by Erica Walch

Joyce Marcel’s piece in the July 10, 2024 Windham Commons discusses a postcard campaign by Americans for Prosperity, a conservative/libertarian group, aimed at educating voters and legislators in Vermont about Act 18. I thank Marcel for bringing up this important issue and I thank Americans for Prosperity for raising questions about what it will entail. I did not receive one of those postcards, so I also thank the Commons for reproducing it. As someone who is faced with ever increasing household costs and whose electricity goes out several times per month, I have been researching Act 18 for some time.

I am part of a group of local citizens that is concerned about the cost of living in Vermont and we have invited Rob Roper, formerly of the Ethan Allen Institute, to speak about the Act and what it may mean for Vermont households. The talk will be on Tuesday, August 6 at 6PM at the NewBrook Firehouse in Newfane on Route 30. The talk is free and open to the public. We are unaffiliated with any other group and have not received any funding for this talk; we are paying for the rental of the space out of our pockets and our goal is to educate the public about what these rules may mean for them.

Act 18 is a complicated and multi-faceted act described (on the VT Senate’s web site) as “an act relating to affordably meeting the mandated greenhouse gas reductions for the thermal sector through efficiency, weatherization measures, electrification, and decarbonization.”

As VT Representative Laura Sibilia (the only source quoted in the article) says, “we (the VT Legislature) haven’t even implemented a Clean Heat Standard. We may never implement a Clean Heat Standard. It’s a performance standard that’s under development. And the rules for implementing it are going to come to the Legislature next year, and perhaps we’ll approve them and perhaps we won’t.”

It’s heartening to hear from Rep. Sibilia that the VT Legislature is open to the possibility of not enacting the “Clean Heat Standard” (which is also known Orwellianly as the “Affordable Heat Act”) under Act 18. The various names and numbers of this act/bill/law further confuse most people. I urge Representative Sibilia and the rest of the legislature to listen to Vermont voters who oppose the overall intent of the law/act/standard – which is to “electrify everything.”

An appointed (i.e. unelected) body called the Vermont Climate Council has been in charge of drafting the standards that the legislature will vote on in January 2024. Members of the council include the Executive Director of Energy Action Network of Vermont, a well-organized advocacy/political action organization that conducts market research on energy/environmental opinions in order to “craft a message that will resonate” and pays members of the public to write letters to the editor, testify at government hearings, speak to groups and to friends and do other advance their goals, which includes the goal to “electrify everything”.

Another appointed member of the VT Climate Council is Liz Miller a VP at Green Mountain Power. Ms Miller earned $334,950 in 2022 (the most recent data available) and a performance bonus of an undisclosed amount as VP for Resilient Supply & Sustainable Systems. GMP’s performance incentives mean the more VT turns to electricity, the more Ms Miller will personally earn. GMP is a shareholder based, for-profit subsidiary corporation owned by two Canadian investment funds and is dedicated to maximizing profit for investors (as any for-profit company is). This is one of the people in charge of writing the rules that, if passed, will increase electricity usage in Vermont.

June Tierney is a Commissioner of the VT Department of Public Service and Public Utilities Commission. She is trying to slow down the process and to explain what the real implications will be of the proposed rules and hear from more Vermonters. She said  “I don’t think Vermonters understand the Mack truck that’s coming at them when you start matching up resources to priorities this plan is going to embody. I just don’t think they understand how it is going to impact their lives and what it’s going to cost.”

Information and explanation of the bill and the proposed rules in it have been scant. There were a few poorly-publicized and poorly-attended public information and feedback sessions, but very few members of the public have provided feedback, because the information is complex and has not been explained well or tangibly. It’s difficult to provide input on something with no specifics.

In April of this year, the legislature hired a pro-electric marketing firm, Opinion Dynamics, to educate the public about Act 18. I haven’t seen any of those educational materials yet, but I do know that the funding for this company came from the $1.75 million taken out of the General Fund in 2024 to pay for the research end of Act 18. That’s our taxpayer dollars, friends.

The Americans for Prosperity postcard and similar ones sent out by the Ethan Allen Institute in previous years are an attempt to educate the public on this complicated and vague law and are more than the state or the Climate Action Committee have done to raise awareness of it. The AFP postcard  lists four bullet points. Sibilia disputes three of them (though she agrees that Act 18 “gives regulators the power to create more useless red tape”), and Marcel investigates none of them. In fact, the bullet points raised in the Americans for Prosperity postcard may indeed be part of the rules the Legislature votes on. And despite Rep. Sibilia’s claim that taxes on fossil fuels would only be paid by the fuel providers, when is the last time a tax on a supply was not passed on to the consumer?

The Vermont Climate Council, in addition to writing the rules of the standard in question, also has a Climate Action Plan, which in 2021 Plan included eliminating wood burning stoves, eliminating propane ranges, water heaters and furnaces, eliminating oil-burning furnaces and boilers, stopping the sale of gasoline powered vehicles in Vermont in 2023 and requiring homeowners and landlords to use electric heat pumps in their homes.

