Tom McKittrick, Ruba Al Zu-bi', and Mike Collins WFAE studio

May 9 2012.

Ruba Al-Zu’bi, Director of Environmental Sustainability for Jordan’s Development and Free Zone Commission toured ReVenture Park today. She is one of 21 Eisenhower Fellows traveling the U.S. to  learn about how industries, governments, etc., work in this country.  She and Tom McKittrick, developer of ReVenture Park, were interviewed by Mike Collins on WFAE Charlotte Talks. You can listen to the interview here.

Read Ruba’s blog about her visit here.

“A sharp developer who spends 3 years alleviating regulatory burden and preparing the location for new development is a role model for many of us. Defining the OPPORTUNITY of green might be more important than strict protection of green. It is all about understanding the ‘trade-offs’ and making the conscious decision that we can defend in front of the coming generations” Ruba Al Zu-bi’.

WFAE studio

Tom McKittrick shares the master plan with Ruba Al Zu-bi'

Bacteria are used in anaerobic digestion to break down biodegradable waste into energy in the form of biogas. Components of this fuel source are methane, carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen. Other useful byproducts are compost, water, and natural fertilizer.

Anaerobic digestion begins when a group of microorganisms converts organic material, so other organisms can form organic acids. Then anaerobic bacteria utilize these acids, so the decomposition process can be completed.

The anaerobic digestion system being used at American River Packaging is the result of ten years of research by Ruihong Zhang, a UC Davis professor of biological and agricultural engineering. Her technology has been licensed by the start-up Clean World Partners. They focus on providing waste management systems employing anaerobic digestion to help generate energy and to attempt to divert some of the millions of tons of organic matter currently going into landfills.

“I applaud Professor Zhang for this tremendous accomplishment,” said UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. ”Scientists like Professor Zhang are helping UC Davis address the most pressing global problems of our time. Her work brings us a giant step closer to the sustainable future we all hope for.”

An ambitious and exciting recycling initiative is now underway at ReVenture Park. Crews are pulling out 180,000 pounds of metal – including stainless steel and copper – from this once abandoned textile dye manufacturing facility. Instead of going to waste, these metals will be put back to use in traditional and non-traditional ways – all of which are detailed below.

Click here to watch a video clip of recycling crews in action. This video is HD quality and free for your use

The visionaries behind ReVenture Park plan to recover an estimated 1.5 million pounds of metal from 15 shuttered industrial buildings located on the 667-acre site. “We are working diligently to ensure as much of it is sold and put back to work as possible,” says Tom McKittrick, President and Founder of Forsite Development. “In the first building alone, we estimate we salvaged over 7,000 linear feet of two inch stainless steel piping that we will use on other projects.”

Most of the buildings also have extensive piping, racking, tanks, and other processing equipment that will be harvested and recycled. Once those spaces are cleared, the developers will renovate them into low cost space for all types of inn

Michael Haag and Joseph Bondi, UNC-Charlotte Art Students

ovative clean energy technologies and companies.

Not only will the metals be reused and recycled for new industry, ReVenture Park developers are working with UNC-Charlotte art students on an innovative new beatification project. These creative students will be transforming some of the salvaged material into metal sculptures that will ultimately be displayed throughout the site. “We are both honored and excited to tackle a project of this scope. We will be crafting an explicit, tangible and, yes, beautiful expression of the metamorphosis about to begin at ReVenture Park.” Michael Haag and Joseph Bondi, UNC- Charlotte art students.

The Environmental Protection Agency is also spotlighting ReVenture Park for being a development site which reuses existing materials rather than building from new materials. You can read more on their feature here.

As the developers of ReVenture Park, Forsite Development Inc. has retained NELCO Recycling and Aggregate of Mooresville, NC to manage the interior demolition and recycling of metals.

epa.gov

EPA is committed to empowering states, communities, and other stakeholders to work together in a timely manner to assess, safely clean up, and sustainably reuse contaminated lands. In 2008, EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER) launched the RE-Powering America’s Land: Siting Renewable Energy on Potentially Contaminated Land and Mine Sites Initiative (RE-Powering Initiative) to facilitate the use of potentially contaminated sites for renewable energy generation when it is aligned with the community’s vision for the site. For this report, potentially contaminated land includes sites where contamination is suspected but has not been confirmed and sites where contamination has been identified.

