Date
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Time
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Name
Communicating the Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) Value Proposition
Session ID
A6 - Lightning: Segmentation and Targeted Messaging
Track
Social Science Insights
Beth Karlin
Description

We present four survey experiments that examine how communications from community choice aggregators (CCAs) can be designed to motivate support for CCAs and reduce opt-outs. Through the CCA model, nonprofit entities purchase electricity from investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and resell energy to customers, with the goal of providing renewable energy at low cost and energy options that are better matched to customers’ wants and needs. While the creation of CCAs is a community-driven process, many members of these communities remain unaware of CCAs and the benefits they offer. Opinions about energy in general are also not strong nor solidified, so carefully-crafted messaging has the potential to influence support for and participation in CCA. Our four experiments examine how nuances in messaging about CCAs affect attitudes toward them. We demonstrate how “carbon-free” is the most powerful label for the clean energy offered by CCAs for both Democratic and Republican customer bases, how emphasizing clean energy benefits of a CCA can be more powerful than messaging about a sustainable future, local jobs, and competitive prices, and how detailed information about the costs of CCAs can deter people but detailed information about programs and benefits of CCAs can substantially increase support. We conclude with recommendations for CCA messaging, emphasizing how detailed information about benefits should be presented alongside information about costs, and messaging should be carefully tested and tailored as much as possible.

Supporting Document 1