The East Hampton Town Board is expected to vote tonight on a resolution to support four recommendations made last month by its Energy Sustainability and Resiliency Committee, an advisory board that is guiding the town toward a goal of achieving 100 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources.
The vote will follow Tuesday’s presentation of the recommendations “adapted into resolution form,” said Lauren Steinberg, an environmental analyst with the town’s Natural Resources Department. The recommendations were first detailed by members of the sustainability committee on May 7.
“The committee and the Department of Natural Resources have done the legwork for these actions,” Ms. Steinberg told the board, and considered it “important to memorialize the recommendations as a resolution to be adopted by the board.”
The first resolution would establish a “community choice aggregation” energy program. Community choice aggregation, or C.C.A., is a municipal model for procuring energy that replaces a utility as the default monopolistic supplier of electricity or natural gas within a municipality. In the C.C.A. model, communities pool demand to negotiate a fixed rate, potentially lowering prices with private suppliers.
Communities can also choose cleaner energy and develop distributed energy resources, including local renewable energy projects and shared renewables such as community solar, energy efficiency, microgrid products, and demand response, the latter defined as a voluntary rationing system in which a utility’s customers adjust their energy consumption during peak demand times to relieve stress on the electrical grid.
Community outreach and education on C.C.A. has begun, Ms. Steinberg said. She suggested a public forum in the fall, before the town adopts the legislation, which would launch an evaluation of a C.C.A. program’s potential. The committee also recommended that the town consider increasing its competitive buying power by combining efforts with Southampton, which has already adopted enabling legislation, and other East End municipalities.
The second recommendation would have the board identify town facilities most suitable for battery storage systems, and issue a request for proposals or request for information for their installation and maintenance. The cost could be offset by revenue derived from a contract with the South Fork Peak Savers load relief program, which the board is considering. Under that program, the town would commit to operate existing standby generators at the direction of Applied Energy Group, a consultancy under contract to PSEG Long Island, which manages the electrical grid, during anticipated peak-demand periods.
The cost of battery storage systems could also be offset by an incentive program offered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and by savings from reduced electricity charges on accounts with demand-response meters. Once operational, Ms. Steinberg said, the battery systems would provide added resilience in case of grid interruption, and would lower peak demand, generate future revenue from a South Fork Peak Savers load-relief contract, and allow energy storage at facilities with solar arrays.
The committee further recommended that the board consider adopting legislation and regulations to facilitate accommodation of battery storage systems and other energy storage systems yet to be developed. Lastly, the committee recommended that the board convene experts and consultants to craft an energy policy that would guide the town toward its goals of 100-percent renewable electricity by 2020 and a 100-percent equivalent renewable in transportation and heating fuels by 2030.
The town has acknowledged that it will not meet the former goal, but said that 2022, when the proposed South Fork Wind Farm is projected to begin operation, was achievable. The latter goal will be more challenging, and it will be necessary to hire consultants, Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said.
“We don’t really have the expertise to do this on our own,” he said. “We should seek consultants to help us plot out how we achieve those other energy-sector requirements.” He added that he supports all the proposals Ms. Steinberg described.
“I’m glad to see NYSERDA’s getting involved in battery storage,” said Councilman Jeff Bragman, who has questioned the value of a contract with the South Fork Peak Savers load relief program. “That and C.C.A. are really the wave of the future — I hope they are.”