[T]wo Vermont residents are among a dozen plaintiffs suing on behalf of 7 million New Englanders who allegedly paid billions of dollars extra for electricity as the result of a price-fixing scheme perpetrated by two of the region’s largest energy companies, Avangrid and Eversource.
Montpelier resident John Odum, David Leighton of South Royalton and other plaintiffs claim the companies artificially constrained New England’s natural gas supply in order to drive up wholesale electric prices.
As a result, New England electricity customers paid $3.6 billion more for power between 2013 and 2016 than they would have otherwise.
Electricity prices during those years were about 20 percent higher than they should have been, according to the suit.
“Not since Enron’s greedy heyday during the California energy crisis, nearly two decades ago, have American energy markets been manipulated for private profit at such expense to everyday electricity consumers,” the suit states.
Odum referred questions to his attorney, Thomas Sobol, of the firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sobol did not return a call for comment. Odum, who is the Montpelier city clerk, is participating in the suit as a private individual.
The suit comes on the heels of a study that found Avangrid and Eversource were reserving large volumes of natural gas pipeline capacity every day during important times of the year, then canceling the sales at the last minute. These purchases were made for gas from the Algonquin pipeline, a critical source of fuel for New England’s wholesale natural gas markets.
In addition to raising prices, market manipulation may also have been used to falsely bolster arguments for more pipeline construction in the region, according to one author of the study.
By buying up so much of the Algonquin Pipeline’s capacity, the two energy giants blocked gas purchases by other New England energy companies, the suit alleges. This artificial shortage drove up the cost of electricity, as most of New England’s generation comes from natural gas-fired plants.
The potential for manipulation exists in certain cases where companies have multiple roles: selling natural gas, buying natural gas for the electricity generation market, and selling electricity.
Through the buying and selling of gas, companies are able to game a regulated market to realize profits, according to Charles Mason, a co-author of the study and a professor of petroleum and natural gas economics at the University of Wyoming.
The Canadian company Gaz Metro operates in both gas and electricity markets in Vermont as the owner of Vermont Gas Systems and the state’s largest electric utility, Green Mountain Power. GMP owns a number of electricity generators, including hydroelectric dams, wind turbines and solar arrays.
Kristin Carlson, the spokeswoman for Green Mountain Power, says it would be “impossible” for the electric company to profit from gas market manipulation.
Unlike with Avangrid and Eversource, which sold wholesale electricity on a largely unregulated market, Green Mountain Power is a regulated utility subject to the same rate-of-return limits as Vermont Gas.
However, one of the study’s authors suggested that a parent company of Gaz Metro knew of the alleged manipulation of the natural gas supply but did nothing to stop it.
The owner of the Algonquin Pipeline is a Houston company called Enbridge, which owns 40 percent of Gaz Metro.
Enbridge undoubtedly knew what was occurring with the daily pipeline capacity purchases that were withdrawn at the last minute, according to the study.
But Enbridge chose to look the other way, the study claims, because the company could use the artificial supply constraints to argue for building more pipelines. Enbridge has proposed a project called the Access Northeast pipeline in partnership with Eversource Energy.
“It is a near certainty the pipeline operator is aware of the scheduling practices on its pipelines that result in underutilized capacity,” the study states. However, pipeline companies make more money selling pipeline contracts than they do from ensuring those contracts actually fill their pipelines with gas, according to the authors. That means “their incentives lead them to favor constructing new pipeline capacity – to sell more contracts – rather than ensuring existing capacity is fully utilized,” the study says.
“In New England, this incentive took the concrete form of the proposed Access Northeast pipeline expansion project,” the study states.
Mason said that while the pipeline operator must have known about the companies’ alleged behavior, he’s not convinced Enbridge sanctioned it in order to push forward another pipeline project. Mason said that assertion was made by another of the study’s authors.
Enbridge is not the only one calling for more New England natural gas pipelines.
Mason’s study and the lawsuit haven’t changed ISO-New England’s position on the subject, according to a spokesperson for the grid operator.
Neither van Welie nor ISO-NE has the data to evaluate the validity of the suit’s claims, media relations specialist Marcia Blomberg wrote in an email. ISO-New England has no opinion on the suit, Blomberg said, and the claims are outside her organization’s jurisdiction.
“That said,” Blomberg wrote, “ISO New England’s concerns about the reliability impacts of natural gas infrastructure constraints have not changed.
“The challenges of maintaining reliability on a power system that is increasingly dependent on natural-gas-fired generators have been apparent in New England since a January 2004 cold snap, and those operating challenges have only intensified since then. The use of natural gas for power generation continues to increase, but the capacity of the region’s natural gas infrastructure has not been expanded at the same pace and it is not always adequate to deliver all the fuel needed for both heating and power generation during winter.”
For its part, Eversource said the lawsuit spurred by Mason’s study is groundless.
“We are aware of the lawsuit and are reviewing it,” said Al Lara, a media relations officer with Eversource. “However, the facts remain unchanged: The allegations underlying this lawsuit are untrue and baseless. The expenditure of resources to further these false claims is regrettable for all parties involved.”
Avangrid representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Green Mountain Power is watching the case closely, Carlson said.
If the widespread overpricing the suit alleges turns out to be true, and if GMP recovers any money from overcharges to customers, all of it will be returned to ratepayers, she said.
Representatives at the Public Utility Commission and the Department of Public Service weren’t able to say immediately whether their agencies might take action of their own against Avangrid or Eversource.
The chief of Attorney General TJ Donovan’s Public Protection Division, Christopher Curtis, said his office doesn’t as a rule comment on investigations the AG’s office may or may not be conducting. Curtis did say Donovan’s office is reviewing the study, and monitoring the lawsuit.
Gov. Phil Scott said Wednesday that he’s “not familiar with” the matter. But he added that “obviously the cost of electricity is of great interest to me.”