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

Utility regulation in New Hampshire is broken.  Exhibit A for that proposition is the endless squabbling at the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) over net metering.

You must be as tired of reading about net metering as I am of writing about it.  What started more than 40 years ago in Massachusetts as a ‘better-to-ask forgiveness-than permission’ experiment is now a seemingly permanent feature of the electricity grid everywhere:  the idea that people can generate electricity at home, usually with solar panels, and essentially spin their meter backwards by feeding any excess energy back into the network.

Net metering has taken off throughout almost all of New England.  The exception is New Hampshire where there have long been concerns that net metering amounts to solar have-nots (including but not limited to poor people) subsidizing the solar-haves (dominated by, it is assumed, the rich).

Back in 2016, the Legislature relaxed draconian statutory limits on the amount of net metering and told the PUC to come up with a more just and reasonable formula for compensation than using the full retail rate (i.e., what you get by spinning meters backwards).  The PUC did just that, kinda sorta, the following year.

Specifically, the PUC adopted a slightly less generous rate for smaller installations (those of less than 100 kilovolts), and a significantly less generous rate for larger installations, while announcing a big study to determine the actual value, to the grid, of net metered power.

That only took four years longer than it was supposed to take, but ultimately the “value of distributed energy resources” (VDER) study determined in 2022 that we more or less got it right back in 2017.  Yes, there’s a very small amount of subsidization going on, but the benefits to those do net metering – basically, relying on the grid as a giant battery of sorts – vastly outweigh the costs incurred by everyone else.

So, after the PUC opened a whole new docket in 2022 to figure out what to do next, there wasn’t much controversy.  The state’s electric utilities, solar industry representatives, and environmentalists signed an agreement – which I also signed, in my capacity as the advocate for residential ratepayers – and submitted it to the PUC for approval.

Let me pause here to apologize for boring you.  I have said all of this before.  It’s Christmas season but when it comes to net metering I feel like I am Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, stuck in a story that repeats itself endlessly.

That’s especially true after the PUC issued its ruling on the settlement agreement last month.  The Commission neither approved nor rejected the agreement.  It was simply ignored.

How redolent this is of the imperial PUC under which the state’s public utilities, their ratepayers, and everyone who cares about the services provided by utilities now labor.  Though tasked by statute with serving as the arbiter between the interests of utility shareholders and utility customers, the PUC is indifferent to the consensus that frequently develops between those two groups.

It must be conceded that not every party to the net metering docket signed onto the settlement.  The Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire – fast becoming the biggest seller of retail electricity in New Hampshire – did not sign on because it wants to drag tangential issues (about how net metering is treated at the federally regulated wholesale level) into the case.

The Sununu Administration’s Department of Energy did not sign on  because it did not like the 20-year “legacy period” – what used to be known as “grandfathering” – in the settlement.  The Department prefers the status quo, in which rates are locked in, for existing installations, only until December 31, 2040 (which is, according to my law school math, 16 years away).

There was, however, unanimity about what inference to draw from the VDER study, prepared by the consulting firm Dunsky Energy and Climate Advisors – i.e., preserve the existing net metering rate formula.  Here is what the PUC had to say about that:

“Having reviewed the record, including the Dunsky Report and the witness testimony, the Commission is not convinced that the parties have sufficiently demonstrated that distributed energy resources have provided significant benefits to all New Hampshire ratepayers that would justify compensation above the cost of energy that net metered-customers receive.”  The word “all” is emphasized in the original.

Essentially, the PUC declared it was going back to square one and forcing the parties to relitigate every single issue related to net metering.  This itself is expensive, and guess who foots the bill for the cost of the regulatory process?  Ratepayers.

Let me pause here, again, for an important aside.  I don’t care about net metering.

Left-leaning politicians and others who seek to decarbonize the electricity grid have allowed their minds to be programmed by the solar industry.  They claim our future depends on massive deployment of solar panels on the customer side of the electric meter.

It doesn’t.  We have way more important things to worry about.

Take, for example, ratepayer-funded energy efficiency, known hereabouts as “NHSaves.”  The PUC recently reiterated, in gratuitous fashion, its avid dislike of NHSaves – implicitly urging the Legislature to walk back its support for the notion that negawatts are worthy competitors to megawatts.

Or take utility-provided default energy service – what you get if you don’t rely on community power aggregation or a competitive energy supplier for the electricity delivered to your home by the utility.  The PUC is hell-bent on increasing the exposure of default energy service customers to the “spot” market for wholesale energy, where the price varies every five minutes according to the inexorable law of supply and demand.

Worse, should this exposure result in default energy service rates not being sufficient to cover the costs incurred by the utilities in buying at wholesale, the PUC wants everyone (not just customers using default energy service) to make up the difference.  That could be a fatal blow to community power aggregation, which is so-far thriving as the first real benefits residential customers have gotten out of busting up vertically integrated electric utilities from 1996 to 2018.

So, what’s bugging me about the PUC’s approach to net metering is less about net metering itself and more about the agency’s attitude.  The commissioners are pursuing an aggressive policy agenda that is bad for ratepayers, disrespectful in the face of consensus, and unmindful of the PUC’s statutory role.

By that I mean the PUC is basically supposed to act like a court.  It is supposed to base decisions on fact rather than commissioners’ subjective opinions about what energy policy is the best policy.  The policy issues are supposed to be the province of the Department of Energy.

When I pointed this out to my office’s advisory board in October, and suggested remedial legislation, the two then-sitting PUC commissioners went ballistic.  They fired off a letter to the advisory board claiming that I have displayed a “pattern of using inaccurate, overheated rhetoric, often disseminated through the electronic and broadcast media, to cast aspersion on the Commission’s application of its authorities under the law.”

I respectfully disagree.  I just want the Public Utilities Commission to do its job.