Editor’s note: This commentary is by Patty Richards, who is the general manager of Washington Electric Cooperative, a member-owned, 100 percent renewable rural electric cooperative based in East Montpelier and serving central Vermont.
[T]he state published two documents in 2018 that show different trends shaping the future of Vermont’s energy use and air quality. One report, from the Department of Environmental Conservation, surprised many. Far from being on track to reduce state greenhouse gas emissions, we learned, Vermont’s emissions have actually risen. The goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to half of 1990 levels by 2028. However, in 2018, Vermont’s emissions levels were 16 percent above that baseline.
The other report is an order from the Public Utility Commission, approving Vermont’s electric distribution utilities’ compliance with the state’s Renewable Energy Standard (RES).
In 2015, the RES, also known as Act 56, formalized Vermont’s goal to use 90 percent renewable energy by 2050 for all types of energy. The RES created incentives, markers, and (if necessary) penalties to guide electric utilities toward this goal. As a result, our responsibility at Washington Electric Cooperative encompasses more than just the electric power we provide. We must now also urge our members to use less fossil fuel in their daily lives for home heating and transportation, and incentivize using our cleaner electricity instead. In 2017, all Vermont electric distribution utilities, including WEC, met or exceeded the state’s goals to increase renewable energy use and shrink our carbon footprints.
So what are electric utilities doing right?
First of all, we all have a vested interest in the issue. WEC and all electric utilities are facing into the storm, quite literally, when it comes to climate change. Over the last five years, WEC has endured more outages, lasting longer, with greater infrastructure damage than ever seen before. That’s because our territory has been bombarded by stronger storms, higher winds, wetter winters, and tree-damaging invasive pests. All of these factors threaten our power lines and can cause multi-day outages for our members.
A critically important goal, shared by every electric utility, is to provide reliable power to our members. Climate change presents new obstacles to maintaining reliability as storms increase and intensify. Last year, WEC’s board passed a statement acknowledging the threat of climate change and committing to environmentally responsible policies.
I was struck by a quote from Vermont Agency of Natural Resources Deputy Secretary Peter Walke in a related Boston Globe article this winter. He said, “We have major challenges in addressing these issues. Ultimately, it comes down to thousands of individual choices.” Act 56 charges utilities with helping our members or consumers identify these thousands of individual choices as they arise – and finding creative ways to help them make the choice, every time, that reduces carbon use.
Of course, to do that we must offer sound alternatives to fossil fuels. WEC’s big advantage is that our electricity already comes from 100 percent renewable sources. And, fortunately, electric technology keeps improving. Electric vehicles are dropping in price and increasing in range and power, battery storage systems are becoming viable for both small- and large-scale projects, heat pumps offer zone heating and cooling more sophisticated than a traditional furnace, and so on.
We also need to understand what motivates our members to use power the way they do. Often, the least expensive option is the one that people choose. There are a lot of appliances that are cheaper to operate using fossil fuels than electricity. To that end, Washington Electric is in the process of changing its rate structure: we’re proposing to increase our monthly fixed rate while dramatically dropping our kilowatt hour rates. Our aim is to make our 100 percent renewable electricity less expensive for our members to use than gas, fuel oil, propane, or other fossil fuels.
The final piece of the puzzle is helping our members afford the big purchases that make the big differences. Investment in new technologies and appliances requires money. So we invest in financial incentives – giving members cash to purchase qualifying weatherization and home appliances and heating systems, for example. Because Washington Electric is a cooperative, we work very hard to make our policies equitable for every member. Electric vehicles are expensive, and there isn’t as much used stock as there is for other vehicles. So we offer EV and plug-in hybrid incentives to all members, with a greater incentive for members with reduced incomes.
Our members want to reduce their fossil fuel use and use energy efficiently. This wraparound strategy helps make it easier, and more affordable, for our members to make those thousands of individual choices greener.
While WEC is guided by our environmental mission, it helps that the state requires electric utilities, as an industry, to take action. Act 56 forces electric utilities to be innovative in order to meet increasing standards for reducing carbon. Even now, we’ve already learned to innovate to maintain reliability and to decrease our exposure to damage as climate-related storms become an increasing threat to our business. It’s my hope that the innovation and strategies modeled by Washington Electric and other Vermont utilities can be useful to other sectors in our state and beyond.
