Roll Call! House Mandates 75% of Electric Sales Be From “Renewables” by 2035

H.40 – AN ACT RELATING TO ESTABLISHING A RENEWABLE ENERGY STANDARD AND ENERGY TRANSFORMATION PROGRAM. 
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PASSED
in the State House of Representatives
on March 10, 2015, by a vote of
121-24

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Purpose: H.40 has multiple purposes. First is to replace the 2005 SPEED program with a new program (RESET), which will ensure Vermont utilities’s ability to continue selling Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to other states. Vermont was accused “double dipping” — selling RECs to other states while also counting them against our own carbon footprint — and those other states threatened to ban purchase our RECs. Selling RECs offsets Vermont electric rate payers’ bills by more than $50 million.
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Beyond this, H.40 seeks to set into law renewable energy benchmarks for the state, force utilities to buy (and therefore sell) renewable energy to their customers (this artificially increased demand is intended to spark construction of more renewable energy generation facilities in Vermont), and mandate that utilities take action to reduce their customers’ energy usage.
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Analysis: Analysis. That the bill fixed Vermont’s flawed (fraudulent) REC selling scheme is well and good.However, H.40 puts into law (“gives teeth to”) the first steps of what had been the official but non-binding goal of having 90 percent of all energy in the state come from renewable sources by 2050. This will come at tremendous cost in terms of increased electricity rates, the impact higher electricity costs will have on the economy at large, and the damage to Vermont’s natural environment as ridge lines and fields are developed into wind and solar electricity factories.
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As the bill states, “The target amounts of total renewable energy established required by this subsection shall be 55 percent of each retail electricity provider’s annual retail electric sales during the year beginning on January 1, 2017, increasing by an additional four percent each third January 1 thereafter, until reaching 75 percent on and after January 1, 2032.”
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The bill gives unprecedented power to the already powerful Public Service Board: “In addition to its existing authority, the Board may establish by order or rule a volumetric charge to customers for the support of energy efficiency programs that meet the requirements of section 218c of this title. The charge shall be known as the energy efficiency charge, shall be shown separately on each customer’s bill, and shall be paid to a fund administrator appointed by the Board and deposited into an Electric Efficiency Fund.”
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And, H.40 changes the nature of the relationship between electric utilities and their customers. As Rep. Cynthia Browning (D-Arlington) argued on the floor, through H.40, “We are not raising taxes, we are not funding new government bureaucracies. Instead, we are using the utilities and the rate payers to do it for us….When the big utilities and the regulatory bodies and the government are holding hands and telling you let’s go forward and do this, the ordinary rate-payer needs to put his hand on his wallet!… And that is exactly the problem here: We have been imposing charges within the rates to finance efficiency projects to meet state goals…. Ratepayers will end up paying for projects that they may or may not end up benefiting from.”
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As for the costs of H.40, the Joint Fiscal Office analysis stated, “…there is no way to assess the actual benefits of many of the most important program investment expenditures. Without such measurement, program expenditures are guaranteed, while precise program benefits are largely hypothetical.

As Recorded in the House Journal, Tuesday, March 10, 2014: “Shall the bill pass? Was decided in the affirmative. Yeas, 121. Nays, 24.” (Read the Journal, p.336-371.)

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How They Voted

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