Through the RE-Powering Initiative, EPA identified and mapped more than 11,000 potentially contaminated sites—and nearly 15 million acres that have potential for developing solar, wind, biomass and geothermal facilities.

Read the full report here

PowerMag.com

Waste-to-energy (WTE) technologies convert the chemical energy stored in residues associated with human activities into heat, steam, and electricity. Primary fuel sources include municipal solid waste (MSW) and other materials diverted from disposal facilities as well as gases rich in methane that are generated when organic substances decompose in the absence of oxygen.

Among the many available fuel-processing and energy conversion technologies, incineration of MSW and derived fuels in boilers is commercially mature and in common use around the world, as are combustion-based systems that fire gases resulting from uncontrolled anaerobic decomposition of waste buried in landfills and from controlled processing of organic materials in purpose-built digesters. Advanced thermal conversion technologies such as gasification and pyrolysis—which transform MSW into versatile fuels suitable for high-efficiency energy production or direct end use—are finding increasing application but are not yet proven.

Overview of Technologies

State-of-the-art WTE technologies are widely recognized by government agencies as effective resource management solutions and renewable generation options. When incorporated within integrated MSW plans emphasizing reduction, reuse, recycling, and composting, they provide an environmentally sound means of recovering energy from the residual wastes while decreasing the volume of material that must be landfilled by roughly 90%. At landfills, agricultural facilities, and wastewater treatment plants, they generate useful energy while substantially reducing emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas (GHG) with high global warming potential.

Globally, WTE capacity has expanded significantly in recent years, driven largely by policy considerations. First and foremost, many nations have forsaken landfilling as inefficient and environmentally undesirable, leading to a steady increase in the annual tonnage of MSW subjected to energy recovery. For example, a 1999 European Union directive essentially banned the landfilling of combustible MSW fractions in order to control methane emissions, avoid nonproductive use of land and other resources, and prevent water and soil contamination.

In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, such policies—along with climate change mitigation and renewable energy targets—have motivated the construction of hundreds of mass-burn incinerators, the early commercial application of various advanced thermal conversion technologies, and the proliferation of smaller-scale landfill gas (LFG) and digester gas systems. Frequently, these WTE plants supply heat or are combined heat and power (CHP) facilities; in fact, 18% of the district heating load in Denmark is served by MSW combustion. Across Europe, WTE facilities produced 56 terawatt-hours (TWh) of renewable energy in 2006, including 31 TWh of heat and 25 TWh of power.

A far different situation exists in the U.S., where public concern over pollutant emissions from incinerators has yet to dissipate, despite the stringent air quality control requirements imposed more than 15 years ago by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). No new MSW energy recovery plants have been constructed since the mid-1990s, and no commercial-scale MSW gasification or pyrolysis facilities have been built. The modest WTE capacity additions—largely of LFG facilities—have been motivated by federal air quality regulations and, more recently, state renewable portfolio standard (RPS) requirements, rather than by waste management policies.

According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), load-serving WTE capacity exceeded 4.1 GW in 2008, but the amount running on MSW has declined slightly since 2003, falling to 2.2 GW. However, recent growth in LFG deployment helped to keep WTE’s share of nonhydro renewable capacity near 11%, third-largest behind wind and wood biomass.

As baseload, dispatchable units, WTE plants continue to play an important role in U.S. renewable energy generation, even accounting for the fact that capacity has stagnated and the EIA includes only the fraction of output attributable to biogenic sources such as green power. WTE technologies supplied 15.4 TWh of renewable energy to the grid in 2008, equivalent to 16% of nonhydro renewable generation, second only to wind. Of this total, MSW incinerators and fluidized bed combustion (FBC) units produced 7.2 TWh from biogenic fuels, which make up roughly 55% of the total U.S. waste stream by heat input. Counting output attributable to the combustion of plastics and other nonbiogenic materials, these plants produced roughly 13 TWh, pushing overall generation from WTE technologies above 20 TWh.

Independent power producers—among them waste management firms and municipalities—own the majority of load-serving WTE capacity, while more than half of the methane-rich fuel produced at U.S. landfills, agricultural operations, and wastewater treatment plants is applied to generate on-site heat and power.

Conventional incinerators typically collect MSW from a broad area, operate on must-run status, and offer availabilities exceeding 90%. LFG and digester gas facilities—collectively referred to as anaerobic-digestion-to-energy (ADTE) plants—are distributed resources sited, sized, and run according to fuel availability and production rate. Both MSW-derived fuels and digester gases may be cofired in fossil plants, but this may have operational and regulatory implications.

