Two items near the bottom of tonight’s City Council agenda would bind Chelsea longer than any councillor’s term, longer than the city charter has existed, longer than most of the people voting have lived here. One is a pair of 20-year agreements with two solar developers. The other is an order authorizing a contract of up to 30 years with a third. All three are pitched as free money for Chelsea ratepayers, and they may well be. But the dollar terms are not in the packet, and one of the numbers does not match the vendor’s own paperwork.
The 20-year deals
City Manager Fidel Maltez is asking the council to approve agreements with BWC Merriam Brook, LLC and Blue Meadow Brook, LLC, two companies building solar projects that the letter says will come online over the next year. Under the state’s SMART solar incentive program, a solar farm earns higher payments if it shares part of the benefit with electricity customers, and one approved way to do that is through a municipal aggregation program like Chelsea Electricity Choice.
The mechanics: the developers send money to the city, and the city passes it through to low-income households enrolled in Chelsea Electricity Choice, either as a lower supply rate or as credits on their Eversource bill. The letter estimates the benefit at “more than $400,000 per year for the twenty-year term of the contracts.” Maltez writes that there is no cost to the city and that if Chelsea ever ends the aggregation program it can walk away from the solar contracts without penalty. State procurement law requires a council vote for any contract longer than three years, which is why it is on the agenda.
That is a real benefit if it works as described. Chelsea Electricity Choice launched in June 2024 and, by the city’s own accounting in June, had saved participants about $3.19 million against Eversource’s basic service across roughly 10,250 accounts. The program’s current prices, set in June under a new supplier contract running through December 2028, are 14.86 cents per kilowatt hour for the basic option against an Eversource residential rate of 17.32 cents. Layering a solar discount on top of that for lower-income households is the kind of thing an aggregation program exists to do.
What the packet leaves out
The agreement in the packet is a template. The page where the actual terms would go, the System Appendix listing the solar site, the share of its output allocated to Chelsea, and the per-kilowatt-hour credit value that produces the $400,000 estimate, is blank. Councillors are being asked to approve the shape of the deal, not its numbers.
The template also asks something of Chelsea in return. Section 4.3 is an exclusivity clause: for the life of the agreement the city agrees not to sign a similar arrangement with anyone else, up to 125 percent of the estimated savings from these systems, unless the developer consents in writing. Two existing solar units, Syncarpha Carver and Syncarpha Park Drive in Acushnet, are carved out. And in Section 6.2 the city represents that its aggregation program already has enough low-income customer consumption to absorb the discount. Neither clause is unusual in this kind of contract. Both are commitments the letter does not mention.
For a sense of what these developers pay elsewhere: BWC Merriam Brook is a BlueWave project in Northfield, where the Selectboard in August approved a 20-year payment in lieu of taxes of $72,960 a year. That is a tax deal with the host town, not the low-income credit arrangement Chelsea is voting on, but it is a reminder that these projects generate several revenue streams and Chelsea is being offered one of them.
The 30-year deal that the vendor says is 20
The third item is different in kind. The city would buy net metering credits from 978 Solar Development, LLC, a subsidiary of New Leaf Energy, for projects the company expects to bring online in 2027 and early 2028 in Wareham, Rochester, Plympton and Carver, much of it on cranberry farms. The company bills the city for 90 percent of the value of the credits assigned to Chelsea’s own municipal electric accounts, so the city saves 10 percent on the electricity it buys for its buildings. Maltez puts the savings at more than $1.2 million over the first 20 years, with no upfront cost, and says the city could see it in the budget as soon as fiscal 2028.
The council order authorizes the agreement “for a period of up to thirty (30) years.” The company’s own FAQ, attached in the same packet, says: “Our net metering contracts have a 20 year term to align with the term of the net metering program.” No draft contract is included, only the FAQ and a two-page letter. The letter itself refers to “the initial 20-year period,” which suggests an option to extend, but nothing in the packet says who holds that option or on what terms. It is a fair question to ask before voting a 30-year authorization on a two-page letter.
Where the money goes
A companion order sets up a Low-Income Solar Energy Revolving Fund, number 4644, run by the Department of Public Works, to hold the SMART payments and pay them out. The fund is capped at $250,000 in spending per fiscal year, and once its balance hits $250,000, “all proceeds received in a single fiscal year” after that go to the General Fund.
Read those two numbers together. The administration says the program will bring in more than $400,000 a year for low-income households. The fund built to distribute it can pay out $250,000 a year. Unless the cap is raised, or the money reaches residents by some route outside the fund, the arithmetic sends roughly $150,000 a year or more into the city’s general budget rather than onto anyone’s electric bill. The fund order does say the cap is the “annual spending limit approved by the Chelsea City Council,” so the council can change it. Tonight would be the time to ask whether it means to.
The meeting starts at 7 p.m. in the council chambers at City Hall.