By Allen Hibner, Co-founder – November 10th, 2023: We are asking all Penfield households to continue to participate in this program for reasons that we will discuss further below.
After much research and deliberation on the part of our entire membership, Color Penfield Green has voted to endorse Penfield’s renewed Community Choice Aggregation program that runs from December, 2023 to November, 2025.
We did not undertake the process to reach this endorsement lightly. Our members all fully recognize that the fixed prices for our Penfield Green (50% renewable electricity supply) and Penfield 100 (100% renewable electricity supply) have risen substantially in our renewed program.
See image below from the Penfield CCA website @ https://penfieldcca.com/
Why Color Penfield Green has Endorsed the Renewed CCA Program:
For the first two-year period of our CCA program, from 12/2021 to 11/2023, our Penfield Green (default - opt-out) program, with a fixed electricity supply rate of 5.733 cents/kWh, actually saved participants money as compared with RG&E’s daily variable electricity supply rate. Yes, we acknowledge that the Penfield 50 rate has now increased to a 9.665 cents/kWh fixed rate for the next two years, which is substantially higher than RG&E’s variable daily supply rate currently, but it is still possible over the coming 24-month time period that RG&E’s rate will rise to meet the Penfield 50 rate. We do not know what the future brings and there are no guarantees that that will happen, but the program’s fixed rate can provide price certainty and energy budget stability for those 24 months to households that stay in it.
We also accept the fact that, if the difference right now is too great for your family, you may need to opt-out of the CCA program, watch the RG&E variable daily electricity supply rates and then opt back into the program when pricing is more favorable for you and your family’s energy budget. We certainly understand that and you can make those changes without any fees or penalties at all – a major benefit of our CCA program.
However, if you are able to stay in the program, absorb the higher Penfield 50 (or Penfield 100) price compared to RG&E for a while and give back some of the earnings surplus you received from the prior two years, you will continue to be using much greener electricity than RG&E’s variable supply rate mix provides. This definitely benefits our environment and the air that we all breathe. In fact, if you look at the image below, notice that our Penfield Green program for the period of January to December 2022 resulted in carbon offsets equivalent to taking 5,388 gasoline powered passenger vehicles off the road for a year. That’s real progress! That’s what our CCA program was designed to do for us and why it was implemented in the first place. Let’s not slow down that excellent progress. We hope that you will stay in the default Penfield Green program or even opt-in to the Penfield 100 (10.849 cents/kWh) program HERE.
Finally, RG&E’s daily variable electricity supply is generated using a very large amount of natural gas as its main fuel source. The first image below comes from RG&E’s own website and shows that during 2021, natural gas fired power plants provided 52% of RG&E’s electricity supply. That is quite a dirty fuel source mix overall (113% of NYS average air emissions) and definitely is not good for our environment. In stark contrast, the second image below shows our Penfield Green fuel source mix and documents a much smaller reliance on natural gas (18%) for our electricity supply. In fact, when you add up electricity provided by; renewable energy certificates (REC’s), hydro, solar, wind, biomass & biogas, and not even including nuclear, which is also carbon free, our green energy mix approaches 65% in the Penfield Green CCA program. It's 100% in the Penfield 100 program.
For all of the reasons listed above, Color Penfield Green endorses Penfield’s renewed Community Choice Aggregation program for 2023 to 2025. We hope that you, and all Penfield households that are able, will continue to participate in this program over the next two years.
The environment we all share thanks you for doing that!
If you would like more information and a better understanding of why prices for electricity generated from renewable sources increased significantly for our CCA program renewal relative to RG&E’s daily variable electricity supply rate, we invite you to watch an informational YouTube video that we recorded recently.