MSW projects have a unique attribute: As an alternative to landfilling, they typically charge a tipping fee to municipalities and other entities (Figure 1). This translates into a negative fuel cost—and a revenue source—that may help offset the high capital costs associated with fuel handling and environmental control systems and the high operations and maintenance (O&M) costs attributable to the variable composition, high moisture and ash content, high contaminant level, and low energy density of waste materials. ADTE plants also require a steady supply of no-cost fuel to justify the expense of collection, treatment, and conversion systems.

read more

StlToday.com

More than a century after cheap coal helped lure the nation’s first alumina refinery here, a developer wants to transform the old Alcoa site in the into one of the Midwest’s largest solar projects.

The developer, Brightfields Development LLC, has spent about two years studying how to convert the long-abandoned brownfield, now owned by the city of East St. Louis, into a 20-megawatt solar farm, enough to power about 4,000 homes.

The transformation of the 220-acre site, overgrown with trees and other vegetation and polluted with reddish bauxite residue known as “red mud,” won’t be easy, or cheap.

The first phase of the environmental remediation alone is estimated to cost $24 million and take eight months. The solar project would cost an additional $65 million and require special legislation to enable the developer to sell the power to Ameren Illinois at prices current market prices.

Utility power contracts normally last a few years, but Brightfields needs a 20-year supply contract in order to finance the solar farm, said John Hanselman, managing principal of the Wellesley, Mass.-based firm.

“We need a long-term contract to make the project work,” he said.

Hanselman and other supporters, including bill co-sponsor state Sen. John O. Jones, R- Mt. Vernon, say the cost to Ameren Illinois customers — just more than 30 cents a year, on average — is worth the project’s enormous public benefits: a source of clean energy that will be produced during peak demand; hundreds of jobs; and a golden chance to put a tract of post-industrial eyesore back into productive use.

The cleanup and solar construction would generate more than 600 jobs overall and support about 20 permanent jobs, Hanselman said.

To be sure, a polluted property in East St. Louis – a city gutted by urban decay, abandoned buildings and high unemployment and crime – seems an unlikely place for the region’s first solar farm.

But the concept — installing solar projects on urban brownfields — is Brightfield’s sole focus. Such properties often make sense for solar projects because of the availability of large swaths of unwanted land, located near centers of population and energy demand, Hanselman said. The East St. Louis cleanup is being overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency under the federal Superfund program.

The type of pollution present at the old Alcoa property, specifically, means the site likely won’t attract other developers, Hanselman said. That’s because the main contaminant present, soft bauxite residue, doesn’t provide a solid enough foundation to construct large-scale structures without extensive engineering.

The history of the North Alcoa site near Missouri Avenue and 29th Street goes back to the turn of the 1900s when Pittsburgh Reduction Co., which later became Alcoa, constructed a plant to covert raw bauxite into alumina, the main ingredient in aluminum. (The actual plant was on the other side of Missouri Avenue in Alorton, short for Aluminum Ore Town.)

The plant ceased operations in the late 1950′s. By the mid-1960′s, most of the buildings had been demolished and the land sold. The property changed hands several times over subsequent years and is now owned by the city.

All that remains today is the legacy of pollution. Over the decades the plant operated, tons of reddish bauxite residue, the byproduct of alumina production, was discarded; first in Pittsburgh Lake and later in three disposal sites surrounded by gypsum dikes.

Some of the most hazardous waste — so-called spent potliner that was scraped from the bottom of kilns and included concentrations of cyanide and fluoride — was removed in 2006. Otherwise, the site remains little changed from decades ago, save for growth of trees and other vegetation.

The city has sought for years to redevelop the property. In the mid-1990s, a former mayor traveled to the White House to accept a $100,000 federal brownfields grant to help find a new use for it. Several ideas have been pitched since, including a company that wanted to use bauxite waste to make construction materials, but none of the proposals materialized.

The EPA on Thursday will take the first step toward breathing new life into the property on Thursday when it releases a draft plan to complete remediation work. A public meeting is scheduled for Tuesday in East St. Louis to discuss it.

The plan calls for spreading a two-foot-deep soil cover across 150 acres of the site to reduce exposure to lead and other metals. Existing onsite ponds would also be reconfigured to catch stormwater runoff.

