The 2.2 MW Lawrence Brook Solar project is providing low-cost renewable energy to Morrisville Water and Light customers. (Encore Renewable Energy)

Jonathan Dowds

After a year of record-breaking expensive winter storms and devastating flooding that crystalized how much Vermont is already suffering from the climate crisis, the Vermont House voted overwhelmingly in favor of updating the state’s Renewable Energy Standard. For more than a year, Vermont environmentalists, utilities, and political leaders have been sitting down together to hammer out an agreement on a Renewable Energy Standard reform bill that is both pragmatic and visionary. Under the bill’s provisions, which now moves to the Senate, Vermont would get 100% of its power from renewable sources by 2035, sooner than any New England state outside of Rhode Island.

Crucially, this would include getting 35% – 40% of our power from new renewable sources. This is crucial because more renewable energy is urgently needed to phase out power generation from our region’s many remaining natural gas plants even as our demand for electricity grows. By 2035, Vermont’s utilities would be purchasing four times more new renewable energy than they would under the status quo. And that’s a big deal from a climate perspective – the equivalent of taking 160,000 vehicles off the road.

Renewable Energy Vermont, where I work, and a broad coalition of environmental and social justice organizations including VPIRG, VNRC, 350VT, the Conservation Law Foundation, the Vermont Chapter of the Sierra Club, and Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility have been making the case for a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy that emphasized the role of new renewables. House Speaker Jill Krowinski’s leadership helped put updating the Renewable Energy Standard front and center.

Vermont’s utilities are highly responsive to their ratepayers and wary of increasing rates unnecessarily, and they embraced many of the goals that the House Environment and Energy Committee advocated for. The result was a consensus proposal that quadruples the amount of new renewable energy we use and that allows utilities to be confident that they can keep the lights on and rates affordable for their customers. It is not as ambitious as our initial proposal but is a very good deal.

Absent from these efforts in a meaningful way? The Scott Administration which missed another opportunity to engage productively on climate issues in favor of fearmongering on cost. Scott’s Public Service Department (PSD) initially suggested that the transformative bill would cost a billion dollars over ten years — a number that is two to three times what the bill will likely cost.

Despite its technical expertise, PSD failed to provide a vision of how we can take advantage of rapidly growing load flexibility, improving storage technologies, and other advances to achieve these goals at the lowest cost. For example, VELCO, the entity that manages the state’s transmission system, estimated that if we are strategic about where we build it, we could get to 85% of the in-state solar capacity needed under the bill (about 1000 MW) without hitting any transmission constraints at all. Thereafter more solar would necessitate either building new transmission capacity (some of which will be required to support the transition to EVs and heat pumps), or a combination of incentivizing electricity use when renewable generation is highest (something that we should be moving towards) and reducing solar output during select periods. Those periods are when we are producing more energy than we can use or safely export to our neighbors.

Instead of providing a roadmap on how Vermont could most cost-effectively balance these strategies, the Department started with VELCO’s worst-case, transmission-only scenario to assign the RES bill responsibility for $500 million in transmission upgrades. PSD added on another $500 million in additional power purchase costs but neither of these numbers was supported by actual modeling of the bill. When the non-partisan Joint Fiscal Office looked at the specifics of H.289, it concluded that the total cost of the bill would be $150 million and $450 million over ten years, far below the Department’s estimate and a small fraction of the $14 billion that will be spent on electricity over that timespan. The Administration seemed to be answering the question “What is the cost of reforming the Renewable Energy Standard if we do it in the least thoughtful way possible?” rather than “How do we update the Renewable Energy Standard in the way that provides the greatest benefit to Vermont?”

Despite the lack of Administration support, the bill is moving forward. It passed the House on a 99 to 39 vote, with four strong supporters absent – meaning it has more than the 100 votes it would need to override a veto. As it should. It is not perfect – no bill is – but it is a significant step in the right direction.

A few critical issues will need to be picked up in the next Legislative session, designing the right procurement programs that spur development and provide equitable access to renewables, and permitting reforms to make the process more straightforward and predictable. But the update to the Renewable Energy Standard is the first step and sets us on the trajectory for success.

Jonathan Dowds is the Deputy Director of Renewable Energy Vermont.

To see this article in the pdf file, click HERE.