An Ode to Docket 4600
As told through a series of haiku:
I drove to Warwick
In a blue electric car
The chargers were full
Those in the know, know
Rhode Island utilities
Governed in Warwick
Fifty-four miles left
Should be plenty to get home
I am risk averse
Endure long meeting
With many energy geeks
Time-based rates for cars
Leafs swap spots at lunch
Brain can’t take much more rate talk
Level 2 charging
Start up in silence
I pause a moment, and breathe
Rate case up ahead
Clean energy intrigue alleged
Peter Shattuck, the Massachusetts director of the Acadia Center, an environmental advocacy group, said the RFP should be changed. “As written, the RFP would favor large hydro over the wind and solar that we need to diversify the energy mix, drive in-region economic development, and achieve renewable power requirements,” he said.
Read the full article from Commonwealth Magazine here.
Eversource facing big Beacon Hill challenge
Peter Shattuck, the director of the Massachusetts office of the Acadia Center, an environmental advocacy group, said he didn’t think Eversource would be successful in winning support for pipeline financing on Beacon Hill. “Last session the Senate voted unanimously to block the pipeline tariff, and with continuing grassroots opposition and another uneventful winter, legislation is unlikely,” he said.
Read the full article from Commonwealth here.
New farmland harvest – solar energy – creating political sparks
But asked whether he’d favor a moratorium, Miner laughed and took a long pause. “I don’t personally like moratoriums,” he said. “Is there a real hardship with some period of a moratorium so you could figure this out? I don’t know.”
But Bill Dornbos, who heads the Connecticut office of the environmental advocacy group Acadia Center, does. “I’ve been contacted by utility-scale developers who are expressing great concern and nervousness about this because they heard the word moratorium,” he said. “They were worried we were going to go to a place like we were with the wind-power issue.
“Legislation that restricts solar incentives on the basis of land type is probably not the optimal solution in the long term,” Dornbos said.
Read the full article from the CT Mirror here.
War, peace and innovation: Solar policy in 2016
In Massachusetts, a “Next Generation Incentive” would offer changes to the net metering credit that steps down as well as changes to the state’s Solar Renewable Energy Credit program and compensation “adders” designed to serve as price signals to guide growth. While the successor tariff includes “thoughtful elements such as long-term price guarantees to lower financing costs, land use standards, and incentives for pairing solar and storage,” it lacks protection for community solar programs, said Peter Shattuck, clean energy initiative director of Acadia Center. But protections seem to be lacking for community solar and for solar programs, he added.
Read the full article from Utility Dive here.
Rules to cut carbon emissions in Mass. may increase them in New England, critics say
Since the initiative began in 2008, it has led to reduced emissions and lower energy prices, said Peter Shattuck, director of the clean energy initiative at the Acadia Center, an environmental advocacy group in Boston.
“While there may be some offsetting increases in emissions beyond Massachusetts’ border, the Commonwealth has to set its own policy course,” Shattuck said. “If we’d been looking over [our] shoulder at what other states were doing, we might never have pursued health care reform, marriage equality, or the Global Warming Solutions Act itself.”
Read the full article from the Boston Globe here.
Eversource seeks higher fees on customers with solar
Mark LeBel, a staff attorney at the Acadia Center, an environmental advocacy group, said Eversource’s demand charge isn’t fair to small consumers of electricity because there is no way for a customer to forecast the fee or manage it. He also said a utility’s costs are never driven by the peak demands of an individual, residential customer.
Acadia recommends creating a distribution reliability charge based on the customer’s electricity consumption over a 12-month period, which would give the homeowner an incentive to reduce his or her use of electricity. LeBel – the coauthor of a report on demand charges entitled “Charge Without a Cause?” – said Eversource’s response to growing solar use appears to be an overreaction. “There’s not a big enough problem to go there anytime soon,” he said.
Read the full story from Commonwealth Magazine here.