Accelerated, City-Scale, Distributed Green Power

Local Power represents a revolution in bypassing the inertia of monopoly dominated electricity supplies — the ability of a city to choose to build, with municipal revenue bonds and private equity, a new local renewable energy infrastructure.  Call us today to get your Local Power estimate of how your city can move beyond fossil-fueled power towards meeting climate protection goals and rate stability with clean, affordable power.

:: Stimulus Package and Green New Deal Applications

:: Community Choice Aggregation Request for Proposals

:: Renewable Energy Development Contract Negotiation

:: Community Choice Aggregation Deal Origination
:: Local and Regional Climate Action Plans

:: Transition Towns/Localizations

:: Renewable Energy and Efficiency Finance
:: Implementation Plans
:: Power Portfolio Design
:: Distributed Generation Rollout Process Design
:: Community Solicitation and Rollout Management
:: Utility Data Collection, Analysis and Infrastructure Modeling
:: Legal and Regulatory Support
:: Political Campaigns

CCA 'a Green Power Revolution': Get Free Local Power White Paper - 'CCA 2.0'


Local Power is positioned to help other cities in California, the U.S. and Europe implement dramatic conversions to renewable energy in just a few years.

The new California model of CCA leverages the massive scale of aggregation with multi-year bond financing and utility meter data access to improve the competitive environment for suppliers, introducing a higher level of integration capability to serve the market with blended Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) products in a portfolio of wholesale energy - blended with higher-cost, higher-value renewable local power assets.

Local Power’s multi-decade development of CCA is much more compelling than any predecessor because the benefits now extend beyond matching cost and allowing customer choice to a realistic path to 51% localization of renewables, energy efficiency, microgrids and storage in ten years, which is a major innovation in one of the world's largest energy markets: or at least 25% of the U.S.. Local Power developed a revenue bond authority for this purpose in 2001, the H Bond Authority, and CCAs in both Ohio and Massachusetts are now looking to use similar bond financing mechanisms. The sheer number of jurisdictions and the populations in California currently seeking to adopt CCA represent a sea change in the way retail electricity is generated and marketed: LPI's approach implements that sea change fully rather than the piecemeal approach of conventional utility business models.

The Local Power Solution: Context

For centuries, cities and counties around the world have relied on public finance to pay for projects that benefit the public good. In the U.S., bridges, highways, water and sewerage systems, schools and public buildings are typically built by private companies and paid for by tax-free government bonds that are paid back over 20- or 30-years — making the projects affordable to the masses, and taking advantage of economies of scale that are not achievable with private finance.
In the early 1990s, Local Power founder and president Paul Fenn recognized the opportunity to use this same municipal bonding capacity to pay for clean energy projects, with a twist: private companies could operate large-scale, city-owned clean energy projects, and use the proceeds to pay off the city’s long-term, tax-free municipal bonds that underwrite the facilities. Fenn pioneered the passage of legislative tools around the country that enable cities and counties to issues these bonds for the purpose of constructing local sources of clean power.

Align Your City’s Values with its Power Supply

The residents of most cities expect the sources of electricity in their homes to cause as little damage to the environment as possible. In response to this widely held public value, a growing number of elected officials at the local, municipal and county level have called on electricity providers to improve their environmental performance.

Yet, for decades, utilities have struggled to meet this pent-up demand for renewable energy as they pay off their long-term investments and debts in coal power, methane gas-fired power plants and other fossil-fuel-based sources of electricity.

Community Choice: Choose Renewables

Your city can break this trend and help utilities improve their environmental performance by hiring Local Power to create a Community Choice Aggregation program, or CCA, to provide clean, renewable energy to your residents and businesses.

When a city hires Local Power, the company’s team of energy experts, engineers and contractors act as the city’s general contractor for a package of clean energy solutions that can meet 50 percent or more of a community’s power needs. Local Power solicits and manages bids from private contractors who specialize in renewable energy, energy efficiency upgrades and demand response technologies that dramatically improve the efficiency of grid power. The guiding criteria:

1. The energy must be from clean, carbon-free sources, and
2. The lowest-cost resources get priority.

Local Power assembles the CCA program and oversees the development process. A CCA program managed by Local Power is highly competitive, which means local businesses and residents benefit from competitively-priced electricity — a dramatic shift from the current dominant model of monopoly pricing from investor-owned utilities.