Good Energy at KEMA Part 5: Future Opportunities for Choice in Gas
This is the fifth in an eight part series looking at Charles de Casteja, Managing Partner for the New York based municipal aggregation consulting firm Good Energy, at the 2013 KEMA Conference.
Municipal aggregation offers many benefits to residents of communities which have elected to aggregate. For those communities partnered with Good Energy, there are some important future benefits, as well. Aggregation “creates, essentially, these buying pools that actually can be advocated for, for other things,” says de Casteja. So Good Energy, utilizing its experience in the energy aggregation field, merged with the feedback given by its partner communities, can represent these communities on the state level.
“For instance, now our residents in Illinois - in southern and central Illinois - they don’t have natural gas choice from the residential level. Well, now I’ve got 175 communities and they want it.” De Casteja explains how, through aggregation, communities have a voice in consulting firms like Good Energy that can represent their desires. Gas is important to these residents because “in the same way that the electricity tariffs are a lot higher than the actual open market, so were the gas purchases.”
And because communities have had the chance to partner with Good Energy to experience the savings from electric aggregation, de Casteja explains that, “now, we’re in a workshop trying to bring choice to essentially 500,000 residents.” So Good Energy is effectively representing half a million customers who want a choice in gas providers.
For more information on municipal energy aggregation, click here.