California's CCA law, explained the concept of CCA to San Luis Obispo for the first time, telling a packed house that CCA would be ‘the best thing to happen to the environment in this community in a hundred years.’”

- San Luis Obispo New Times, 2019

Continued..."On Sept. 18 (2019), the San Luis Obispo City Council approved a Community Choice Energy (CCA) program & directed staff to come back with a plan that will make the city ‘carbon neutral’ by 2035, one of the most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals in the world."

- San Luis Obispo New Times, 2019