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Cites equity and registration problems
By Paul Bean
The Public Utilities Commission December 6 draft report on the Clean Heat Standard “strongly recommends” the equity and reporting obligations within the CHS are not adopted, seemingly quashing the version as now written.
The PUC says the plan for “enhancing social equity” won’t work on the Clean Heat Standard, the Legislature’s attempt to transition to electrical heat in an effort to reach mandated reductions in carbon emissions.
“The Clean Heat Standard program must be ‘designed and implemented’ to enhance social equity by prioritizing customers with low income, moderate income, those households with the highest energy burdens, residents of manufactured homes, and renter households with tenant-paid energy bills,” said the report.
This will not be possible because the only way to ‘prioritize customers with low income’ would be to subsidize and prioritize their heating costs by “frontloading” the low/moderate income Vermonters into the program, the PUC says:
“The Legislature encouraged the Commission to frontload, to the extent reasonably possible, these equity-targeted credits ‘so that the greatest proportion of clean heat measures reach Vermonters with low income and moderate income in the earlier years’ of the program,” said the report.
The CHS requires the PUC must first focus on low/middle-income Vermonters who cannot afford the implementation of the CHS and they must rely on the willingness of fuel-dealers to help them meet that obligation. The “obligated parties” within the CHS include fuel dealers, and they would be required by law to “obtain and retire” clean heat credits and that can be done by installing electric heat pumps.
“As an example, if an obligated party is assigned to obtain and retire 25 clean heat credits in year on…this amount could be earned by installing two 3.5 ton (42,000 Btu/h) single-family residential air-source ducted heat pump systems (specifically homes in which this would fully displace existing oil heat) and delivering 7,251 gallons of 20% biodiesel sourced from soybean oil. For the installations, while they would generate only a portion of their carbon reductions in year one, those measures would continue to earn credits for the estimated lifetime of the measure”
The biggest flaws lie in Fuel Dealer Registration Data, the PUC says. Some dealers are unregistered and the PUC does not have the resources to go after the unregistered fuel dealers as private enterprises. This under-registration distorts the PUC’s understanding of how much fuel is being imported and sold into Vermont.
Furthermore, many of the fuel dealers that did register reported their information inaccurately. Lastly, in September, the language used within the initial registration asked registrants to “use their best judgement when reporting fuel sold in or into Vermont.” The report clarifies the language was corrected in September, but the original registration caused some registrants to underreport and caused others “would be registrants” to not report at all.
Because of all three of these major flaws, this completely distorts “validity of the data and ultimately the clean heat credit obligations that were based on it.”
Ultimately, if the PUC does not know how much fuel many of the dealers are selling, then it can never appropriately determine how many “carbon credits” they are responsible for, thus how many low-middle income Vermonters they are required to “frontload.”
The legislature must review the Clean Heat Standard in the coming session if it is to proceed into law.
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Categories: Energy
My oil dealer got kicked out of my yard when they decided they owned my oil tank. There was no committee formed to make this decision.
Re: “…do the math to determine – with admittedly flawed data – what the obligated parties obligations would be in year one of a Clean Heat Standard regime:”
In Rob Roper’s recent Substack missive on this subject, he expressed, in one sentence, an excellent description of Vermont’s current Clean Heat legislative processes. It’s amazing, in fact, that Rob and Paul are able to articulate this chaos as well as they do.
But more important is the colossal waste of time and money resulting from this process. Clearly, consultants from every affected sector are being paid millions of Vermont taxpayer dollars with little if any productive results.
Does this sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s not just the PUC and our energy sector that are in a state of chaos. Anarchy is pervasive in our healthcare system and, especially, in our education system. In other words, our government (legislative, executive, and administrative) is not only in a state of chaos, it’s corrupt.
In the final analysis, the chicken and egg debate, whether or not the corruption caused the incompetence, or the incompetence allowed the corruption, is beside the main point – which is that government, by its nature, tends to be both incompetent and corrupt – which is why our Founders sought to limit government power at every turn in the road.
And yes. I’ll say it again. We Vermonters must finally begin to understand, not only what the system of private free enterprise is, but that a free market system “… is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”
Anyone who disagrees, especially after watching the Vermont government in action for the last 30 years, is either corrupt or incompetent.
Well said, and the end result of that incompetence and corruption (in name, government) is more and more bureaucrats at the feeding trough funded by the tax payers.
You are so right. The amount of time this Clean Heat Standard has consumed, with dozens and dozens of meetings, numerous consultants, lots of workshops, comments, documents produced, it’s surreal. Ditto the Climate Council, which has subcommittees that have task groups meeting all the time. I feel for the state agency staff who are required to participate in these endless stream of meetings. I asked the Climate Council for an accounting of all the money that has flowed from the Global Warming Solutions Act, the Climate Council and its recommendations that, among other things, resulted in the Clean Heat Standard-torture-the-PUC process, plus we now have an Office of Climate, but nope, nobody wanted to followup my request and produce an accounting. It occurred to me the other day as I was sitting through yet another Climate Council subcommittee meeting that if all these people met so often on housing issues, someone might actually solve some problems.