“The whole idea here is to cover the waste, because obviously there’s risk associated with exposure,” said Dion Novak, the Chicago-based project manager for the EPA.

The federal agency can issue a formal decision to move forward with the work after 30 days and negotiate an agreement with Alcoa and the city – the parties legally responsible for funding the work, Novak said.

Alcoa already has pledged to fund its share of the remediation, company spokeswoman Lori Lecker said. In a prepared statement, she said the aluminum giant is “fully committed to funding and completing that remediation work.”

While cleaning up decades of environmental waste won’t be easy, Brightfields’ proposed solar project faces an even bigger obstacle — the Illinois General Assembly and the politics of energy subsidies.

The bill to enable the project, sponsored by Sen. James Clayborne, D-Belleville, would authorize Brightfields to enter into a 20-year power supply contract with Ameren Illinois at a price starting at 23 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Ameren Illinois is already required by state law to buy some solar energy. But the price stipulated in the proposed legislation is almost 50 percent more expensive than solar energy sold to utilities in February under shorter-term agreements, according to Arlene Juracek, the acting director of the Illinois Power Agency.  And its several times more expensive than energy generated with fossil fuels. The added costs would be passed through to Ameren retail customers.

Ameren Illinois spokesman Leigh Morris said the utility, which merely passes power costs on to its customers, hasn’t taken a position on the measure.

The Illinois Senate passed the bill 33-22 late last month. It is currently pending in the House.

State Sen. William Haine, D-Alton, was among those who voted against the bill in the Senate. He said opposes any effort to benefit energy developers at the expense of ratepayers.

“I admit that this is a small amount of money,” he said. “But I’ve grown weary of subsidizing power projects on the backs of Ameren consumers.”

Henry Henderson, a Granite City native and head of the Midwest office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said legislators should take a broader view of the issue, and realize that coal and other existing fossil fuel-generated electricity are also subsidized. Projects like the proposed solar farm provide added benefits of revitalizing blighted urban properties and creating new jobs, he said.

“The idea that a use has been found for this site and it puts clean energy into the grid is a net benefit,” Henderson said.

Whether or not the legislation advances, remediation of the Alcoa property will move forward, and installation of the proposed soil cover could begin as soon as this summer to help accommodate redevelopment plans.

Novak has been in charge of overseeing the site cleanup for more than a decade. In that time, he’s watched various other efforts to revitalize the long-abandoned property fail. This time, he sees potential.

“This particular concept has a lot of promise,” he said.

MassHighTech.com

Cleantech business Harvest Power has raised a $110 million Series C round of funding, the company announced Thursday.

The funding of Waltham-based Harvest Power was led by True North Venture Partners and American Refining and Biochemical Inc. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), DAG Ventures and Generation Investment Management also participated in the round. In March 2011, the company raised $51.7 million in a series B round, which was led by Generation Investment Management, a fund started by Al Gore.

Harvest, a biogas manufacturer, said the company will use the funding to expand its capabilities. Founded in 2008, Harvest uses its technology to process organic materials (such as food scraps, scrap wood and other organic material) into renewable energy. The funding comes after the company announced plans to construct two anaerobic digestion (food waste to energy) facilities sin North America.

“Harvest presents a game-changing investment opportunity for True North: The company intersects our core interests of energy, water, agriculture and waste, and its business model is also highly scalable,” said True North Managing Partner Michael Ahearn in a written statement.

The company also announced that Ahearn will join Harvest Power’s board of directors. Goldman, Sachs & Co. (NYSE: GS) served as the placement agent.

“The significant investor interest Harvest has received is the result of our dynamic partnerships, innovative approaches, and proven ability to build the first nationwide organics management company,” said Paul Sellew, CEO of Harvest. “By integrating organics recycling, renewable energy and the production of soils, mulches and natural fertilizers, Harvest has shown that we are a leader in a new kind of cleantech – one that lowers costs. We are proud to partner with True North and other investors that want to be part of this disruptive model.”

Harvest Power raised $1.25 million of a targeted $2.25 million new funding round in September 2011. That same month, it acquired Delaware-based soil and mulch manufacturer Coastal Supply Company Inc. in September 2011. The deal allowed Harvest Power to expand its access to retailers through Coastal Supply’s existing relationships with retailers such as Lowe’s and The Home Depot, according to Sellew.

WSJ.com

Each week, we push our trash to the curb, and it seemingly disappears. But where does it all go: the spent cartons of milk, the computer keyboard fried by spilled coffee, those empty dog food cans?

