Mansfield, MA — April 4, 2019 ‐ Energy New England, LLC (ENE), always takes the opportunity to provide diverse options to our clients’ portfolios. The Wholesale Power team continues to analyze multiple opportunities – type of project, cost, fit, impact on portfolio mix, and ultimately – energy pricing. Attention to client requests, portfolios and how potential resources enhance the systems position in meeting their goals is the priority of ENE’s work with municipal light plants (MLPs).

The team at ENE has spent considerable time building a decision support tool that will allow each system to see two useful pieces of analysis: (1) recommended participation in potential projects and (2) ability to model each project’s volumes, enabling decision-makers to visualize the outcome of portfolio mixing and pricing for individual MLPs.

The projects currently being modeled include Deepwater Offshore Wind (48 mw), Palmer Biomass (40 MW), Utility Scale Solar (50 MW) and First Light (30 MW). These projects enable the MLPs to add resources of different technologies to their portfolios.

ENE suggests that MLPs add energy from each project to their power supply portfolios. ENE measured this added set of resources against highly conservative assumptions of forward market prices and concluded that an addition does not profoundly change portfolio cost structure over 20+ years and compares favorably to current Massachusetts RPS costs. The minimal rate impact means that public power can continue to add these projects to their portfolios, maintain competitive retail rates, and increase public power’s trend toward use of non-carbon emitting power supplies.

The benefit from adding non-carbon emitting power to municipal portfolios lead MLPs in Massachusetts to file bill H2863, sponsored by Chairman Thomas Golden and Senator Anne Gobi. It requires MLPs to meet the current Massachusetts carbon reduction goal of 80% by 2050. This piece of legislation and commitment to the non-carbon emitting projects discussed above continues each MLP’s effort to meet each constituents’ desires to increase portfolio mix and maintain high reliability of service and reasonable costs – a hallmark of public power communities for over 100 years.

Setting goals and guidelines, maintaining flexibility to create diverse, non-carbon portfolios, preventing compromise on public power’s founding principles of local choice, reliability and reasonable rates is the most rational approach that also fits the MLP business model.

About Energy New England, LLC. Energy New England, LLC (https://ene.org) is a leading provider of wholesale and retail energy services. The company conducts more than $300M in structured transactions annually, and has also grown to become the leading provider of conservation and efficiency services for the public power community in the region. The company’s customer base has grown exponentially over the past few years. Its comprehensive portfolio includes power supply and risk management services, regulatory, energy and water conservation services, energy brokering, and renewable energy solutions. Energy New England has customers situated throughout New England as well as other power pools. The company works with an increasing number of utilities, independent power producers, industrial, commercial and institutional facilities, municipalities and non-profits.

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