Last year at Special Town Meeting, Harvard residents approved a warrant article sponsored by the Energy Advisory Committee titled “Electrical Aggregation,” authorizing the town to “aggregate the electric load of interested electricity consumers within the town of Harvard and enter into agreements for services to facilitate the sale and purchase of electric energy and other related services…”
It’s high time for an update on this process and for people to be reminded of its implications, especially now that Harvard has just been selected for a pilot program being administered by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center called HeatSmart (see article).
Under the electrical aggregation program, more widely known as “community choice aggregation,” the town will engage with a purchasing agent (aka a “broker”) to formulate an aggregation plan, under which the town will contract with one of the numerous companies approved by National Grid as alternative suppliers..
Effectively what this means is that instead of each resident having to make a choice individually, the town will take on (with the help of the Energy Advisory Committee and the broker) the process of vetting suppliers, selecting among plan options for renewables and other power supply features, and presenting all our residents and businesses with the options that best suit our town. Once this selection process is complete, all electric customers in Harvard will be given the option to join this aggregation plan or not..
Customers who have signed contracts with an alternative supplier in the past will have the option to remain with their alternative supply or join the aggregation plan..
No one will be forced to join in, but doing so should (if we do our job right) provide everyone with better options in terms of pricing and/or renewable energy sources..
The Energy Advisory Committee provided the Board of Selectmen with a recommended course of action for selecting an energy broker in early 2017, and we are awaiting issuance of an RFP and subsequent bidding processes before moving on to building our aggregation plan..
The state-sponsored HeatSmart program is a new effort to reduce the greenhouse gas contribution as well as cost of residential heating and cooling, by providing communities with volume-purchasing options for higher efficiency technologies. Residents may recall Solarize Harvard, a successful pilot program undertaken in 2012–2013 providing residents and businesses with attractive options to purchase solar photovoltaic systems. You can think of HeatSmart as an equivalent program for home heating and cooling. Harvard has partnered with the town of Bolton in this effort, and we’ve been selected as one of the four municipal participants across the state..
The HeatSmart rationale in a nutshell:
- Heating and cooling represents a large share of fossil-fuel use in New England, as yet untapped as an opportunity for renewable energy penetration..
- Efficiencies have increased significantly in several technologies, mostly in air-source heat pumps (e.g., “mini-splits”)..
- As we “green the grid” and make it more efficient, electricity from renewable sources can boost the benefits of this transition within heating and cooling applications, traditionally fossil-fuel based.
The HeatSmart program dovetails nicely with community-choice aggregation, and both programs are now underway in Harvard.
It’s an exciting time and the Harvard Energy Advisory Committee is pleased and honored to be working with town and state officials and vendors on promoting these programs. We need all the help we can get to ensure that all residents and businesses are aware of the various program options and to help make them happen in a way that benefits us all. If you are interested in helping out and/or learning more about what’s on the energy roadmap for Harvard, please come to a public forum Thursday, Dec. 14, from 7 to 9 p.m. in upper Town Hall. In the meantime, questions or comments can be sent to heac-public@googlegroups.com, or find us on Facebook (“Harvard Energy Advisory Committee”).
Eric Broadbent writes on behalf of the Energy Advisory Committee and the HeatSmart Bolton-Harvard team.
