The Biggest Green Power Thing in America

2023 will one day be known that a major new model for renewable energy blew past the pack. No one knows exactly what is up, but everyone is talking about it. True, it took a quarter century of preparation to make this happen, but we at Local Power LLC are nothing if not patient.

Every one of our community energy aggregation models, from Municipal Aggregation in Massachusetts to Community Choice Aggregation (2.0) in California, has taken years to show results. Local Power's Green Bond model took 15 years for San Francisco to start using CCA 2.0, our second generation CCA model, took from 1998 to 2014 to complete! But within the next ten years, something bigger and faster than anything so far has...actually...happened.  CCA 3.0 in New York, which we started developing in 2014 after finishing 2.0, to create a more replicable, less bureaucratic model for all major forms of carbon, has already taken a decade to come to market. Everybody asks, can you speed things up?

And indeed, the records that CCA broke last year were based on models first approved by various governments 20 years ago. But it is the fastest gun in the West as far as transforming energy overnight.

You don't know about it because your eyes are fixed upon the hare. But look at the results! CCA is bigger in scale of climate impact than the largest players in renewable energy. Apart from inventing them, CCA 2.0 programs in California were the largest issuer of Green Bonds in America last year, building $10B of $30B in new renewables, while maintaining competitive rates for tens of millions of Californians. Not only that, California CCAs took nine of the top ten spots of all US utilities, on a list that includes megautilities like PG&E, National Grid, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, for renewable energy customers above regulatory minimums. In fact, California CCAs got more than ten times the customers of the next ten on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's list to switch to renewables above state minimums.  An energy transition without economic pain? hmm.

You don't know this because it was not achieved by billionaires or Wall Street darlings. The media is less excited about municipalities than billionaires.  But CCA 2.0 municipalities in California have blown the entire renewable energy establishment out of the window on real, actual results.

As the creators of CCA in California, we have bragging rights, if not billions of dollars in our pockets. With us, municipalities have the victory, if not the prize, in climate action and energy transformation in the U.S.  CCA 2.0 is not just the record breaker for building and buying renewable energy, but it blew past every U.S. out there utility, all of which have had many decades to get there but have never done so. CCAs have done so in remarkably little time! It is the tortoise, not the hare, who is fastest. Communities organized democratically, not corporations, regulated or not, serving isolated consumers, take the gold on transforming energy. And they have done it in a way that can be copied around the country and around the world.

And you ain't seen nothing yet. CCA 3.0, Local Power LLC's new third generation aggregation model, has in our estimation thirty to fifty times the climate punch of CCA 2.0. America has both a proven, replicable proof of how to get green energy without rate increases or taxes, and a mature business model, developed step by step over thirty years demonstrations, that will prove CCA 3.0 to be even bigger, better stronger and faster than California municipalities' great achievement last year.