Correction: Connecticut’s Innovative Energy Solutions Program is working with the consulting firm Strategen. An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the program and firm. Also, the participating company Kraken is not affiliated with the similarly named cryptocurrency company.

Connecticut regulators have approved the first round of pilot projects in a new program aimed at accelerating innovation across the electric grid. 

Seven tech companies have received the go-ahead to partner with utilities Eversource or United Illuminating to test the potential of their hardware or software to help decarbonize the state’s electric grid. 

The Innovative Energy Solutions Program is part of a broader effort by the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) to modernize the grid. It encourages utilities to embrace new technology while limiting the risk to ratepayers. 

The selected companies were winnowed from an initial 50 applications. While some of the technologies have been deployed successfully elsewhere, none have been tested in Connecticut, said Julia Dumaine, PURA’s supervisor of strategy and operations. The projects, funded at a total of just under $10 million, were chosen after a multi-step review process that included scrutiny from a nine-member advisory council. 

“Having these increasingly stringent reviews minimizes ratepayer risk,” Dumaine said. “These are technologies that have demonstrated the potential to provide real ratepayer and grid-level benefits.”

None are startups in the research and development phase — they are all prepared to scale up at a later date, she said.

After the pilots launch, each company has a set of metrics they must meet and will be required to report on them quarterly, said Eli Asher, a senior manager at Strategen, the consulting firm responsible for developing and administering the program. 

“We will be gathering data on how effective the projects are,” he said. “At the end of the deployment period, we’ll have a cost-benefit analysis to inform the recommendations as to whether they should be fully deployed at scale across the state.”

The program allows the utilities to recover their costs for testing these new technologies, something they might be reluctant to do otherwise.

“I think it’s great to have regulators backing a program like this,” said Alex Ghanem, commercial manager for Piclo, one of the companies participating. “It’s a risk to test things out and it costs the utilities resources to do so. I think this is a great framework.”

Based in London, England, Piclo will work with United Illuminating to launch a grid flexibility market. They will recruit owners, operators and managers of any type of distributed energy resource — battery storage, electric vehicles, and other types of dispatchable power sources commonly known as DERs — to operate in an independent marketplace in return for compensation.

Piclo will work with DER aggregators on their platform. They will provide United Illuminating with local flexible DERs that represent alternative — and ideally, cheaper — places to buy energy than on the wholesale market when the utility has insufficient supply to meet customer demand. 

Piclo is already operating in New York in partnership with National Grid. 

“The penetration of DERs is disrupting the grid and the utilities need to pull on multiple different levers to manage that,” said John Bayard, Piclo’s chief commercial officer. “Grid flexibility marketplaces are one of the tools they can use.”

Another British company, Kraken, will also work with United Illuminating to help them better manage DERs. 

Kraken’s platform “can connect to any kind of DER — electric vehicles, heat pumps, smart thermostats,” said Devrim Celal, chief executive officer. “We can connect to them in an effective way, monitor them in real time and control what they do.”

This pilot will focus on customers that use heat pumps and drive electric vehicles. The company will recruit ratepayers to sign up to use their mobile app, which will give Kraken access to their DERs. For example, they might tell the company what kind of EV and charger they have, and what time of day they need to have their car charged by. 

“We will determine when is the best time to charge their cars to achieve low-carbon emission targets, and in exchange we’ll give them a reward,” Celal said. 

The pilot is intended to help the grid run greener and more cheaply.

An EV charging software company called AmpUp will work with Eversource to try to balance electricity demand during peak periods by decreasing load at electric vehicle chargers. Based in Santa Clara, Calif., AmpUp will provide incentives to compensate charging station owners for decreasing charging during peak periods. 

They are still working out what level of incentive might stimulate participation, as well as whether it might appeal to a workplace with four chargers as much as to a company operating a fleet of vehicles, said Matt Bloom, director of partnerships.

“We’re really excited,” he said. “It’s good to see the regulators take a little risk. This is a good way to innovate, see what we learn and whether it’s something Eversource could adopt long term.”

