Blog

On October 28, 2022, I attended a special panel discussion on “The Impact of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on the Region’s Energy Landscape,” hosted by the New England Council, a regional organization of public, private and not-for-profit organizations that come together around a variety of policy issues including energy and the environment. The event's five featured speakers consisted of those involved in energy generation and development, wind energy, environmental activists, and Washington DC firms representing energy and environmental interests.

Written by Mike Sherman and John Livermore

Recently, in a the New York Times article entitled "Old Power Gear Is Slowing Use of Clean Energy and Electric Cars,"* it was reported that the structure and condition of the electric grid are increasingly serious obstacles to transitioning away from one-way central electricity generation to a more complex grid design where energy is generated by both utilities and new, distributed customer inputs for which the central systems were never designed.

EDR Group and its parent EBP are involved in Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) in California, Massachusetts, cities in Switzerland and other European cities. We monitor and participate in a range of CCA efforts.

In 2018, communities in six states are leveraging their buying power for electric supply through Community Choice Aggregations (CCAs). What’s new in this 20 year phenomenon is electric supply bids increasingly include renewable components at the same or lower rates than utility basic service rates.

Energy program evaluation has sure changed! Programs to support efficiency in energy use and renewable power sources go back 40 years, following oil crises in the 1970s. Utility companies were mandated to provide incentives to users via “demand side management” conservation programs. These were followed by public rebates for investment in renewable and efficient technologies. The programs were evaluated for effectiveness, and initially there was great concern about net benefits -- not counting “free riders” (who would have made the energy efficient choices even without the program). EDR Group was a part of these evaluations from its beginning in the late 1990s, and our work featured measurement of both economic impacts and net benefits.