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided to find out. In 2009, they began attaching transmitter chips to thousands of pieces of ordinary garbage. They tossed this “smart trash” into the bin, sat back and watched the tortuous, disturbing path that our garbage often takes: the meanderings of electronic waste as it headed for distant shores, of ratty old sneakers that ran the equivalent of a dozen marathons, of printer cartridges that traversed the continent not once but twice on the road to recycling.

This clever experiment threw a spotlight on the biggest, costliest, dirtiest secret about our garbage: our ignorance of how much we produce, what it contains and what happens to it once it leaves our hands.

Take the nation’s official trash tally—used alike by environmentalists, businesses and policy makers—which maintains that the average American tosses out 4.4 pounds of trash a day, with about a third getting recycled and the rest going to landfills. These numbers are found in the Environmental Protection Agency’s exhaustive annual compendium “Municipal Solid Waste in the United States”—America’s trash Bible—and are determined by an array of byzantine estimates and simulations, based on manufacturing data and the life expectancy of products.

But the EPA’s “materials flow analysis” dates back to the bad old days when there were 10 times the number of town dumps and many more illegal ones, with little actual weighing and regulation. Today the business model of the landfill and recycling business depends on precise measurement (and billing per ton), so we have much more real-world data. Using these sources, the most recent survey conducted by Columbia University and the trade journal BioCycle found that Americans actually throw out much more than the EPA estimates, a whopping 7.1 pounds a day, and that less than a quarter of it gets recycled.

So how does America’s trash weigh in? Here are some key numbers from the emerging science of garbology:

• At 7.1 pounds of trash a day, each of us is on track to produce a staggering 102 tons of waste in an average lifetime.

• Trash has become America’s leading export: mountains of waste paper, soiled cardboard, crushed beer cans and junked electronics. China’s No. 1 export to the U.S. is computers, according the Journal of Commerce. The United States’ No. 1 export to China, by number of cargo containers, is scrap.

• American communities on average spend more money on waste management than on fire protection, parks and recreation, libraries or schoolbooks, according to U.S. Census data on municipal budgets.

As these snapshots suggest, garbage costs are staggering. New York City alone spent $2.2 billion on sanitation in 2011. According to the city’s department of sanitation, more than $300 million of that was just for transporting its citizens’ trash by train and truck—12,000 tons a day—to out-of-state landfills, some as far as 300 miles away. How much is 12,000 tons a day? That’s like throwing away 62 Boeing 747 jumbo jets daily, or driving 8,730 new Honda Civics into a landfill each morning.

On the opposite coast, Los Angeles has opted to construct a garbage mountain 500 feet high, taller than most of the city’s high-rises. This is Puente Hills Landfill—trash as geologic feature, so full of 60 years’ worth of decomposing garbage that the methane it produces is pumped into generators that provide enough power for 70,000 homes.

At the landfill’s flat and dusty summit, a dozen bulldozers and graders swarm every day, backing and turning and mashing and shaping. “More people should see what I see here,” says Michael “Big Mike” Speiser, whose job is to sculpt trash into a mountain with the blade of a bulldozer. “Everything that’s advertised on TV ends up [here] sooner or later, and a lot sooner that most people think.”

Puente Hills is just the largest of the 1,900 municipal landfills operating nationwide. The chief executive of Waste Management, the world’s largest trash company, estimates that there is at least $20 billion in valuable resources locked inside the materials buried in U.S. landfills each year, if only we had the technology to recover it cost effectively.

The U.S. doesn’t have to handle trash this way. Other countries with big economies and high standards of living have rejected the disposable products that make up so much of America’s garbage—in part because European countries hold manufacturers, not taxpayers, responsible for the costs of packaging waste. With that sort of incentive, toothpaste tubes need not come in redundant cardboard boxes and television sets can leave the store with no boxes at all. The average Dane makes four pounds of trash a day, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; the average Japanese generates 2.5 pounds.

Other countries also are shunning landfills. Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium and Denmark all send less than 4% of their garbage to landfills; Germany does no landfilling at all. Recycling rates there are two to three times America’s, and the rest of their trash goes to waste-to-energy plants.

The preferred mode in Europe is to build not a few hugely expensive incineration behemoths but a larger number of smaller, community-based utilities that burn trash to provide electricity and heat through underground conduits. The technology in the newest plants limits toxic emissions of dioxins, a major issue with incinerators of the past, to levels similar to a backyard barbecue’s. Carbon emissions are less than those emanating from landfills. One facility being built in Denmark will be hidden beneath a community ski park featuring three different slopes of various difficulties.

