Buffalo Grove hires an electricity consultant

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Updated: March 17, 2012 8:06AM

Hoping to present a bundle of businesses and residences to a power supplier, Buffalo Grove has agreed to hire a consultant that will help the village select a power company, more than a month before voters can authorize or deny any bundling.

Saying that the first aggregated groups of electricity customers should have the prime buying power, the Village Board on Monday approved a contract with Intelligent Power Partners to search for the group’s best options for power suppliers.

Village Manager Dane Bragg said 225 municipalities will vote this spring about whether to aggregate residential and business electrical customers into combined contracts, and Buffalo Grove and its cohorts would be wise to move quickly and have options ready to select a supplier as close to the voters’ assumed approval as possible.

“We will have a lot of communities going to market at the same time,” Bragg told trustees Monday. “We are sensitive to finding the best price that we can for our residents and our small business customers.”

Buffalo Grove and six other villages — Lincolnshire, Long Grove, Arlington Heights, Palatine, Vernon Hills and Wheeling — will ask voters on the March 20 ballot for permission to group all of their residential and small-business customers into bundles, which they will then market to numerous power-supply companies. The buying power of tens of thousands of customers combined, they reason, should leverage discounts that individuals could not achieve.

But Bragg told trustees that picking a single company for the village’s entire populace goes beyond comparing prices. The partner governments will need to know each bidder’s capabilities for standard and sustainable energy, what kind of control the companies have with their sources, and numerous other details.

“This is an area that we don’t have a lot of expertise in,” Bragg said.

Thus, the desire for a consultant, which he said should lay out the details of four to six preferred bidders. Bragg said one of the qualities that made IPP preferable to the four other consulting candidates was that IPP did not want to later become a supply bidder, which some of the other firms planned to do. He said IPP had provided an affidavit that it had no conflicts of interest with any potential suppliers.

Each of the seven municipalities will chip in nearly $3,000, he said, for a total contract of $20,750 to the consultant. All will be required to contribute, even if a village’s voters deny aggregation within their borders.

All six of Buffalo Grove’s partners have or are expected to approve IPP. Each of the other Village Boards have voted, or will do so at their next meeting, to approve the intergovernmental agreement, which will bind them into one collection. Under the agreement, Bragg said, is the requirement that whichever consultant Buffalo Grove selects will be the consultant for the group.