Finance Committee - 05/05/2021 Page 13
Mayor Donchess
OK why don’t you go ahead?
Ms. Brown
So here we are, can you guys see this screen before | start?
Mayor Donchess
Yes.
Ms. Brown
Awesome. So | wanted to present about the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire which is an
organization that | have been working to form with the City of Lebanon, the town of Hanover and Cheshire
County for the last year and a half. So we are finally at the milestone to officially join this organization by
signing a joint powers agreement which is the contract that we are looking at today. But first | wanted to go
over what Community Power is.
Community Power is a way for towns, cities and counties to procure electric supply on behalf of their residents
and businesses and provide related customer services. For example, net energy metering, supply rates and
etc. So you are pooling purchase power. The utility company will still be in charge of delivering that energy to
residents so that part of the bill will be unchanged. But what we are really changing is where that kilowatt hour
side of the energy bill comes from. We will be able to purchase potentially lower cost energy on behalf of the
community and also greener energy if we decide that is the way we want to go in Nashua. So this is a very
new and innovative program; something that would help us get to our 100% renewable by 2050 goal.
So what is the Community Power Coalition which is what you would be joining when you sign the JPA? It is a
peer network, technical service group. So we are coming together to share services. | quickly realized when |
started researching what community power is after RSA 53E passed, that | could not implement a program
alone as the Energy Manager. So this will allow us to share programs and services with other communities; for
example customer service, going out to bid for power supply and also coming up with new and innovative
renewal energy projects. So that brings us together with a bunch of other communities to share that cost which
would make it extremely expensive for Nashua to do by itself.
So who pays? | know that specific side of Finance. So this agreement is free. To join in the JPA we are not
obligated or putting up any sort of money to join Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire. What we are
doing is setting ourselves up to be able to create an aggregation plan with our Aggregation Committee with
help from this organization which is something that would be very difficult to start up and do on our own. When
it comes to cost of buying power supply, all of the cost of this program will be wrapped into the price of power
like it is now with Eversource. They wrap up any sort of cost that they are incurring of buying our kilowatt
hours into the price that we pay. So we would be doing the same for our residents, that part wouldn’t change.
We would potentially be able to leverage less expensive energy by negotiating for ourselves in the wholesale
market or the New England market.
How do you join a coalition? This is the part where we are at right now which is the Joint Powers Agreement.
This is an agreement that has not been officially executed so the Community Power Coalition of New
Hampshire is not an official entity until we have three communities who have adopted the JPA and are ready to
start becoming a real entity. Right now the JPA has been approved by our Attorney General. Lebanon has
passed the JPA, so has Hanover and so has Cheshire County. So Nashua is the last group to pass the JPA
from the original organizers of this program. But we are expecting between 5 to 10 communities to have
passed it by July 2021 so that’s coming up very quickly. And once we have that initial group of 5 to 10
communities, the coalition will become a real entity and we will be able to, probably not go out for power supply
yet, because we are still waiting for rules to be made by the PUC.
