Community choice aggregation is a program in which your city, county, or a joint authority of local governments buys electricity in bulk on behalf of everyone in the jurisdiction, while your existing utility continues to deliver that electricity through its wires and send you a single monthly bill. You don’t sign up. If your area launches a program, your account is enrolled automatically, and you stay in unless you opt out during the notice window.
Ten states authorize these programs today, and together they serve millions of customer accounts.1U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Community Choice Aggregation The core idea is that a local government can negotiate the supply side of your electricity service, choosing where the power comes from and at what price, without owning any poles, wires, or meters.
Who Does What
Three parties share the role that one utility used to play on its own. The local government, acting as the aggregator, pools the electricity demand of every household and business in its jurisdiction and signs contracts with generators or suppliers to fill that demand. The incumbent utility keeps the physical system: the poles, wires, transformers, and meters that move electricity into buildings. And you, the customer, receive the same service you did before, from the same utility, on the same bill.
Day to day, almost nothing changes. The utility still responds when a storm takes down a line, still reads your meter, and still sends you one monthly statement. That statement now shows a supply charge reflecting the rate the aggregation program negotiated, while the delivery charges stay with the utility. Outages, repairs, and emergencies remain the utility’s legal responsibility whether you’re in the program or not.
The billing mechanics keep this simple on your end. The utility typically collects the full payment and passes the supply portion along to the contracted generator, so the local government doesn’t run a billing department or a call center. One bill, one payment, two different companies behind the scenes.
States Where This Is Available
Local governments can’t just decide to start aggregating electricity purchases. They need enabling legislation from their state. The ten states that have passed such laws are California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Virginia.1U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Community Choice Aggregation Massachusetts and Ohio were among the earliest adopters in the late 1990s. New Hampshire followed in 2019 and Maryland in 2021.
Reach varies widely. California has grown most aggressively, with dozens of programs collectively contracting for thousands of megawatts of new clean energy capacity. Illinois has hundreds of active programs, though many are smaller municipal arrangements. In Virginia, the legal framework exists but programs are still in early stages. If you live in a state that isn’t on the list, there is no pathway to community choice aggregation, regardless of what your local officials might want.
How You Get Enrolled and How to Opt Out
These programs use opt-out enrollment, and this is the single most important thing to understand about them. When a program launches, every eligible electricity account in the jurisdiction is automatically switched to the new supply arrangement. Residents don’t sign up. They’re included unless they actively leave. The design is deliberate: the larger the customer base, the stronger the aggregator’s negotiating position with suppliers.
Before automatic enrollment takes effect, the program is legally required to notify every eligible account holder. The notices explain the new supply rate, the energy mix, the contract length, and the opt-out process. Most states require at least two notifications across a 30-to-60-day window before the switch happens.1U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Community Choice Aggregation Some states also require the notice to show a side-by-side comparison with the utility’s current supply rate.
Opting out is straightforward during the notice period: contact the program administrator by phone, mail, or website, and your account stays on the utility’s default supply. No penalty, no fee. After service has started, the rules tighten. In California, a customer who leaves after the first 60 days must stay with the utility for a full year before becoming eligible to return. Other states may place returning customers on a variable utility rate until the next fixed-rate cycle begins.
Programs routinely see 80 to 93 percent of eligible accounts stay enrolled, mostly because people don’t open the mailer or don’t act on it. If you move into a service area that already has a program, you’ll generally be enrolled automatically after you establish utility service, so the opt-out decision isn’t a one-time community event. Each new account faces it.
What You Get for It
The ability to choose cleaner electricity is the headline reason most communities pursue aggregation. Programs typically offer a default supply that enrolled customers receive automatically, and that default often contains a higher share of renewable energy than the utility’s standard mix. Beyond the default, many programs let customers choose a 50 or 100 percent renewable option.
Those environmental claims are backed by renewable energy certificates, tradeable documents representing the attributes of one megawatt-hour of renewable generation. When a program advertises 100 percent renewable supply, it has bought enough certificates to match the electricity its customers consume. The physical electrons flowing through the grid are the same mix everyone else gets. What changes is where the money goes.
More ambitious programs go further and sign long-term power purchase agreements that directly finance new wind, solar, geothermal, and battery storage projects. Some also fund local initiatives like low-income solar installations, electric vehicle charging incentives, energy efficiency rebates, and demand response programs that pay customers to cut usage during grid stress.
Whether It Actually Saves You Money
Usually, but not always. Most programs launch with rates at or below the utility’s default supply, and administrators naturally highlight savings. Research across multiple states has found that the majority of programs offer competitive pricing, and many of the voluntary green power options still beat the utility’s standard supply on price.
But rates can exceed the utility’s default during certain periods. In Illinois, roughly a quarter of active programs in one major utility territory were not beating the default rate at the time of a federal research review. In Ohio, programs that locked in multi-year fixed-rate contracts became less competitive when wholesale energy prices dropped. The City of Melrose, Massachusetts, suspended its program entirely when regional capacity prices spiked. Community choice programs are exposed to the same market volatility as any other electricity buyer.
Exit fees are the other wrinkle most residents don’t anticipate. When customers leave a utility’s supply service, the utility may still be paying for plants and contracts it built or signed to serve those customers. Regulators in several states allow the utility to charge departing customers a fee so the remaining customers don’t absorb those costs. In California this is called the Power Charge Indifference Adjustment, and it appears as a separate line item on aggregation customers’ bills. The amount changes each year based on the gap between the utility’s legacy procurement costs and current market prices. These fees can narrow or even erase the advertised savings.
So when you’re checking whether your program saves you money, look at the total bill, not the supply rate in isolation. Factor in exit fees. Compare against the utility’s current default rate, not last year’s. And remember that a fixed-rate contract that looks attractive today may not look that way in two years if wholesale prices fall.
How This Differs From Community Solar
The two programs sound similar and are often confused, but they do different things and can coexist in the same area. Community choice aggregation changes who buys your electricity supply on your behalf, covers everyone in the jurisdiction by default, and keeps everything on one utility bill. Community solar lets you subscribe to a share of a specific solar installation and typically credits your bill for the energy that installation produces. It’s opt-in rather than opt-out, tied to a particular physical array, and sometimes billed separately by the project operator. If both are available where you live, you can often participate in each.
What to Watch For
The biggest mistake residents make is ignoring the opt-out notice and then assuming the program must be saving them money because the local government runs it. Local governments have strong incentives to keep enrollment high, and that can mean launching programs where the rate advantage is thin or temporary. Read the notice when it arrives. Compare the numbers against what you’re paying now. And check back annually, because both the utility’s default rate and the program’s rate move over time.
If you’ve been in a program for a while and never opened a bill with the aggregation line item in mind, pull one up now. Many participants don’t realize their supply source changed, because utility bills are confusing enough that a new line item can slip past unnoticed. Knowing what you’re paying, and to whom, is the whole point of the choice the opt-out model asks you to make.