Connecticut will tap clean energy technology to find emission-cutting efficiencies on grid is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Member towns in New Hampshire’s year-old Community Power Coalition are reaping the benefits of banding together to buy electricity on their own. 

As of Feb. 1, residential and small commercial customers in the coalition’s 16 active member communities will pay a base electricity rate of 8.1 cents per kilowatt-hour, a 26% reduction from their already-competitive rate of 10.9 cents per kWh.

Another 29 communities are planning to enjoy the lower rate after they launch their own programs this spring, effectively making the statewide coalition the second-largest electrical supplier in the state.

“The community power program has been a great success,” said Jackson Kaspari, resilience manager for the city of Dover and a member of the coalition’s board of directors. Since Dover launched its program last October, for example, residential and commercial customers have saved an estimated $500,000, he said.

The new rate, which will be in effect through July 31, is lower than the default residential rate offered by every other electric utility in the state: 24% below Unitil, 20% below the New Hampshire Electric Co-op, 17% below Liberty, and 2% below Eversource.

The estimated savings for customers in all member communities for the next six-month rate period is around $3.2 million, said Brian Callnan, the coalition’s first chief executive officer, and formerly the vice president of power resources and access at the New Hampshire Electric Co-op.

New Hampshire’s community power law, signed into law in 2019, authorizes municipalities to procure their own power, instead of buying it through their local distribution company. The distribution companies continue to deliver the electricity and handle billing. 

The coalition uses the collective buying power of all of their residents and businesses to secure competitive rates in the wholesale market. Their ability to be flexible in the timing of energy procurements enables them to find value, Callnan said.

“We don’t have to purchase power at a given time period,” he said. In contrast, “the investor-owned utilities don’t have that flexibility” in their regulated procurement process.

The coalition’s base rate — called the Granite Basic — includes 24.3% renewable content, the minimum required under the state’s renewable portfolio standard. But customers may choose to pay slightly higher rates for greater proportions of renewable power.

Opting up to the highest level — the Clean 100, with 100% renewable power — would still only raise the average residential customer’s bill an estimated $29 a month over the basic rate, while eliminating more than two tons of carbon emissions per year, according to John Tabor, chair councilor of the Portsmouth Energy Advisory Committee.

“Portsmouth Community Power customers could reduce their carbon footprint from electricity the same as if they converted their homes to solar panels, at a fraction of the cost,” Tabor said in a statement released at the time of the new rate announcement.

Currently, about 90% of customers have chosen to stay with the Granite Basic product, Callnan said.

The revenue from electricity sales cover the nonprofit coalition’s operating costs, with the balance going into reserves. Every member community is allocated their portion of the collected reserves in the nonprofit. Member communities will also have an opportunity to create a reserve fund on their own to pursue other energy-related projects in their towns, such as improving building efficiency or developing solar projects. 

The coalition could potentially partner with a community hosting a solar project and take up some of that power, he said.

“Pretty much all the communities have ideas for projects or are working on projects,” Callnan said. “To me, that’s the exciting part of this — we can really make an impact on how a community uses energy. There are no renewable projects under development from within our communities right now, but we could see that happen in 2025.”

Dover’s energy commission is considering a multi-phased program to improve energy efficiency in their municipal buildings, Kaspari said. They have also evaluated some sites for building solar, such as at the city’s wastewater treatment facility, he said. 

“Being a member of the coalition has given us new perspectives on a lot of things and opened the door for information sharing with other municipalities,” Kaspari said. “That’s one of the most powerful aspects of the coalition at this time — leaders in the energy sector talking to each other from across the state.” 

Five years later, New Hampshire’s community power law is reshaping the electricity market is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Vermont is pioneering two novel approaches to try to maximize the benefits from electric vehicle rebate programs. 

Electric vehicles have so far done little to lower gasoline consumption, with one analysis estimating that 2.25 million EVs on the road in 2021 only reduced U.S. gas fuel sales by about half a percent. That’s in part because many early adopters have been either infrequent drivers with short commutes or owners of vehicles that were already relatively fuel efficient.

A pair of programs in Vermont are attempting to change that dynamic by targeting incentives to long-distance commuters and drivers of older, less efficient vehicles.  

