Power to the People is a column by Donald M. Kreis, New Hampshire’s Consumer Advocate. Kreis and his staff of four represent the interests of residential utility customers before the NH Public Utilities Commission and elsewhere.
By DONALD M. KREIS. Power to the People
Mayor Byron Champlin of Concord has some good news and some bad news for the electric ratepayers of his city and, by extension, for electric ratepayers everywhere in New Hampshire.
The good news – delivered via the monthly newsletter hizzoner zaps out to me and my fellow Concord residents – is that cheaper electricity is on its way. “Community power officially launches in Concord with the October meter reading, and will be reflected in ratepayers’ November bill,” Champlin proclaimed.
Concord is joining the roughly 50 municipalities around the state that are part of the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire – the CPCNH – which buys electricity at wholesale on behalf of its member towns and cities. The Coalition’s “Granite Basic” rate of 8.6 cents per kilowatt-hour is well below the 10.5 cents most Concord residents are paying via the default energy service offered by the local utility, Unitil.
Now for the bad news.
That 8.6 cent per kilowatt-hour rate is not the one Concord residents will automatically receive as the City exercises its right to deploy community power aggregation on an opt-out basis. “Opt-out” means you have the right to reject community power in favor of buying electricity from a third-party supplier, or even sticking with Unitil’s default service.
The CPCNH actually offers four flavors of retail electricity, which vary by how much of the electricity comes from renewable sources like wind, solar and hydro as opposed to conventional sources like natural gas, nuclear fission, oil, or coal. The Granite Basic electricity is 16.8 percent renewable, whereas renewables comprise 100 percent of the electricity you get if you buy the Coalition’s “Clean 100” flavor.
Clean 100 electricity costs 12 cents per kilowatt hour – $78 per month for a typical residential customer. That’s well north of the price for Granite Basic, which works out to $56 per month.
The other two flavors Concord is offering through the CPCNH are “Clean 50” – 50 percent renewable – at 10 cents per kilowatt hour – and “Granite Plus,” 33 percent renewable, at 9.3 cents.
Let me pause here to remind everyone that these energy charges are only part of your monthly electric bill; you also pay distribution charges, and a couple of other charges, to the local utility.
So, where’s the bad news, exactly?
Concord has decided to put everyone on the “Granite Plus” rate of 9.3 cents. If you want the cheaper rate – that 8.6 cents – you must (to use the term Mayor Champlin employed in his newsletter) “opt down.”
The problem with the “opt down” idea is that most people won’t do it, even customers who prefer the cheapest electric rate available. Regular people are busy living their lives and don’t necessarily go over their monthly electric bill with a magnifying glass.
When the City of Concord obtained the approval of the Public Utilities Commission for its community power aggregation plan, did the City happen to mention that customers would not automatically be put on the cheapest rate available from the CPCNH? Well, kinda sorta.
On pages 8 and 9 of the plan the City submitted to the PUC, you see the Granite Plus rate listed as the “preferred default power option” and the Granite Basic plan described as the “alternative default power option.” The approved plan also recited that “[t]he products that Concord Community Power initially offers to customers, and the rates charged for each product, will be refined and finalized in advance of program launch.”
In other words, the City refined and finalized its way to assuming that electric customers in the capital city prefer to pay more for their electricity to make it greener. Though that is undoubtedly true of many electric customers in Concord and elsewhere, as the state’s ratepayer advocate I don’t think it’s cricket to make that the default setting.
So, when I received the mayor’s newsletter on Friday afternoon as I was heading off for my weekend, I dashed off a reply. “I don’t think ‘opt down’ is consistent with the letter or the spirit of [the law], so it may be necessary to bring this to the attention of the Department of Energy and the PUC,” I said. “Am I missing and/or misunderstanding something?”
My answer arrived on Monday afternoon. It came not from Mayor Champlin but, rather, from Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire – who had somehow received my mayoral query.
“[T]threatening to file some soft of a complaint with the DOE/PUC is out of order, and I view it as an intimidation tactic,” Evans-Brown wrote. He called my communication to the mayor an “inappropriate abuse of your position.”
So it goes, sometimes, between ratepayer advocates and those who run nonprofits that operate as de facto trade associations for solar developers and other renewable energy interests. Evans-Brown correctly pointed out that Concord has officially adopted a goal of 100 percent clean energy by 2030.
But, as Clean Energy New Hampshire well knows, the state itself has no renewable energy goal. Voters have repeatedly elected a governor and legislators who oppose such things, and thus it is safe to assume that opinion on the question is divided even in an ultra-green (or ultra-blue) city like Concord.
In those circumstances, the right thing for community power aggregation communities to do is to “default” to the cheapest power available and then allow people to opt-up to the costlier and greener tiers as they prefer. That’s true in Concord and even in Plainfield and Hanover (two other municipalities that have apparently taken similar steps).
According to Evans-Brown, I was “disingenuous” by threatening to go to the PUC and the DOE in light of my previous complaints to regulators about three other towns – not part of the Coalition –that reneged on commitments to pull the trigger on community power aggregation only if they could beat the default energy service rate offered by Eversource. As Evans-Brown noted, the regulators blew off that complaint.
I must admit that those who don’t like my latest beef with community power – which I will confine to the court of public opinion – have a point. I didn’t abuse my power – as an advocate, I have none – but I was arguably asleep at the switch.
I should have noticed before Friday that some municipalities were playing this “opt down” game. Suddenly, instead of four electric utilities to monitor, I have dozens of municipalities to keep track of on behalf of residential utility customers.
To paraphrase that immortal line from Jaws, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.
