Green Municipal Aggregation

Massachusetts and Rhode Island state laws allow a city or town to choose the electricity supplier for residents and businesses within that municipality. This is called municipal aggregation or community choice aggregation. It allows for important energy decisions to be made at the local level rather than by an investor-owned utility or by a for-profit competitive electricity supplier. 

Green Municipal Aggregation, or GMA, is a model we devised with energy broker Good Energy that adds more Class I or "new" renewable energy to residents' electricity at a competitive price. When a community decides to enact GMA, it goes out to bid for an electricity supplier and secures a long-term price and a cleaner electricity supply. That supplier replaces the utility's Basic Service, offers a more stable price (usually cheaper in the long run, too), and adds more renewable energy than required by state law.

We estimate that by 2023, aggregations will be supporting 1 million MWH of clean energy above and beyond Massachusetts requirements. Executive Director Larry Chretien gives an update on the impact of GMA in this 2 minute video.

By the end of 2022, we expect aggregations to be in operation in these Rhode Island cities and towns – Barrington, Central Falls, Newport, Portsmouth, Providence, and South Kingstown.

Seven RI communities are making significant progress in their quest to implement Green Municipal Aggregation (also referred to as Community Choice Aggregation or CCA).

• In May, the Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission (PUC) unanimously approved the first four aggregation plans in the Ocean State for Providence, Central Falls, Barrington, and South Kingstown. We expect the aggregation programs for these pioneers in Rhode Island to launch by early 2022.
• In July, Portsmouth filed its plan with the PUC. We hope it will get approval before the end of the year so that it may also launch its program in early 2022.
• Newport is currently finalizing its aggregation plan and we expect it will file with the PUC in early fall.
• Narragansett has passed a resolution enabling aggregation and is currently exploring the development of an aggregation plan.

If you’re interested in learning more about GMA or want to find out how your community can get started, contact Mikaela@greenenergyconsumers.org

Here is a list of participating communities: