Ayotte says she supports a new gas pipeline. What might that mean for prices in NH?

Gov. Kelly Ayotte announced her support this week for a pipeline project that would bring natural gas from Pennsylvania to New York.

During a visit from Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, Ayotte said she hoped New York leaders would take new interest in the Constitution Pipeline, which was initially approved in 2014 but shuttered in 2020.

Jamie Dickerson, senior director of climate and clean energy programs with the Acadia Center, which advocates for cutting carbon emissions in the Northeast, said customers may be worse off if a new pipeline were built.

“We see that it’s much more likely that prices would go up rather than go down as a result,” he said.

Domestic gas prices continue to grow more volatile in the global market which means unreliable prices for consumers, he said. He highlighted the spike in gas prices in 2022 as a result of the war in Ukraine as an example of that international context.

Pipelines and natural gas infrastructure are also expensive – both to construct and to maintain — and customers are usually the ones footing those bills, Dickerson said.

“We already have this multi-billion dollar gas network underneath our streets,” he said. “There is really a huge, looming bill that is coming due over the next 10 years that I think the general public is not aware of, and only increases the imperative of basically phasing out our reliance on natural gas and shifting off a natural gas system as quickly as possible.”

Dickerson says there are other energy resources — like offshore wind, solar, batteries, and inter-regional transmission lines — that could help with reliability in the winter, when gas is used for heating and electricity.

“The clean energy alternatives that exist have never been more cost effective and more readily available, both for utilities to invest in, for customers to invest in, for states to invest in,” he said.

To read the full article from New Hampshire Public Radio, click here.