The gloves are off in the battle for customers this winter between fuel dealers and Vermont’s gas utility.
First in comments on the state’s draft Comprehensive Energy Plan then in an email this week to reporters about a news conference Gov. Peter Shumlin held with the American Gas Association, it seems to be all anti-Vermont Gas all the time for the Vermont Fuel Dealers Association.
In comments submitted to the Vermont Department of Public Service on the energy plan, the fuel dealers association spent around half of its five-page comments highlighting the environmental downsides of natural gas. Then Tuesday, when the governor held a press conference on heating assistance with the American Gas Association and three house committees heard testimony on a potential shortfall in Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program funding, Matt Cota, the fuel dealers association’s executive director, sent an email to reporters warning them to fact check anything the association said because “their mission is put all heat in the hands of their utilities.”
What’s with the persistent aggression?
Cota says it is nothing new.
“We’ve never been shy from speaking our minds,” he said.
While Vermont Gas is the competition, Cota said it is not fair that the company plays by different rules. As a regulated utility, Vermont Gas was able to secure approval from the Vermont Public Service Board for an expansion fund that will take money that would go to reducing rates for customers and put that into a fund to help pay for an expansion into the Vergennes and Middlebury market areas. The fund, according to the board’s decision approving it, would potentially reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the state and provide incentives for increased economic development.
Cota says when fuel dealers want to expand they need to go to the bank to get a loan, while the gas utility can just go to the Public Service Board.
Steve Wark, director of communications for Vermont Gas Systems, says this old argument is worn out.
“What [Cota] fails to acknowledge is that the oil dealers can and do charge their customers whatever they want,” Wark said in a written statement. “A regulated utility must apply for approval to adjust their rates and only after a thorough review of the request can they receive approval of the price that they charge.”
Another common theme in Cota’s attacks on natural gas is the high concentration of power the Canadian company Gaz Metro, Vermont Gas’s parent company, will have if Green Mountain Power merges with Central Vermont Public Service. In that case, Gaz Metro would control a majority of all the utilities in the state, although Green Mountain Power proposes shifting some control of the state’s electricity transmission system to ensure the new company would not have more than 50 percent control of the transmission utility.
“Everyone in the state is grasping the idea that one company will control 100 percent of the natural gas retail and the entire pipeline system and 75 percent of retail electricity and the electric distribution system,” Cota says.
He says fuel dealers are flexible and will provide people with anything to heat their homes so long as it is clean, warm and efficient. Natural gas, while it may be cheaper now, could spike in costs, leaving Vermont stuck with a more expensive source of heating, Cota said. Wark counters that Vermont Gas has been owned by Gaz Metro for more than 25 years and during that time has been able to expand and provide a cheaper, cleaner product.
Cota says the fuel dealers association’s other beef is that it sees itself as a group of smaller mom and pop companies competing against a big foreign competitor.
“We have locally owned companies,” Cota said. “For the vast majority, the name on side of the truck is guy driving it or answering the phone.”
Not quite, says Tim Searles, public policy director of the Champlain Office of Economic Opportunity. Searles put in a call to VTDigger.org at Wark’s request. Searles says the number of independent propane dealers in the state is decreasing. He says his organization tries to get low-income people to switch to natural gas because it is cheaper than other sources of heat.
Chances are we have yet to see the last of the bickering between the competing industries. As for Wark’s final word on Cota’s all-out assault on natural gas in the political arena, he wrote: “it seems unlikely that he is being altruistic but more likely that his aggressive campaign is designed to prevent Vermonters from having access to a lower cost cleaner fuel so he and the fuel dealers can continue to profit from the high prices of oil and propane.”
