Energy Cooperative Gives Committee A Charge

     Bourne’s Alternative Energy Committee wants the town to join an electrical cooperative that will  develop alternative energy projects that could help the town power its municipal buildings.
     Since the cooperative, called the Cape & Vineyard Electric Cooperative, would own and operate the energy projects, the town would incur little debt for the work.
     Maggie Downey, administrator of Cape Light Compact, told the committee members this week that the cooperative’s long-term objective is to develop electric generation projects over the next 10 years that would stabilize electric rates for all Cape Light Compact customers.
     The cooperative could obtain lower cost financing for projects through, for example, the Rural Utilities Service, and could at the same time, she said, limit a town’s risk.
     After hearing the presentation and asking numerous questions, committee members agreed that it would be in the town’s interest to join the cooperative, something that will require a Town Meeting vote.
     The committee then voted to ask selectmen to approve the addition of two articles to the Fall Town Meeting warrant. The first would authorize the town to apply for membership in the cooperative. The second would authorize selectmen to negotiate membership terms and conditions with the cooperative.
     Currently, the cooperative, which was organized in September of 2007, has three members: the Cape Light Compact itself, Barnstable County, and the Town of Barnstable.
     Prior to the group’s formation, cooperative organizers had wanted a ruling from the US Internal Revenue Service that the energy transactions that the cooperative was contemplating would not be taxable. However, the IRS does not rule on hypothetical questions, so the cooperative had to be formed and an actual transaction had to take place before the IRS could answer its question.
     On June 9 of this year, a favorable IRS ruling was returned, and the cooperative now wants to expand and go forward.
     The cooperative was formed before the state passed the recent Green Communities Act, which allows for net-metering, and was originally intended to allow municipalities to do some of the things that net-metering now allows them to do outside of the cooperative.
      The net-metering law allows municipalities to use the electricity they generate through alternative energy projects to offset their utility costs and decide how to apply any unused credits.
     The cooperative’s current plans would relieve towns of the cost of developing and maintaining those projects and still allow members to take advantage of net-metering.
     One of the things Bourne’s committee members wanted to ensure before recommending that the town join the cooperative was that Bourne could pursue alternative energy projects outside of the cooperative, now that state law encourages those projects.
     At the present time, for example, the alternative energy committee has been talking with the Ingersoll family about plans for a green technology campus on their Bournedale property, a joint project of the family and the Bourne Financial Development Corporation. If the town wanted to develop a similar public/private project, the committee wanted it to be able to do so.
     Ms. Downey told members that the cooperative members had discussed the issue and had acknowledged that towns would want to be able to pursue outside ventures, but noted that sometime in the future the group might want to place a cap or in some other way limit the size of those projects.
     Member towns will not be able to pick and choose projects, but if they were opposed to a cooperative project, they could vote to leave the cooperative, remaining bound only to the contracts to which they were a part.
     Members also wanted to know whether a project like the Bourne landfill’s methane gas-to-energy project might be a cooperative project, and were told that it could.
     While wind energy was the most discussed type of alternative energy, the cooperative’s projects and agreements would not be limited to wind power.
     The cooperative is currently putting together the agreements to partner with a private entity in a photovoltaic pilot project that would invest $5 million to $10 million in solar energy projects located in member towns.
     Bourne, Ms. Downey said, has two potential sites identified for such an installation.
     Under the agreements, as proposed, the private entity would own the installations for 15 years, when ownership would flip to the cooperative.
     During those first 15 years, the cooperative would have a fixed-price power purchase agreement and a renewable energy certificate agreement in place with the private entity.
     The town would purchase its energy under that agreement, using the money it would ordinarily budget for energy costs. The installations’ host towns would participate in virtual net-metering, with an estimated savings of seven cents per kilowatt hour per year over the life of the system, a number calculated using current energy costs.