Au milieu des années 1990, quelques militants de l’énergie du Massachusetts ont eu une vision : Et si les consommateurs pouvaient choisir l’énergie qu’ils consomment ? Au lieu d’être gavés de sources d’électricité sélectionnées par une compagnie d’électricité, que se passerait-il si les villes, les communes et les groupes d’individus pouvaient acheter de l’énergie plus propre et moins chère ?
Trente-six millions de personnes aux États-Unis utilisent un système énergétique développé par une poignée de militants dans les années 1990. Un MIT scholar examines this unusual story.
In the mid-1990s, a few energy activists in Massachusetts had a vision: What if citizens had choice about the energy they consumed? Instead of being force-fed electricity sources selected by a utility company, what if cities, towns, and groups of individuals could purchase power that was cleaner and cheaper?
The small group of activists — including a journalist, the head of a small nonprofit, a local county official, and a legislative aide — drafted model legislation along these lines that reached the state Senate in 1995. The measure stalled out. In 1997, they tried again. Massachusetts legislators were busy passing a bill to reform the state power industry in other ways, and this time the activists got their low-profile policy idea included in it — as a provision so marginal it only got a brief mention in The Boston Globe’s coverage of the bill.
Today, this idea, often known as Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), is used by roughly 36 million people in the U.S., or 11 percent of the population. Local residents, as a bloc, purchase energy with certain specifications attached, and over 1,800 communities have adopted CCA in six states, with others testing CCA pilot programs. From such modest beginnings, CCA has become a big deal.
“It started small, then had a profound impact,” says David Hsu, an associate professor at MIT who studies energy policy issues. Indeed, the trajectory of CCA is so striking that Hsu has researched its origins, combing through a variety of archival sources and interviewing the principals. He has now written a journal article examining the lessons and implications of this episode.
Hsu’s paper, “Straight out of Cape Cod: The origin of community choice aggregation and its spread to other states,” appears in advance online form in the journal Energy Research and Social Science, and in the April print edition of the publication.
“I wanted to show people that a small idea could take off into something big,” Hsu says. “For me that’s a really hopeful democratic story, where people could do something without feeling they had to take on a whole giant system that wouldn’t immediately respond to only one person.”
Local control
Aggregating consumers to purchase energy was not a novelty in the 1990s. Companies within many industries have long joined forces to gain purchasing power for energy. And Rhode Island tried a form of CCA slightly earlier than Massachusetts did.
However, it is the Massachusetts model that has been adopted widely: Cities or towns can require power purchases from, say, renewable sources, while individual citizens can opt out of those agreements. More state funding (for things like efficiency improvements) is redirected to cities and towns as well.
In both ways, CCA policies provide more local control over energy delivery. They have been adopted in California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio. Meanwhile, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Virginia have recently passed similar legislation (also known as municipal or government aggregation, or community choice energy).
For cities and towns, Hsu says, “Maybe you don’t own outright the whole energy system, but let’s take away one particular function of the utility, which is procurement.”
That vision motivated a handful of Massachusetts activists and policy experts in the 1990s, including journalist Scott Ridley, who co-wrote a 1986 book, “Power Struggle,” with the University of Massachusetts historian Richard Rudolph and had spent years thinking about ways to reconfigure the energy system; Matt Patrick, chair of a local nonprofit focused on energy efficiency; Rob O’Leary, a local official in Barnstable County, on Cape Cod; and Paul Fenn, a staff aide to the state senator who chaired the legislature’s energy committee.
“It started with these political activists,” Hsu says.
Hsu’s research emphasizes several lessons to be learned from the fact the legislation first failed in 1995, before unexpectedly passing in 1997. Ridley remained an author and public figure; Patrick and O’Leary would each eventually be elected to the state legislature, but only after 2000; and Fenn had left his staff position by 1995 and worked with the group long-distance from California (where he became a long-term advocate about the issue). Thus, at the time CCA passed in 1997, none of its main advocates held an insider position in state politics. How did it succeed?
