Westchester Municipalities
joining together to fight
climate change by obtaining
clean energy supply
at competitive rates

Westchester Power is the first community energy of its kind in New York State, launched in 2016. There are now 27 municipalities who have proactively taken charge of their energy future by participating, and collectively they have mitigated over 660 thousand tons of greenhouse gases. That’s the equivalent of planting about 11 million tree seedlings and growing them for 10 years, or taking 140,000 cars off the road for a year. Learn more about the program by watching this short video introduction.

Westchester Power Basics

• It’s a program that allows local governments to procure electricity, gas, and other services on behalf of their residents and small businesses.
• The program supplier is selected from qualified Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) through a competitive bidding process.
• Distribution, maintenance, billing remains with utility

A Community
Energy Platform

The large scale of the program enables us to attract new opportunities for increased environmental impact and potential savings. These include:

Community Solar – You can help put more clean energy on the grid and save money at the same time by subscribing to a large solar farm through Sustainable Westchester’s Community Solar program. Currently, participation requires a separate signup process and a two bill system (your electric bill and a separate solar credits bill). NY State has required Con Ed and other utilities to include Community Solar on the electric bill, which means that the program will be able to deliver solar discount credits directly without a separate bill.

City Participation Process

New York State Public Service Commission regulations specify the process for formation of a municipal Community Choice Aggregation program. The main steps include:

Enacting an enabling law – This is essentially the legal announcement that the City takes unto itself the authority to establish a CCA program. It oblige the City to actually do so however.

Community outreach/education activity – while there have already been a number of events, it doesn’t “count” for the purposes of complying with the regulations unless it happens after the Enabling Law is enacted. These additional outreach activities will require 2-3 months to complete.

Let’s Talk Clean Energy

Why clean energy? By now, everyone has heard of climate change, but it’s not always easy to make the connection to our daily lives. Our energy choices are, however, linked to many of the most serious challenges that we face these days, as well as the question of what kind of future we leave our children.

Most of our electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels which release greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. This has contributed to our environment’s degradation, increasing temperatures and local effects such as more frequent higher intensity storms and changes in seasonal patterns. Here’s a short video about the greenhouse effect which is responsible for this problem.

Our energy choices and COVID 19

Studies are showing that areas with higher levels of pollution see worse outcomes from COVID 19. Many observers have pointed out the similarities in the challenges since both require collective, long-term action to solve.

Sea Level Rise

Over the past century, the Hudson has risen about a foot due to global warming (see this Scenic Hudson article), threatening households and habitats. This map shows how the Yonkers waterfront may fare over this century. We can reduce the impact and costs by taking strong action to reverse the growth of greenhouse gases.