Both L.A. and New York City are considering major waste-to-energy projects, and Waste Management is experimenting with new technologies, including a test facility in Arlington, Ore., that uses a process known as plasma gasification. The technology vaporizes (but doesn’t burn) garbage with arcs of electrical energy that heat matter inside their beam to 25,000 degrees. The process takes place in the absence of oxygen, so many of the normal, noxious byproducts of combustion aren’t produced. Instead, out comes a synthetic gaseous fuel and a lump of shiny rock, not unlike volcanic glass, with toxins locked up inside in relative safety. This garbage death ray reduces trash volume by 99%, not even leaving ash behind—just 20 pounds of obsidian for every ton of trash disintegrated. The process is still too expensive to be commercial, but it shows promise.

Of course, the best way to reduce trash is to waste less in the first place. Cut out disposable plastic bags or bottled water. Buy used or refurbished electronics. Consider whether that thing you’re buying will be treasured for years to come or discarded in a few months. The real sacrifice, even when it is invisible to most of us, is accumulating ever more things that quickly find their way to our costly, growing mountains of garbage.

CompeteCoalition.com

A new analysis released by COMPETE highlights the stunning growth in electricity shopping in the states that allow retail power competition, despite the fact that demand for electricity has been flat due to the economic slowdown. The increasingly vibrant competitive retail electricity markets are leading to what I call the electricity “haves” and “have nots”.

The 17 states and the District of Columbia with workably competitive retail competition allowing customer choice are the electricity “haves”. And as COMPETE’s report clearly shows, the success in these states is creating pressure in the states that are electricity choice “have nots” to provide greater flexibility and freedom to their electricity customers.

“The surge in retail electric choice and the underlying reasons for that surge warrant renewed consideration of providing access to captive customers everywhere. As competitive choice models evolve, they can serve as a basis for a transition to choice in new states seeking favorable opportunities and increased benefits for their consumers,” concludes the report’s author, Philip O’Connor, former chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission and noted expert on electricity competition issues.

O’Connor’s analysis, based on data compiled by DNV KEMA Energy & Sustainability and the U.S. Energy Information Administration, tells a compelling story. Since 2008, customer accounts served by competitive suppliers have grown more than 53%, from 8.7 million to 13.3 million in 2011. The total electricity load served competitively has grown 40% since 2008, from 488 million megawatt-hours (MWh) to 685 million MWh in 2011, an increase of nearly 200 million MWh.
“As of the close of 2011, nearly one out of every five kilowatt-hours of electricity in America was supplied by a competitive provider – even though customer choice is denied to consumers representing 56% of total U.S. electricity load,” O’Connor observes.

O’Connor’s new analysis updates a similar report prepared for COMPETE in 2010, which found the competitive share of electricity sales volumes nationally grew from zero to 15% in the first decade since its inception, moving from a novel concept to a normal practice in the electricity business, as customers sought the flexibility and innovative pricing and services offered by competitive electricity suppliers.

The updated analysis shows a tremendous increase in switching by residential customers since 2009, both through individual supply contracts and through competitive aggregation programs. Since 2008, the total number of customer accounts served under choice arrangements grew by 53% to more than 13.3 million. Residential accounts served by competitive suppliers jumped more than 3.8 million to nearly 11 million, a 54% increase. The number of non-residential accounts served competitively increased by more than 800,000 to nearly 2.4 million – an increase of more than 50%.

This vibrant success story helps underscore why customers in Arizona, California, Michigan and other states denied electric choice are increasingly demanding it. Competition works in the states that allow it.

In contrast to monopoly-protected utilities that pass along their costs to captive consumers, competitive suppliers must risk their own capital to lower costs and enhance efficiencies to attract and retain customers and remain profitable. To succeed in a robust, open competitive electric market, suppliers therefore must constantly differentiate themselves by finding new and better ways to serve customers. As such, robust competition supports expansion of innovative products and services like consumer-empowering demand response, often facilitated by smart meters and grids.

Retail electric competition is clearly the best option for our recovering economy, for businesses both large and small, and for residential customers. It helps promote innovation and emerging technologies, and gives businesses the flexibility they need to manage their energy costs efficiently and preserve and create jobs.