Westchester’s green power program shutting down amid dispute with New York state
Sustainable Westchester, the nonprofit behind the initiative, says new outreach and education rules from the New York State Public Service Commission made the program too burdensome to maintain.
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A major change is coming to Westchester’s clean energy scene. The Westchester Power program — which has supplied greener electricity to more than 100,000 households across 30 municipalities — will end this month.
Sustainable Westchester, the nonprofit behind the initiative, says new outreach and education rules from the New York State Public Service Commission made the program too burdensome to maintain. “Those standards were granular and really beyond the capacities of a community-based organization,” said executive director Noam Bramson.
But state regulators dispute that claim, saying Sustainable Westchester simply failed to meet basic transparency requirements designed to protect ratepayers.
Another source of tension has been the program’s automatic enrollment model, which placed households into the green energy plan unless they opted out — a practice that left many residents frustrated.
Starting Dec. 1, participants will be switched back to their default utility suppliers.