I can remember the old Barre Coal Company on Railroad St. in Barre when I was a kid. My Grandmother and many others were still heated with coal at that time. I can almost imagine what they would have told their Legislators back then if they had a similar situation foisted against them. How long do you think it would have taken before all of the Legislators would have been voted out, or worse. Of course it did not happen, because the Legislators of that time were not as full of themselves as present day Legislators, and knew that was not up to them to legislate such things. I would point out that even without legislative activism initiated by lobbying groups, the change from coal to other means of heating homes went forward at a rate that citizens could afford.
“watching the Vermont government in action for the last 30 years” corrupt or incompetent ….
Pete Welch was writing the various laws when in Congress (House of Representatives) and his wife administers them. What exactly qualified an elementary school teacher to be qualified for a Utility Board position? Kamala Harris, along with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is the godfather/mother of incompetence. May they always be remembered as the nimrods who allowed an invasion of our country to take place and set records for drug overdose deaths. Janet Yellen was supposed to advocate sound economic policies, but millions of hardworking families are struggling with out-of-control inflation not seen in 40 years, as she helped pave the way for the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which had nothing to do with reducing inflation – the strategically misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act is mainly a climate bill. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin watched with bewilderment as a Communist Chinese spy balloon slowly made its way over the entire continental United States. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took nearly three weeks to [announce a trip] to the site of the train wreck in East Palestine. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is about as competent as VT’s own Margaret Cheney (Welch).
Corrupt? Incompetent? …. Left-wing elitists?
“Vermont government in action for the last 30 years”?
Pete Welch was writing the various laws when in Congress (House of Representatives) and his wife administers them today. What exactly qualified Margaret Cheney (Welch) to be a competent pick for the Public Utility Board? Being a Harvard educated newspaper reporter/magazine editor/Spanish teacher at Sharon Academy? Maybe the same qualifications as that of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm …. by appointment.
It must be a Left-wing elitist thing the Democrats forever run with. Kamala Harris – along with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas – are the god-parents of incompetence. May they always be remembered as the nimrods who allowed an invasion of our country to take place, setting records for drug overdose deaths.
Janet Yellen was supposed to be a qualified (Brown and Yale) advocate of sound economic policies. Then why are millions of hardworking families struggling with out-of-control inflation not seen in 40 years? She helped pave the way for the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which had nothing to do with reducing inflation. The strategically misleadingly named ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ is mainly a climate bill that Welch and wife are jamming down our throats!
A Phd. In Delusion.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wasn’t qualified to guard a henhouse as he watched a Communist Chinese spy balloon slowly make its way over our nation. He gets out of the Army and goes to work at Raytheon …. smooth move!
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took nearly three weeks to [announce a trip] to the site of the train wreck in East Palestine. Recalling when he took time off for his husband’s baby event …. Now we have drones flying over New Jersey and Pete is mute. What did he know about transportation?
A Democrat clown show on display in the form of Vermont voters – the majority of which work in state government or the teachers union – who keep reelecting the clowns that have mismanaged their pension fund into the red by millions.
poetic justice
Admittedly, the ‘market mechanism’ of treating greenhouse gas emissions as a commodity and then limiting them by limiting the ‘credits’ available to the market is extremely complicated. But under a very limited number of circumstances and assuming those who design and operate the system know what they are doing, this approach can result in greater reductions at lower cost than command-and-control regulation. That being said, the Clean Heat Standard program was doomed from the start. It cannot work under any circumstance and to make matter worse the people running this disaster do not have a clue. Apparently, a few of them are starting to figure this out.
“Treating greenhouse gas emissions as a commodity” to achieve “greater reductions” is not only extremely complicated (a typical euphemism describing an incorrect assertion), the elephant in the room is the increasing support for the evidence that CO2 is not a significant ‘greenhouse gas’ in the first place, nor the ‘climate change’ boogeyman it was initially made out to be.
Yes, the climate is changing. In fact, it’s been getting warmer for more than 10,000 years since the last ice age, with a brief temperature decline (a mini-ice age) 300 to 400 years ago. But rising sea levels confirm that modern current warming predates recent increases of CO2 levels and the current warming trend is neither unusual nor unprecedented. Apparently, CO2 levels are near record lows, and we are still living, today, in one of the coldest periods in all of Earth’s history.
What’s really ‘complicated’ is trying to understand why anyone would want to limit one of the most important compounds supporting all life on Earth in the first place. Again, the reason can only be explained by incompetence or corruption. It’s clearly not ‘the science’.
I’m not transitioning over to anything.. I’m so sick and tired of being told what to do by these flatlanders. We don’t need to be saved BY the liberals we need to be saved FROM the liberals.
And all of this discussion presumes carbon dioxide is THE driver of the small amount of Earth’s warming since the coldest point (~1850) in the last 10,000 years. CO2 cannot warm the Earth, the oceans, or atmosphere any further, even if we double present concentrations. The ocean controls the Earth’s atmospheric temperature and the CO2 levels (by way of temperature solubility).
Anything VT does to fight “carbon” is immeasurable ….we could bankrupt VT by spending $1B per year and the temperature would change < 0.000005 deg F. We could emit zero CO2 in VT and the present global ppm level wouldn’t budge.