By Michael Bielawski
Former State Senator John Rodgers – who is considering a run for the lieutenant governorship – was on the Morning Drive radio show on Friday morning and he noted the amount of special interests influencing state energy policy.
He was asked about H. 289, which seeks to tighten the state’s Renewable Energy Standard. VDC recently wrote that this bill “would more closely tie the Vermont power grid to instate renewable power and cost ratepayers an additional $350 million – $1 billion over 10 years.” House leaders are currently threatening to override the governor’s veto of the bill.
The bill increases the percentage of non-carbon energy that electricity creation, heating, and transportation must use by various checkpoints in the coming years. It’s also a carbon tax in the form of an “alternative compliance payment.”
Rodgers shared the assessment that this bill is going to cost Vermonters more.
“It’s gonna add $100 million a year to people’s electric costs, the majority of that money is going to go to utilities and developers,” he said. “… And so when net metering passed they allowed net metering systems to charge 21 cents a kilowatt hour while we could buy power from Hydro Quebec for 6 cents a kilowatt hour.”
Net metering is when a customer buys solar panels for their property and the public energy utilities must purchase that energy at a set rate usually significantly higher than average energy costs.
Rodgers asserts that $10s of millions of state funds are getting “cost-shifted” since the net metering program began. He says that the majority of that money has gone to energy developers.
He also said that ratepayers are paying more than the market price.
“And it’s time for the solar and wind power to be priced at the market price, there is absolutely no reason to be over-paying for it,” he said. “These panels, they are coming from China, they are getting cheaper and cheaper, and there are reports around the world that say that renewable energy is now cheaper to build than other sorts of energy.”
Too many lobbyists?
He asserted that these alternative energy developers have an overwhelming presence at the Statehouse.
“I don’t want to call it corruption but there are an awful lot of those developers who make giant contributions to political candidates,” Rodgers said. “… It’s a little disturbing to pull into the Statehouse and see a major solar developer’s cars all over the parking lot.
He continued, “And then we have one of the lobbyists in the building who says we have to do everything we can for climate change who just went skiing with a whole bunch of friends in the French Alps during the Town Meeting break.”
Rodgers also noted that the same lawmakers who sound the alarm that climate change is going to doom society continue to live in excess.
“So these guys are saying we need to do everything we can but they are not doing it, they are living in their big houses, many of them have multiple big houses, they are jet-setting around the world. The biggest contributor to carbon is the top 10%.”
The whole interview can be listened to on the Morning Drive webpage.
The sentiment that the Statehouse occupants have taken the push to eradicate carbon dioxide, a necessary compound for life on Earth, too far is not new. Vermonters for a Clean Environment Annette Smith has noted the trend as well.
“No longer the representatives of all Vermonters, the statehouse is populated by a climate claque whose only villain is carbon emissions. Nothing else matters to these true believers. They are driven by the fear that if the monster of fossil fuel emissions is not vanquished, the world will end,” she wrote to the Caledonia Record in February of last year.
The author is a writer for the Vermont Daily Chronicle