Green Energy Consumers Alliance supports the idea that we need to electrify everything. By shifting sectors that have been historically powered by the combustion of fossil fuels, such as heating and transportation, to electricity, we can dramatically reduce emissions in the short-term while setting up a path to a net zero-carbon society in the long-term.

We are pleased to release the second edition of our “Green Municipal Aggregation in Massachusetts” status report. A lot has happened in the field since our first edition in the spring of 2018 necessitating this update. If there is one key takeaway, it’s that GMA has proven to be a way to bring more renewable energy to communities affordably and equitably.

CleanChoice Energy is at it again & needs to be stopped.

Recent developments cause us to say again that Massachusetts is not doing enough to protect consumers from electricity suppliers making deceptive claims about pricing and the greenness of their electricity.

We take great pride in the fact that we, along with a company called Good Energy, took the model of municipal aggregation (a.k.a. community choice energy) and made it truly green. We did so with our pioneer partners, the City of Melrose and the town of Dedham. In 2016, those communities used the buying power of their residents to secure an affordable electricity rate that includes more local renewable energy than required by state law. Since then, over a dozen communities have joined the movement and added more renewable energy to residents' electricity supply - most recently Medford, Bedford, and Rockland. Green Energy Consumers is proud to be providing that additional incremental amount of renewable energy.

The first thing most people do when they walk into a room is to turn the lights on. But most people do not think of how that power got there and where it came from. In reality, electricity is a complex system responsible for the generation, transmission and distribution of electrons. So how do we know if the electricity we’re using came from renewable energy or not? The answer: Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). But in order to understand how RECs work and how they do their part to clean our grid, we must first understand how the grid brings electricity to our homes and businesses, and how it operates as a whole.

This is an update from previous blogs on the subjects covered here.

Have you recently received salespeople at your door or offers in the mail from competitive electricity suppliers? They lay the pitch on thick with too-good-to be true rates and feel-good energy mixes. It may seem hard to poke holes in the pitch, but under the smiling surface, many of these suppliers use smoke and mirror marketing to get their foot in the door and your signature on a contract.

Our Climate Change Perspectives mini-blog series is a 3-part series that brings to light the personal impacts of climate change on Green Energy Consumers' staff members' lives. This series aims to clarify what is at stake for people around the world and how those realities influence the choices we make on a daily basis.

Yaima Braga is our Energy Programs Manager.

Been hearing from "green electricity" suppliers like CleanChoice Energy? You want to support the generation of electricity from renewable sources, but how do you know if a green power program will use your dollars to speed our transition to clean energy? How would you know whether your purchase of green power is actually contributing to shifting the mix of electricity that powers our electric grid away from fossil fuels?

These are valid questions that we, as a non-profit energy organization working in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and offering a program that allows you to make the switch to renewable energy, get asked every day. So here it is: Green Power Bootcamp, in a blog.

At Green Energy Consumers, we talk a lot about the importance of energy efficiency and conservation. But, for a few hours every year, reducing our energy usage becomes especially important: on the hottest and coldest days of the year, energy use is the highest and electricity is dramatically more expensive and polluting. These high-demand days are called peak days, and we’re calling on our members to help us Shave the Peak by taking straightforward steps to reduce energy usage for a few hours on these days.

For over a hundred years, the rap on electricity was that you could not store as usefully as you could store oil, gas, coal, and wood. That has made matching power supply with demand a challenge. More recently, we have been told by New England utilities and their ally, the so-called “Independent Operator of New England” (ISO-NE) that increasing amounts of wind and solar, intermittent resources, will make the challenge even harder.