Part 5. Good Energy at KEMA: 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.
For residents of those communities which have decided to, municipal aggregation offers many benefits. In addition, there are some important future advantages to those communities partnered with Good Energy. Aggregation “creates, essentially, these buying pools that actually can be advocated for, for other things,” according to de Casteja. Good Energy, then, can combine its experience in the energy aggregation field with feedback from the communities it represents, to support 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 says that, by aggregating, communities are given a voice via consulting firms like Good Energy which represent their desires. Gas aggregation has become 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 Good Energy has had the opportunity to partner with these communities to help them 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.
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