Editor’s note: This commentary is by James Moore, who is co-founder and co-president at SunCommon, a Vermont-based Benefit Corporation with nearly 200 employees. He has worked on clean energy policy and solutions for two decades.
Vermonters like to think that our state is special in a lot of ways, including our love of the environment, but the dirty little secret is that we are not as “green” as we like to believe. Vermont is going backwards on addressing the climate crisis, and, adding to the misinformation, many of Vermont’s politicians and utilities are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to local solar power.
In fact, New York, Massachuesetts, Maine, and Connecticut all have reduced their climate pollution below their 1990 levels. Yet, Vermont’s pollution increased 16% over the same period. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Vermonters want to be part of the solution and when we build local solar to power our homes, businesses, schools and communities — it is one of the most impactful things we are actually doing to reduce our climate pollution. When more solar is built in Vermont, less fossil fuels are burned in New England.
The reality is that most of Vermont’s green power is actually green washing. Vermont utilities spend millions of dollars every year on fake renewable credits (mostly from Canada) and then we congratulate Vermont on being green? A recent study found this kind of scheme’s result is that Canadian utilities can burn more coal and other polluting fossil fuels. To make it worse, our Vermont utilities use the fake credits to offset their sale of real renewable energy credits, produced by local wind, biomass, landfill gas, hydro and solar, to other utilities in New England, which keeps those states from investing as much in new clean power of their own.
Is hydro power from Canada bad? It is better than many alternatives and it helps stabilize Vermont’s grid. But ratepayers shouldn’t pay extra to simply shift our climate pollution footprint north of the border. And we shouldn’t compare the cost of real pollution reduction in Vermont with that of a renewable energy credit shell game with Canada.
The “cost” of Vermonters producing their own clean energy is tiny in comparison to the more than $2.5 billion a year we spend on energy, about $800 million of which is spent on electricity.
In fact, much of the money Vermonters spend on electricity flows right out of our state. Comparatively, when Vermonters invest in a clean energy future much of the money stays local and puts Vermonters to work with over 1,200 people employed in our state’s solar sector.
The utilities’ own documents estimate that solar net metering increased rates by less than one-half of 1% per year — and that is before all of the benefits of local solar are accounted for, including the millions of dollars in local wages and taxes, the savings to many of our communities that have invested in solar and the obvious environmental benefits.
Despite these benefits, two years ago state regulators started to make more drastic changes around solar permitting and compensation, and the impact has been clear: the amount of local solar that will be installed in 2019 is on track to be the least since 2015, and 40% less than what was installed in 2017. That’s right, the Vermont government actually put the brakes on clean energy. This reduction, however, pales compared to the slowdown which the utilities and the governor are asking regulators to adopt next.
To be clear, the compensation rate for solar should continue to decrease at a measured pace as the cost of the associated equipment drops; however, we need to be building more local clean energy not less to protect Vermont and Vermonters from climate change. Our laws prop up the current program and they will need to be changed to promote more local clean energy.
We can’t squander any more time. Without action, global temperatures will rise by 7°F by the end of this century. Imagine your body temperature rising that amount. Neither we nor our planet could sustain that. We have the tools needed to lower our pollution, and the decisions we make today will determine whether future generations will be able to continue to fight climate change, or if it will be past a point of correction. As Vermonters, we need to be on the right side of history.
