08/14/2026
Every month, money leaves the house for electricity, heat, and gasoline, and every month it is simply gone. Nothing accumulates. Paul Fenn has a name for that arrangement, energy rent, and a ballpark number to go with it: roughly $70,000 per decade for an average NYSEG household, closer to $90,000 once sewer and trash are counted. He has spent thirty years on a single question, which is what happens if that same money buys something you own instead.
Fenn is the founder and president of Local Power, the consultancy Bloomberg once called the utility industry’s number one enemy. He wrote the first community choice aggregation law in Massachusetts in the mid-1990s, wrote California’s version, signed in 2002, and drafted the world’s first green bond authority for San Francisco in 2001. He is now administrator of the Town and City of Ithaca’s energy programs, which makes this town the live test of his newest model. This conversation covers what those programs are, who is eligible today, what it costs to participate, and the part he is careful not to promise.
What deregulation actually left behind
Fenn dates his involvement to about 1992 and the policy itself to 1995, which puts his whole career inside what he calls the post-regulatory era. Two things happened at once, in his telling. Electricity and gas were deregulated, and the industries that ran them globalized. Capital left. The United States went from importing almost no liquefied natural gas to exporting more of it than anyone.
The consequence is exposure. New York prices are no longer set mainly by what it costs to serve New York. “If a war makes natural gas more valuable as liquefied natural gas in China than it is in New York, then the gas is going to China,” he said. Electricity rates have roughly tripled in recent years, by his account, and another increase request is in front of regulators now. (Fenn puts that request at about 24 percent; NYSEG’s filed case is larger, roughly 35 percent for electricity delivery and 39.4 percent for gas.) A normal year used to be five percent.
His point is not that the bill is annoying. It is that for a lot of households the few hundred dollars a month going to the utility was the only discretionary money they had. There was never a second three hundred dollars.
Two programs, one website
Ithaca adopted its own Green New Deal in 2019, and the years since have been turbulent: a pandemic, a wave of federal climate money, and then that money pulled back. The Town and City of Ithaca run two separate things under one roof, and they are easy to hear as one. Community choice aggregation is the collective purchase of electricity and gas supply on behalf of everyone in the municipality. Enrollment is automatic and residents who want out have to opt out. Dia’s shorthand for it, borrowed from somebody at the town: the Costco of energy. That program is on pause, waiting on state regulators.
Own Your Power is the other half, and it is the half that is moving. It is opt-in. Rather than negotiate a better price for grid power, it helps residents and small businesses build and own energy systems on their own site or their block: rooftop solar, heat pumps, hot water, storage, and a two-way EV charger that works as a battery, all of it operated as a single asset by one control system.
There is no settled word for that. “We say microgrid because it’s the clearest kind of conception of what it is,” Fenn said, noting that some pieces are joined by wires, some by heat or hot water, and some are not physically connected at all. Both programs live at tompkins-gen.com behind two buttons, a blue one for basic service and a green one for Own Your Power.
The expensive part is the paperwork
Fenn does not answer the affordability question with technology. Every piece of equipment involved is on the market and UL-approved today. Nothing he describes is waiting on an invention. The obstacle is soft costs. He means the marketing, the engineering, the applications, the five house calls a solar company makes before anyone signs anything. “Half of the cost is the customer,” he said.
So Local Power is working as a broker and a standardizer. Participants hand over energy data in phases, sit for an interview, and get an analysis of which onsite options would actually pay back on their site. Those projects then get bundled, roughly fifty in the first round, and bid out as a package, so developers do the engineering once for a defined set of jobs instead of chasing homeowners one at a time. Local Power takes five percent of whatever gets built, and is paid only after it is built.
Nothing changes hands before that. As with a municipality accepting a supply contract, nobody commits a dollar until there is a real offer to say yes to.
What ownership is supposed to replace
The target is not independence. It is a much smaller bill and a much shorter list of things that can shock it. Fenn’s stated goal is to get a participating household down to about 30 percent of its current grid draw and to eliminate combustion entirely: no gasoline, no natural gas, no heating oil. The gasoline line matters more than people expect, because a renewably charged EV pulls a whole second monthly bill onto the system.
