Avery Bleichfeld
Boston residents enrolled in the city’s Community Choice Electricity program should expect to see lower rates for the next two years.
Through the municipal aggregation program, the city bulk-purchases electricity and resells it to residents, a model that officials say will bring savings and stability.
Oliver Sellers-Garcia, the city’s environment commissioner and Green New Deal director, called this a shift from a “confusing” and “anxiety-inducing time for consumers.”
“If you look at the news, there’s all sorts of factors that make you think that it’s unclear what’s going to happen, but not a lot of great news from geopolitics to renewable energy sort of being forestalled,” Sellers-Garcia said. “A lot of us living here in Boston are just spending way too much money on energy.”
In June, Massachusetts ratepayers on average paid the third-highest cost for residential electricity in the country, after Hawaii and California, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The city offers three rates through its Community Choice Electricity program, based on what portion of the energy supply is credited to renewable energy sources. Rates are set for two-year spans.
The default Boston Community Choice Electricity program includes an additional 15% renewable energy for a total credited renewable energy supply of 45%. Residents may opt down to a slightly cheaper 30% clean energy rate or opt up to a more expensive 100% renewable energy plan.
The cost of that standard rate will decrease by 3.9% beginning in December, from $0.14805/kWh to $0.14231/kWh — a unit of measurement that tracks how much energy is used over the course of an hour. Based on state estimates that the average residential customer uses 500 kWh per month, a household might save an approximately $2.87 per month or $34.44 over the course of a year.
The cost for customers on the basic plan will decrease 3.8%, from $0.14205/kWh to $0.13661/kWh, for estimated monthly savings of $2.72 cents per month or $32.64 annually.
Customers on the all-renewable-energy plan, called Green 100, will see a 5.5% decrease, from $0.17195/kWh to $0.16248/kWh, for estimated monthly savings of $4.73 per month and $56.82 per year.
Currently, customers on Eversource’s basic rate pay $0.14884/kWh, for an estimated monthly cost of $74.42 and an annual cost of $893.04. Eversource, like all utilities in the state, sets its rates on a six-month period. That basic rate is in place through the end of January.
The city can’t guarantee savings over the two years, Sellers-Garcia said, but the rates are lower than the current ones and will start lower than Eversource’s basic rate. He said the city has so far saved ratepayers over $260 million since the program launched four years ago.
The Community Choice Electricity program is opt-out, meaning that customers are automatically enrolled a few months after opening an account.
Sellers-Garcia said those decreases in rates come from the same mix of factors that allow municipal aggregation programs to reduce costs generally: being able to more strategically pick when to sign contracts and make deals about purchasing energy supply; doing so on a longer two-year timeline, compared to a utility’s six-month scale; and the bulk purchasing power across a municipality (in that factor, Boston’s scale as the largest aggregation program helps, he said).
Under state guidelines, electric suppliers across Massachusetts will be required to increase the amount of clean energy credited to an electric supply to at least 30%.
The additional renewable energy the standard city plan uses will stay the same — 15% on top of what is required statewide. Sellers-Garcia said it’s important to the city to increase the amount of renewable energy without making the program unaffordable for residents.
“One of the great things about aggregation is that we have found a way to strike a balance between keeping costs low and adding a bit of renewable energy,” he said.
The city was also quick to pitch the program — especially with its lower rates — as an alternative to competitive third-party electric providers.
Under state law, companies other than public utilities are allowed to operate as a middleman, purchasing electricity and acting as the supplier for residential customers
Those companies have long been the subject of concern and ire from state and local leaders over concerns that they hike electricity rates after providing initial lower costs and using aggressive sales tactics to pull in customers.
“Mayor Wu and those of us in her administration who’ve had a chance to talk about it have all been really very clear on the topic,” Sellers-Garcia said. “We would like third-party suppliers to be banned in Massachusetts.”
Barring that, he said he’d like to see municipalities being able to opt out of having third-party suppliers allowed in their city or town.
In 2018, then Attorney General Maura Healey’s office published a report analyzing consumer impacts of third-party electric suppliers which found tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of net consumer losses per year.
The attorney general’s office has released annual updates every year since, aside from 2020.
The 2025 update, published in January and revised in May, found that between July 2023 and June 2024, the net consumer loss from participation in third-party electric supplies compared to the energy utility’s basic rate was $73.7 million; the report identified total net losses since July 2015 of over $650 million.
Officials have also expressed concerns that those companies particularly target lower-income communities, communities of color and those who don’t speak English as a first language.
The 2025 report from the attorney general’s office found that low-income households tend to sign up for third-party electric suppliers at a higher rate and on average pay more.
According to the attorney general’s office, 26% of low-income households signed up to purchase from a third-party supplier compared to 15% of non-low-income households; and the average low-income household’s loss through third-party electric suppliers was $217 while the loss of the average consumer generally was $185.
One third-party electric supplier, CleanChoice Energy is facing allegations from the state’s Department of Public Utilities that it participated in deceptive sales practices by comparing its rates in mailers to out-of-date — and higher — rates from electric utilities.
The DPU also alleges that CleanChoice signed customers up for plans with a fixed introductory rate that lapsed, within a matter of months, into a variable and higher monthly rate.
Under the allegations, CleanChoice may need to pay fines to the state’s Department of Public Utilities or be prohibited from signing new customers up to its services.
The alleged violations have renewed calls for reforms or bans on the competitive third-party electricity system.
“We continue to believe that the single best way to protect Massachusetts residents from third-party electric suppliers’ exorbitant rates and predatory practices over the long term is to pass legislation to ban third-party electric suppliers from the residential electricity market, or at the very least pass substantial reforms,” said Larry Chretien, executive director of the Green Energy Consumers Alliance, in a statement on behalf of the Campaign to Stop Predatory Electric Suppliers.