Letters

As recently reported [“Thiele Measure Would Help Municipalities Save On Electricity Costs Via CCA,” 27east.com, March 31] Assemblyman Thiele is the primary supporter for properly upgrading the laws for Community Choice Aggregation (CCA). CCA allows the residents of a town to form and join a very large group of residents where the CCA management will purchase the type of energy they want and at the best prices they can find.

However, what is purchased by a CCA is not what is delivered to the CCA members, and that fact is rarely well understood by residents and even many elected officials. The one and only existing Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) delivery cable and system would not change even if more than 50 percent of the residents of East Hampton were no longer purchasing from LIPA. All residents of the CCA town (and basically all the 1.1 million residents of Long Island) will receive the same electricity that comes from many sources, including both clean and not-clean output. The CCA does not insert other cables that carry different electricity to homes.

All the elected officials of the Town of East Hampton have supported creating a CCA from Assemblyman Thiele’s proposed law. But they have not calculated, or admitted, that there is total contradiction between the price goals of a CCA and the total lack of fair pricing from South Fork Wind (originally Deepwater Wind South Fork), the company that is trying to add a small and expensive-output wind farm that will be delivered through a cable going from the ocean into East Hampton. Around the year 2028, the price per each kilowatt (KW) sold by South Fork Wind will be over 20 cents. The other nearby and much larger ocean wind farms, including one with the same owners as South Fork Wind, will be charging about 8 cents per KW.

Assemblyman Thiele is the elected official who understands how a CCA in the East End will eliminate for the clean energy members of a CCA the extremely overpriced electricity made by South Fork Wind. Thiele has never made the irrational financial combination of supporting a dramatically overpriced (and undersized) wind farm production while supporting the CCA that will not purchase from South Fork Wind.

I hope that all the other elected officials of Long Island in all the towns other than East Hampton will understand that all the people on Long Island will overpay for the South Fork Wind output. In fact, the residents in the future CCA of East Hampton will pay the least. I will continue to make the East Hampton Town Board see their financial error that could be as high as a $1 billion dollar mistake.

Zachary Cohen

East Hampton