ALTAMONT — Actions taken by the Altamont Board of Trustees at its upcoming meeting on Tuesday have the potential to fatten the bank accounts of both residents and the village itself. 

At the Feb. 4 meeting, the board is slated to vote on a lease agreement for 63 of the 303 acres the village owns in Knox, home of the no-longer-in-use Altamont Reservoir. In addition, a public hearing will be held to consider the adoption of a Community Choice Aggregation program, which, if enacted, could lower the electricity bills of village residents. 

At its October 2019 meeting, the village board heard a joint-venture proposal from Boulder Point Solar and Blue Wave Solar to install a community solar project on a portion of the village-owned land in Knox. 

The Altamont Reservoir hasn’t been used in 12 years. 

Blue Wave is a Massachusetts company that was supposed to be partnering with Ravena-based solar developer Boulder Point on the project — but only Boulder Point appears on the six-year lease agreement obtained by The Enterprise. 

According to the state, the largest the project could be is a 5-megawatt installation, which would yield the project about 660 customers, according to EnergySage, an online comparison-shopping marketplace for solar-panel systems.

As for income, the village could receive as much as $1,500 per acre for each of six years, according to the lease agreement.  

By adopting a Community Choice Aggregation program, the village would be giving itself the authority to make a local decision about where and from whom Altamont’s electric customers get their power.

“They don’t ever have to use it,” Louise Gava told attendees during New Scotland’s public hearing on adopting a CCA program; now there is just a local law on the books that gives the town the power to make that energy-purchase decision — should it get to that point. Gava is a Community Choice Aggregation project leader with the Municipal Electric and Gas Alliance.

New York State’s deregulation of the electricity industry in the late 1990s meant that customers no longer had to buy electricity from the utility company; they could enter the marketplace and look for the best rate on their own. 

To break the industry monopoly, utilities were, in the words of one description, “radically reorganized”; rather, they were made to split into separate companies: one company owned and maintained the physical infrastructure while the second company sold the electricity.

All of this deregulation underscores the comity appeal of a Community Choice Aggregation program, where, if enough local municipalities in the area were to enroll in the aggregation, electric customers in those communities would likely pay less for energy while also choosing the source of the electricity generation.

But municipalities also have to supply enough customers to the program to make the aggregation attractive to suppliers, which means offering to energy-service companies 40,000 ready-to-purchase electricity consumers.

And so far, that hasn’t been an issue.

There are already nearly 90,00 households that make up MEGA’s Capital Region Aggregation.