New Jersey passed its equivalent of CCA, government energy aggregation, as part of electricity deregulation in 1999, but a customer signature requirement stymied CCA efforts. Legislation has since removed this opt-in barrier, and outreach is under way, particularly to communities engaged in sustainability and climate action planning.

New Jersey’s experiment with an opt-in aggregation process demonstrated that CCA must operate as an opt-out program. Only with the automatic enrollment of all customers, and a well-publicized opt-out provision, can a CCA reach the critical mass and demand stability necessary to attract suppliers and succeed as a business. New Jersey now allows the automatic enrollment of residential customers, but it still requires commercial and municipal accounts to opt in during a specified period.

• Percentage of renewable power required under New Jersey’s Renewable Portfolio Standard: 22.5% by 2021
• Current administration’s goal for percentage of electricity to be supplied from carbon-free sources by 2050: 70%
• Current administration’s distributed generation and combined heat-and-power goal: 1500MW
• Megawatts of solar photovoltaic installed under New Jersey’s Solar Renewable Energy Certificates incentive program and 2.1% carve-out for solar in the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard: 490MW
• Number of communities that are certified Sustainable New Jersey communities: 125 (22.1% of all New Jersey communities)