The Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative’s Board of Directors recently approved a decarbonization policy that will provide guidance to leadership and staff as the organization seeks to procure an increasingly “greener” wholesale energy portfolio while still maintaining reasonable costs for its six public power utility members, CMEEC said on Dec. 6.
The action, taken at CMEEC’s annual meeting held on November 16, 2023, followed discussions at several meetings of CMEECs Board of Directors and Risk Management Committee, as well as working sessions with the governing bodies of CMEEC’s public power utility members.
“The desire for a formal, written decarbonization policy was identified during our organization-wide strategic planning sessions that were held in 2020, as memorialized in the Strategic Plan our Board adopted in October 2020,” said Kevin Barber, the Chair of the CMEEC Board of Directors and General Manager of the Third Taxing District of Norwalk Electric Department -- one of CMEEC’s members.
“We felt it was necessary at that time to establish some reasonable parameters around our approach to decarbonization, and this policy reflects the culmination of those efforts,” he said.
Ron Gaudet, Chair of CMEEC’s Risk Management Committee and General Manager of Groton Utilities, a CMEEC member, added that “Consistent with our foundational principles of local governance and control, this policy reflects where we believe our communities are currently at, collectively, in terms of balancing the costs and benefits of achieving incremental gains with respect to environmental stewardship while acknowledging existing regulatory, infrastructure and technological realities.”
“We will continue to seek reasonable and prudent ways to reduce our carbon footprint as we forge a path toward a more decarbonized electric sector,” said Dave Meisinger, the CEO of CMEEC.
“We have already been following the basic ‘all of the above’ tenets of this policy for some time, yet it remains a ‘living document’ that will evolve as a clearer picture of the path toward a more carbon-free electric sector continues to emerge,” he said.
The policy is included with a news release issued by CMEEC related to the policy.