The arithmetic he will commit to runs like this. The money is already leaving, and today it buys nothing. The premise is that the same flow can service an asset instead, with the return coming from avoided cost: the gas station, the pipeline, most of the grid. Financing bridges the front end, whether a local loan, a home loan, a direct investment platform, or an eighth-year ownership transfer for people who cannot borrow at all. Once that is paid off, the rent requirement stops, in his words, “from that time forward.” Neighbors who share a system share the savings. What he will not do is put a number on the other side. “If you had one number, it would be too much for some and too little for others,” he said. Until the first round of bids comes back, nobody knows what a system costs on a given street. The mechanism is defined. The price is not.
Renters, trusts, and neighbors you’d rather not meet
Dia put the real objection on the table: everyone wants community, and community is frightening. A co-op sounds wonderful right up until it involves other people.
Fenn offers a menu instead. Households that want to cooperate can co-own a system, including neighbors who buy in only for the use of a shared car. Households that want the economics without the meetings can use a trust, which he describes as “a black box where everyone’s agreed to what the terms are on paper,” with what happens on a missed payment or a move-out already decided rather than put to a vote. Someone who wants to own outright and speak to nobody can do that as well. “We want to set up systems that don’t require heroic acts,” he said.
Renters can own a share here, which onsite energy programs almost never allow, and that matters in a town where half the population turns over on a school calendar. A month-to-month tenant with no credit might get modular equipment they can take along when the lease ends. They can buy shares in a larger system next door and cash out later. In a building where the owner participates, the system can be written into the lease, with occupants buying in and holding an agreement with each other. Municipalities building on their own property intend to offer some of that capacity as shares to people who cannot build on their own roof.
His rule about the neighbors and landlords who will never do any of this is blunt. Do not ask them to do the impossible. Let them join the people who want it.
The honest cost of that flexibility is paperwork, and he says so without being asked. Group diversity, in his words, runs exponentially past individual diversity. Local Power is writing agreements for every permutation it meets and turning them into templates.
What he won’t claim
Fenn believes these systems will be able to leave the grid within roughly ten years, once enough electric vehicles and storage accumulate on a network. Today is not that. “At this point, I would never claim that,” he said. Participants stay connected, keep a smaller electric bill, and use the grid as a backup battery charger.
He is equally frank about why this is a hard sell. A decade of green marketing taught people that buying “green power” often meant buying certificates, most of them from Texas, while nothing changed on the ground. What is left is a public that does not believe energy claims anymore, and that is the room his actual program has to walk into. He called that the biggest challenge they face.
Eligibility right now comes down to two things: being in the city or town of Ithaca, and being interested. Renters, homeowners, landlords, small businesses. There is no cost at this stage, and Fenn says even the people who go through the data collection and then decline are useful, because they sharpen the templates and introduce their neighbors. If your town is somewhere else, about half the country already has a CCA law, and Local Power works with communities in both halves.
Local Power has been running pilot programs like this for two decades. Ithaca is the current one.
Contact
Own Your Power / T-GEN sign-up — www.tompkins-gen.com
Email — [email protected]
CCA customer service: (888) 262-0484
Local Power — localpower.com
Massachusetts consultancy: +1 (413) 268-2272
California consultancy: +1 (510) 451-1727
Resources & Links
Tompkins Green Energy Network (T-GEN)
Local Power
City of Ithaca Green New Deal
Ithaca Local Economy Lab
The Practically Real Team
Ithaca Local Economy Lab
Jake Gribschaw — Technical Advisor — www.linkedin.com/in/jgribschaw
Stacey Cornelius — Associate Producer — agencyofwords.com
Sonia Simone — Content Strategist — remarkable-communication.com
Erin O'Shaughnessy — Creative Consultant — www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/erin-o-shaughnessy-depoe-bay-or/373808
Yen Ospina — Artist — yenospina.com
Carsie Blanton — Musician — carsieblanton.com
Photography by Forest Floor Creatives
Own your power instead of renting it. Inside Ithaca's Own Your Power pilot: what renters can own, what joining costs, and why paperwork sets the price.
