Opinion: Local and Green: Let’s Own Our Power

The following column appeared previously in the Amherst Bulletin.

Climate change is not just a threat — it’s a daily reality impacting our lives. Local residents are feeling the pressure of an energy system strained by fossil fuel dependency.

That’s why our local electricity aggregation, Valley Green Energy, (and all our local municipalities) should examine and potentially embrace Own Your Power, a new program designed by Local Power, LLC for Ithaca, New York, to localize and revolutionize how it generates, uses, and shares energy. The initiative invites residents to cooperate, own, and share in a local energy transition that reduces fossil fuel use, strengthens neighborhood resilience, and keeps wealth circulating right here in their local community.

Local Power, LLC’s team, led by Paul Fenn, co-authored Massachusetts’ pioneering municipal aggregation model, developed California’s Community Choice Aggregation 2.0 framework, and created the Solar Bond model that allowed communities to finance renewable infrastructure directly. And it is located in our own neck of the woods, in Williamsburg.

Resident participation is key to the success of the Own Your Power program. Globally, energy transition efforts are often difficult because too few people are actively involved and because the change touches every corner of daily life — electricity, heating, transportation, and waste. According to Local Power, LLC, these four sources make up roughly 75% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. 

At the core of Own Your Power is a simple idea: reduce the community’s reliance on the grid and natural gas pipelines by building interconnected local systems that deliver power, heat, and transportation energy onsite via rooftop solar arrays, community geothermal loops, shared EV charging hubs, and neighborhood battery storage.

The timing for implementation for such a program is perfect in that our local communities have been converted by Eversource and National Grid to using smart meters. A large number of residents have EVs and EV chargers. On top of that, residents don’t have to wait until their current heating system dies to join in a neighborhood geothermal network. Your current system simply turns into the supplemental system needed to provide any heating above the 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit that geothermal heating can provide. And we have many residential neighborhoods that are designed with blocks or loops that could accommodate geothermal system sharing. The model helps individuals and groups take collective responsibility for energy use while maintaining the convenience and reliability of conventional systems. 

Own Your Power also provides an opportunity to reshape and rebuild local economies. As Local Power puts it, “Degrowth in the global pipeline and grid economy is regrowth in the local economy.” Every geothermal installation, every solar panel array, every shared EV infrastructure project represents dollars that would be retained in Amherst rather than exported to multinational energy producers.

The Own Your Power website describes how Ithaca’s program is designed to make the energy transformation accessible, including an analysis of each household or building’s energy use to identify the most cost-effective onsite improvements, and of potential group adoption of advanced shared systems — making cutting-edge technologies affordable through collective investment.  The Ithaca program also offers financial assistance: helping participants evaluate offers, secure financing, and tracking of performance over time. 

The city and town of Ithaca are just starting the implementation of Own Your Power as a companion to their Community Choice Aggregation program. Amherst, Northampton and Pelham as members of our local Valley Green Energy electricity aggregation could lead us in doing the same. 

Own Your Power is geopolitical. It replaces imported energy with locally produced clean power; it redefines citizens as owners rather than ratepayers. Most importantly, it gives municipalities a credible way to meet our climate goals, helping to avert climate disruption.

Let’s own our power — together. Let’s start by examining “Own Your Power” and how it could work here.

Darcy DuMont is a former town councilor and sponsor of the legislation creating the Amherst Energy and Climate Action Committee. She is a founding member of Zero Waste Amherst, Local Energy Advocates of Western MA, and a non-voting member of Valley Green Energy Working Group. She can be contacted at dumint140@gmail.com