What is Community Empowerment?
A state enabling policy that:
- Empowers local communities, through a democratic process, to set their own course for their energy future
- Communities can enable financing (“support”) projects that meet criteria of local values and concerns
- Communities support projects of the community’s choice
- Meaningful, direct support = Enabling financing
- Residents provide credit-worthy buyer that projects need to secure financing and construct project
- Long-term energy cost stabilization opportunities
- Ability to purchase above RPS for community’s residents, businesses and municipal buildings
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about this website
This website was developed and is maintained by the non-profit Vineyard Power Cooperative, which is dedicated to bringing more renewable energy to the island of Martha's Vineyard, offshore Massachusetts.
We established this website in our role as one of the leading organizations in the coalition to bring Community Empowerment to Massachusetts. However, we soon realized that Community Empowerment is a powerful policy tool that could be used to quickly bring about greater renewable energy use in many places, if not most places across the United States.
For this reason, we structured this website to be available as a platform for Community Empowerment organizers and advocates from across the United States.
If you or your organization would like to promote Community Empowerment in your state, please contact us.
Community Empowerment developed from a grass-roots desire to support renewable energy projects. To date, it has received input from: State and National environmental and renewable energy groups; renewable energy project developers; municipal aggregators; attorneys with expertise in energy law and policies, and project finance; State officials and elected officials; residential consumer advocates.