ProRate Energy

About ProRate Energy

We help communities navigate today’s complex world of new energy choices by making them easier to understand and use. Through education, advocacy, and practical systems design, we strive to create a more reliable, affordable, and resilient energy future for New Orleans—using solutions that can be scaled far beyond the city.

Although incorporated in 2020, ProRate Energy’s leaders bring more than forty years of experience in energy policy and systems‑based solutions to the table. The teams we helped to lead have restored local regulatory control of New Orleans’ electricity, executed individual and large‑scale energy-efficiency projects and programs, and promoted proven policies, such as Integrated Resource Planning, Time‑of‑Use pricing, and Community Solar.

Since 2014, we innovated and pioneered many, far lower-cost, alternatives than traditional fossil-fuel generation, including flexing electricity use (e.g., for Water Heating and Dish Washing), highly dynamic pricing (like airlines price), distributed energy storage (adding large batteries to thousands of homes), and virtual peaking plants (like was just approved in Dec 2025 by our City council). Since 2020, we developed new ways to finance community solar farms, hybrid rooftop community solar, and performance‑based utility compensation.

We focus on New Orleans because it’s our home, but more than that, it’s a city that combines strong, local authority and a willingness to embrace change in the context of urgent climate challenges. This combination makes our city an ideal place to implement solutions that can improve grid reliability, cut energy costs, and reduce emissions, while creating models that can be applied almost anywhere.

ProRate History

Over a decade ago in 2016, CLEP, a highly dynamic electricity rate design, was introduced to NOLA in the 2015 Integrated Resource Planning docket. Four years later, CLEP was renamed to ProRate.  In the same docket, we promoted a 1000-home CLEP utility pilot with each home getting a 10-kWh battery. This system would significantly displace the need for a real peaking plant that Entergy New Orleans was then promoting. Such a system is now called a Virtual Peaking Plant. Now, please look at our logo again and see what we see: a Virtual Peaking Plant. This attests to the fact that our leaders are often thinking a decade ahead of others.

Testimonials

Kay Aikin (Grid Architecture Professional), 2022
"As a grid architecture professional, we need to deploy not only technology to the problem of fighting climate change but new innovative rate structures that promote local customer-centered solutions. CLEP is one such rate structure that should be explored."

David Stets (Most Recent Former Chapter Chair of the Louisiana Sierra Club), 2022
"I want to do everything I can to stop climate change."

Rev. Jim VanderWeele (Reverend in Louisiana), 2022
"I'm signing [ProRate's petition] because global warming must be addressed, now."

Mike Hopkins, CEO of Ice Energy, within RESNET's annual conference in New Orleans on February 24th, 2019.                                  "... A pilot was being proposed in conjunction with redevelopment [of Charity Hospital] that would have a true, market-based rate system—allowing ratepayers to have a direct involvement in the real market for electricity—both in terms of the cost of consuming and the value of generating. The idea was: this CLEP pilot would incentivize the kinds of investments that ratepayers, as opposed to the utility, could and would make if they were exposed to the real economics of the grid. This would enable Charity to be a microgrid. This microgrid model is something that's going on all around the world… to some degree. The challenge of a microgrid—which is the ultimate in a distributed approach to the grid, enabling renewables and requiring energy storage, to do that—is that the investors in the microgrids, whether those are big companies or homeowners, have to be exposed to and have access to the real economics of the electricity system and the grid. That's what CLEP was designed to do and that's what CLEP would do and will do when it's implemented. I see this as an opportunity for the City of New Orleans, if CLEP could be adopted, even on a pilot basis, it would put New Orleans at the very forefront of this transformation, this movement away from fossil fuels, away from old-fashioned central plant models, to the grid of the future, which will be distributed… will be much more like a network of microgrids. This will enable the much larger and much faster adoption of renewables. That's the opportunity that you have and I'm excited about it. I think it's a tremendous opportunity for New Orleans and it could be a great model for the rest of the country and really the rest of the world."

ProRate can reverse what our current electricity rates do "steal from the poor and give to the rich". View our first video, entitled "Stealing from the Rich".