The 2021 Climate Action Plan imagines a scenario of “more than 96,224 residential heat pump installations [in Vermont] by 2025 and 177,107 by 2030.” The next sentence reads “In many cases, the opportunities for enhanced building energy performance and reduced emissions will save customers money”. Clearly, this means that in MOST cases, it will not save customers money.

They backpedaled in 2022, setting dates for these goals further in the future, as they began to realize that very few people in Vermont want any part of this all-electric/all-government future. However, the current Climate Action Plan hopes for a doubling of demand for electricity in Vermont between 2020 and 2050. VTDigger recently reported that all of “New England’s grid operators are expecting the demand for electricity to increase by 17% in the coming decade” largely due to increased use of electric vehicles.

If you follow the money, those who benefit from “electrifying everything” are electric companies and the manufacturers and installers of electric equipment. Those who will be hurt by vast electrification are consumers who will find the cost of electricity increasing and the reliability decreasing. Southeastern Vermont has the most electricity outages in the state of Vermont, according to a SevenDaysVT article from October 2023, which cited data including an outage map provided by GMP.  

GMP has something called the “Zero Outages Initiative” (name probably created by whatever marketing firm came up with the “Affordable Heat Standard” moniker), with a goal of eliminating all power outages in its service area by 2030.

They plan to do this by upgrading lines with spacers (you may have seen this being done on Route 30 in Townshend earlier this year) and burying lines (you may have seen this being done in Wardsboro over the past year and ongoing). The cost of these upgrades is $250 million, which, despite having more than $3 billion in assets (according to FERC documents), they will pass along to consumers with a 2% rate increase.

My last electric bill from GMP included a “Customer Notice” that GMP would be asking for a 5.26% increase to base rates starting October 1, 2024. The notice didn’t say what the increase was proposed to be funding. It did give contact information for the PUC for customers to provide feedback, which I happily did.

In the SevenDaysVT article, GMP says “investments in grid resiliency would actually save ratepayers money over time by reducing the major storm-repair and line-maintenance costs” which average $7.1 million per major storm. We can see that a lot of that money is spent hiring out of state contractors to clean up after the fact, rather than using their 500 employees to take down trees that are obviously hanging over power lines, even though they have easements on private property to do that maintenance work.

While buried power lines work great and are not subject to outages, the system must be completely buried (as it is in Iceland) otherwise when there is an outage further up the line, the customers with buried lines will also be out.

There are three reasons why I oppose the idea of electrifying everything. First, while I rely on the government to ensure that heating and cooking appliances sold in America are safe and efficient, I don’t want the government telling me what fuel source I am allowed to use in my home and I enjoy a diversified blend of wood, propane and electricity – if one runs out or spikes in price, I can rely on the other two. Second, like many people, I love wood heat. It is sustainable, reliable, and local. You can’t get much more energy independent than burning your own well-managed wood lot, and if you don’t have your own to burn, you can buy firewood from a local, small business, not a huge foreign conglomerate. Third, electric power is essential in the 21^st century, but it is unreliable. Imagine being all-electric and facing a multi-day outage. I have endured two five-day winter outages in the past seven years and numerous shorter outages. I installed the Tesla Powerwall Battery Storage system through GMP in March 2024. In the four months since they’ve been installed, they have provided 4% of my overall electric power, including two 36-hour winter outages. When the power goes out, as it has already done 8 times in July, as I write this on July 12^th, the Power Walls take over and power my refrigerator, freezer, water pump, lights, sump pump, and computer and can do so for days. All very important items to use, but if they were also powering my heat, my cooking stove and my car, the power stored in them would be quickly exhausted, and I’d be stuck cold, hungry, and unable to leave my home until the power came back on.

What happens when people have electrified everything in their home and vehicle and the price goes sky-high? Even if the grid is working, if people can’t afford paying their electric bill and they have no other fuel source as a back-up, they won’t be able to cook or heat. No amount of insulation is going to fix that.

Marcel reports Sibilia as saying “she (Sibilia) heard from others that the postcards cost Americans for Prosperity $60,000”. OpenSecrets.org is a non-partisan website that tracks political spending in America. According to Open Secrets, electricity providers and environmental organizations working to increase electrification spent $3,500,000 lobbying Vermont legislators between 2015 and today. Over $1 million of that came from Green Mountain Power alone. They must be expecting a big return on their lobbying investment and if the electrify everything rules pass, they sure will get it. A $60,000 postcard campaign to educate consumers on what Act 18 has in store for them seems like not enough spending.

I invite anyone who pays for heat or uses electricity (or cares about people who do) to attend the free public event featuring Rob Roper on Wed., August 7^th, at 6PM, and also to do your own research and follow the money. All of the information I cite in this article came from me spending my own free time searching on the Internet and reading the documents proposed by the Climate Action Council and GMP. It used to be that the public could depend on news sources to do research, interview multiple sources with different opinions and present balanced information about stories that effect the lives of ordinary people, but that seems to have gone out of fashion and now it’s up to us to do our own research.

Author is a Newfane resident.