Citizens Energy Corporation
88 Black Falcon Avenue, Suite 342, Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Founded in 2010, Citizens Solar has become one of the largest solar developers in the state of Massachusetts. As of 2019, Citizens Solar has a $200 million portfolio across 30 distributed solar projects totaling over 90 megawatts.  Citizens Solar works with a diverse array of government and private sector entities to develop solar sites, allowing our partners to save on electricity costs while contributing clean and green energy to the grid.  With sites ranging from a converted landfill to an heirloom potato farm, Citizens Solar is experienced in a wide range of partnerships. Private businesses and landowners who lease their land to Citizens Solar can expect years of revenue produced by local sources of clean renewable energy.

Our Experience 

Partial de-regulation of the gas industry in the early 1980s offered Citizens Energy with a window of opportunity into a previously exclusive market. In an effort to topple long-standing monopolies over access to the distribution system, Citizens Energy mounted a landmark federal regulatory challenge, attempting to reduce the price of natural gas by allowing more competitors to enter into the market, which would benefit consumers and the national economy.   After Columbia Pipeline, one of the nations largest pipeline owners, was charged with practices that resulted in over-billing of end-users, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) threatened to revoke Columbias license. The head of Columbia proposed opening its pipeline to Citizens Energy as part of its settlement. FERC approved the proposal and Citizens Energy entered the natural gas industry full force through its subsidiary, Citizens Gas Supply Corporation.  Citizens Gas Supply soon became involved in the construction of new gathering facilities, designed to bring free-market gas into the interstate pipeline. By the end of 1986, Citizens had access to a total combined throughput of 18 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. Within one year of its founding, Citizens Gas Supply was one of the nations largest independent movers of natural gas, buying and selling an average of 270 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, while distributing more than $160 million worth of gas per day throughout 17 states.  Ultimately, Citizens Gas Supply managed to enter into agreements with 38 pipeline operators throughout the United States, making it possible for the company to purchase and transport natural gas from and to nearly every domestic geographic market. In addition to its trading activities, Citizens Gas Supply made significant investments in gathering systems, strategic pipeline interconnects, storage facilities, firm transportation, and downstream facilities.  Many of these activities were pursued through joint ventures with established industry leaders, including National Fuel Gas Company and the Victoria Gas Company. In 1993, Citizens Gas Supply Corporation was sold to Western Gas Resources in Denver, Colorado, along with other natural gas-related assets of the company.  Since entering the natural gas market in the 1980s, Citizens Energy operated a Natural Gas Assistance Program to provide fuel to low-income families in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. This program expanded to serve Massachusetts in 2007 when Citizens Energy began a partnership with Distrigas. Operating for over 30 years, the Natural Gas Assistance Program provided more than $20 million in assistance to over 150,000 families.

Transmission

Citizens Energy partnered with San Diego Gas & Electric to develop a large-scale 500 kV high-voltage transmission project in Southern California to improve electric grid operation and enable access to one of the largest sources of renewable power in the United States – thousands of megawatts of geothermal, solar, and wind resources from the Salton Sea region and Imperial County. 

  The Sunrise Powerlink is a 120-mile, $1.9 billion power line designed to deliver as much as 1,000 megawatts of clean energy. Completed in 2012, the Sunrise Powerlink enables SDG&E to meet three important objectives: 



• Improving reliability: The Sunrise Powerlink is the first new major powerline to connect San Diegos growing population and economy to the electric grid in a quarter-century.

• Providing direct access to renewable resources in the Imperial Valley: Although California has established aggressive renewable energy goals, very few large transmission lines connect population centers like San Diego to renewable energy-rich areas like Imperial County. The Sunrise Powerlink allows SDG&E to import enough green energy to meet the needs of over 650,000 homes and limit the need to build more conventional power plants that use fossil fuels.

• Reducing costs for customers: The Sunrise Powerlink is expected to save consumers over $100 million per year in energy costs by limiting the need to run aging, inefficient power plants. The Sunrise Powerlink also will reduce transmission congestion bottlenecks that cost customers millions of dollars in annual congestion fees.

Wind

WindThe first project in Citizens Winds portfolio was a 34.5-megawatt (MW) facility in Munnsville, N. Y., that went online in 2007. We also co-developed a 198-MW project on Wolfe Island, Ontario, that began construction in July 2008 and entered commercial operation a year later. Citizens Wind has expertise in all aspects of the wind development process from site identification to procurement and construction. Citizens Wind is developing an additional 200 MW of wind.

Oil

Citizens Energy has worked with major oil companies and oil-producing countries over the last 40 years on successful ventures and channeled revenues to provide heating assistance to millions of struggling senior citizens and low-income families across 25 states, from Maine to Alaska.

Renewables

Citizens Energys first steps in the renewable energy sector took place in the early 1980s, when its electricity trading division began wheeling wind power from the Pacific Northwest into California. Committed to clean, renewable power to reduce carbon emissions and dependence on foreign fuel sources, Citizens Energy launched Citizens Wind in 2003 and Citizens Solar in 2010. We conduct our development activities in a socially responsible manner, with particular focus on environmental sensitivity and respect for the local communities in which we operate. Citizens Solar and Citizens Wind are unique in the renewable energy industry: Our profits support charitable programs to cover the energy needs of low-income households.

Natural Gas

With the nation facing alarming increases in natural gas prices in the early 1980s, Citizens Energy Corporation began exploring opportunities to enter into the natural gas market. Citizens Energy believed that the same business model used in its Oil Heat Program – the use of for-profit opportunities to drive down the price of heating oil – could be applied to the natural gas industry.