The Powell City Council met on August 4, 2026, at 10:30 AM for a public hearing and discussion of a proposed municipal electric aggregation program. Ross McDonald, a representative of the Northeast Ohio Public Energy Council (NOPEC), presented the program, which Powell voters had previously authorized the city to create. City staff selected NOPEC through a competitive request-for-proposals (RFP) process, and the city manager confirmed that the two statutorily required public hearings had been satisfied. The agreement was before council for consideration that evening, with first electric supply under the program scheduled for August 28, 2026.
Yep. 5 30. Okay. Hello. I'm Ross McDonald and I work for NOPEC. Nope. Is the Northeast Ohio Public Energy Council? We are we're a nonprofit governmental entity whose mission is to aggregate electric and natural gaps. So we represent about 250 communities throughout. We've been doing this for 25 years. If you'll recall last fall, the Beth the Illuminate, is that the brewing company I passed on the way into? I just saw that. Sorry. We've been doing this for a long time. If you recall last fall, though, there was an I'll not say where we were at my power. We killed that we've offered it. And what you're looking at opt out. I'm talking about the electric activation programs. We have a program where the residents who qualify, which pretty much every household is going to qualify. If you qualify, that means that the city is allowed to create a program whereby they negotiate a set price for all residents in the town. To not be in the program, you have to opt out, meaning I don't want in the program. The nice thing is that you have a you with no pack, you can opt out at any time, not just during the formal three week period. But there will be a three-week period uh coming up uh in the summertime where you're going to receive a letter from us or see how we'll tell you what the web can be. Um it gives you instructions on how to study owns. I don't want to be in the program uh to go ahead and talk about it. Now, the thing is um a lot of folks are either getting their power from AEP directly, which is called the standard service offer, or people are shopping on the retail apples of Atlas market, which is uh energychoiceohio.gov, which is filled with, you know, at any given moment there's 150 to 160 different offerings on that website. The point of aggregation is to hopefully the goal is to kind of sort through all the noise of contracts and rates and and provide a really good competitive product for the residents. Now you could possibly go find uh a little bit cheaper rate on the apples to apples website, but it's what is your tolerance for uh continually re-upping or remember to cancel the contract. You have to sort of monitor those uh engagements, those contracts. Uh otherwise, say you're on a short duration, a short contract with them. There's typically language that allows them to auto-renew it and give you a rate that they decide is the rate that they want to give you. Uh so with us, and we'll get into finer details here. With us, uh, we don't charge for cancellation fees. We let you switch among all the different products that we offer. So when we enroll the city, uh everybody's gonna have what's called the default product or the default electric rate. However, we have seven different things you can shop across if you would like to. Uh we have green energy, which is you know renewable energy. We have your standard energy that's fixed for 12 months, 24 months. We have a monthly variable rate that people could enroll into if they want to. So the difference between our uh, I guess, pricing options is that we never charge termination fees or monthly membership fees. So some of those products on the website, Apples Apples, uh, they'll show a membership fee of say $35. And let's say that the kilowatt hour price is eight and a half cents per kilowatt hour. You take eight and a half cents per kilowatt hour plus a 35, that's really closer to 11 cent electric at that point. We are offering a flat rate that is easy to understand, free of termination fees, free of the membership fees. So this all again though originated from the Powell voters authorizing the city to create the program. Uh so that happened last November. Then the city kind of regrouped and created uh an RFB process for qualified uh aggregators to submit proposals to them. Our company did that. We were recommended to the city council. The city council liked the recommendation.