Lessons of the legislation
In the first place, Hsu believes, a legislative process resembles what the political theorist John Kingdon has called a “multiple streams framework,” in which “many elements of the policymaking process are separate, meandering, and uncertain.” Legislation isn’t entirely controlled by big donors or other interest groups, and “policy entrepreneurs” can find success in unpredictable windows of opportunity.
“It’s the most true-to-life theory,” says Hsu.
Second, Hsu emphasizes, finding allies is crucial. In the case of CCA, that came about in a few ways. Many towns in Massachusetts have a town-level legislature known as Town Meeting; the activists got those bodies in about 20 towns to pass nonbinding resolutions in favor of community choice. O’Leary helped create a regional county commission in Barnstable County, while Patrick crafted an energy plan for it. High electricity rates were affecting all of Cape Cod at the time, so community choice also served as an economic benefit for Cape Cod’s working-class service-industry employees. The activists also found that adding an opt-out clause to the 1997 version appealed to legislators, who would support CCA if their constituents were not all bound to it.
“You really have to stick with it, and you have to look for coalition partners,” Hsu says. “It’s fun to hear them [the activists] parlent de leur participation aux assemblées municipales et de la façon dont ils ont essayé d’obtenir un soutien de la base. Si vous cherchez des alliés, vous pouvez faire avancer les choses. [I hope] le peuple peut voir [themselves] dans l’activisme des autres, même s’ils ne sont pas exactement les mêmes que vous.”
En 1997, le projet de loi sur l’ACC bénéficiait d’un soutien géographique plus important, était compris comme un avantage économique et environnemental pour les électeurs et n’imposait l’adhésion à personne. Les activistes, tout en donnant des interviews aux médias et en organisant des conférences, avaient trouvé un soutien supplémentaire au principe du choix du citoyen.
“Il est intéressant pour moi de voir comment la rhétorique de… [citizen] Il est intéressant pour moi de voir comment la rhétorique du choix et la rhétorique de la démocratie s’avèrent efficaces”, déclare Hsu. “Les législateurs ont le sentiment qu’ils doivent donner à chacun un certain choix. Et cela exprime un désir collectif pour un choix que les services publics enlèvent en étant des monopoles.”
Il ajoute : “Nous devons énoncer des principes qui façonnent les systèmes, plutôt que de prendre le système pour acquis et d’essayer de justifier des principes vieux de 150 ans.”
Un dernier élément de l’adoption de la CCA a été le bon timing. Le gouverneur et l’assemblée législative du Massachusetts étaient déjà à la recherche d’un ” grand compromis ” pour restructurer la distribution d’électricité et relâcher l’emprise des services publics ; l’ACC s’inscrivait dans ce mouvement de réforme plus vaste. Néanmoins, l’adoption de l’ACC a été graduelle ; environ un tiers des villes du Massachusetts dotées d’un ACC ne l’ont adopté qu’au cours des cinq dernières années.
La croissance de l’ACC ne signifie pas qu’elle est invulnérable à l’abrogation ou aux efforts d’opposition financés par les services publics – ” En Californie, il y a eu une réaction assez intense “, note M. Hsu. Néanmoins, conclut Hsu, le fait qu’une poignée d’activistes ait pu lancer un mouvement national de politique énergétique est un rappel utile que les actions de chacun peuvent faire la différence.
“Ce n’est pas comme s’ils étaient passés à travers une barricade, ils ont juste trouvé un moyen de la contourner”, dit Hsu. “Je veux que mes étudiants sachent que vous pouvez vous organiser et repenser l’avenir. Cela demande un certain engagement et un travail de longue haleine.”
Référence : “Tout droit sorti de Cape Cod : The origin of community choice aggregation and its spread to other states” par David Hsu, 1er décembre 2021, Recherche sur l’énergie & ; Sciences sociales.
DOI: 10.1016/j.erss.2021.102393
