On June 13, 2025 at our monthly Fix the Grid Technical Committee meeting we heard from Paul Fenn, a pioneer and continuing innovator in the area of community (a.k.a. municipal) choice aggregation (CCA). He discussed his latest model of community choice aggregation, CCA 3.0, which seeks to advance the effects of CCA on the climate and on energy democracy. He also touched on legislation he has introduced in Massachusetts that would add non-export license options to aggregation communities in order to speed up deployment of behind-the-meter solar and other DERs and ensure that aggregation communities get timely access to Mass Save funds.
Paul Fenn co-authored the nation’s original municipal aggregation law in Massachusetts 30 years ago. He wrote the nation’s first Community Choice Aggregation law for California in 1999 and the world’s first Green Bond in the US for San Francisco in 2001, using these to develop a new model for aggregation in California that has resulted in $35B of new renewables in the state in the past decade, including $15B of Green Bonds, the largest issuers in the US in 2024, larger than the nations of China and Canada. California CCA 2.0 programs secured 9 of the nation’s 10 top spots for voluntary renewable customers in 2024, with ten times the number of customers served by the next ten on the list . For the past decade Paul has developed CCA 3.0, which his company, Local Power LLC, is now implementing in New York as a CCA Administrator. This kind of CCA encompasses all addressable carbon sources in a community and engages customers in community wide decarbonization as owners of hyperlocal, interoperable Distributed Energy Resource projects.
Paul’s slides are available here.
A recording of the talk is available for personal use on request from kentwitt@gmail.com or rspector@polsci.umass.edu.