Legislation approved in June at the request of the Burlington Electric Department authorizes electricity providers to incentivize high-consumption fuel users to switch to battery electric vehicles. The law defines high consumption as more than 1,000 gallons of gasoline or diesel annually. 

According to Darren Springer, Burlington Electric’s general manager, the company decided to pursue such a program — ostensibly the first in the country — after reviewing research from Coltura, a nonprofit that advocates for accelerating the transition from gasoline to cleaner fuels. 

Coltura has found that 10% of U.S. drivers consume about a third of the gasoline used by light-duty vehicles. 

“We’re slowly getting people to understand that you can more cost-effectively reduce emissions from the transportation sector if your resources prioritize the highest mileage drivers,” said Rob Sargent, Coltura’s policy director.

And there is an added equity bonus, Sargent said, because a majority of these superusers (56%) are also below the median household income. Many of them are commuters forced to drive long distances because they can’t afford to live close to where they work, and end up spending a lot of their limited income on gas. 

Focusing electric vehicle incentives on maximizing gasoline displacement “aligns the climate imperative with the very appropriate need to focus on equity and access,” Sargent said. 

Because Vermont requires annual vehicle inspections, proving how far you drive in a year is a matter of comparing odometer readings on those inspection reports from one year to the next. 

Springer said the company is in the process of figuring out how to structure the program, which, with approval from utility regulators, will likely be offered in January to Burlington’s 21,000 customers. 

“We’re thinking about what level of miles traveled per year would qualify someone for this program,” he said. “Burlington drivers are driving less vehicle miles annually than the state as a whole, because the city is a relatively compact urban area compared to many other parts of the state.”

The other challenge is figuring out what incentive level will drive adoption, he said. The company will offer an enhanced EV incentive for superusers beyond their existing programs’ current range of $1,300 to $3,000, depending upon the buyer’s income level and the type of vehicle being purchased.

Cash for clunkers

Meanwhile, a state program called Replace Your Ride, launched last September, is offering income-eligible drivers a $3,000 incentive to scrap a gas-powered vehicle that is at least 10 years old and replace it with a new or used electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle. 

At the time of trade-in, the owner must submit a form attesting that the car is being disposed of by one of the state’s approved scrapping partners or a company certifying it will be auctioned for parts. 

“The quicker we’re taking vehicles off the road and replacing them with cleaner transportation options, the better off we are for progress toward our climate goals,” said Patrick Murphy, sustainability and innovations projects manager for the Vermont Agency of Transportation. 

Setting the right incentive level to convince people to trade in their old vehicles has been a challenge for the program. Between last September and the end of June, the program only removed 32 old cars from the roads, Murphy said. 

Sixteen of those rebates went toward the purchase of used electric or plug-in vehicles, and 13 were for new vehicles. (The average age of the trade-ins was 15 years.) The remaining three rebates were for a third option: a pre-paid mobility card for getting around by other means, such as public transit or car sharing.

“We did not get the interest that we had hoped for, but it was really driven by market factors that came into play after the program had been enacted,” Murphy said. “The used vehicle supply became very tight, especially for those vehicles that got very good mileage or for plug-ins. Those being traded in were still able to get $3,500 or $4,000 on the market. In ordinary times they wouldn’t have been worth that much.”

In an effort to boost participation, the state is upping the incentive from $3,000 to $5,000, effective July 27. That incentive can be stacked on top of other state incentives, potentially cutting the cost of a new or used vehicle by as much as $10,000, Murphy said.

Beyond cost, a number of other factors complicate the decision to go electric in Vermont, including the availability of charging infrastructure in the state’s many rural areas. Still, Murphy said, “we’ll see what additional interest we might get. We are starting to see some saner used vehicle prices at this point.” 

Vermont wants to win over the state’s biggest gas-guzzlers with new EV incentives  is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Connecticut is about to adopt a new environmental justice mapping tool designed to infuse equity into policy-making and empower residents of overburdened communities in their efforts to prevent exposure to additional hazards and improve overall quality of life.

The mapping tool incorporates more than 50 different data sets to show which census tracts in the state are most at risk from pollution exposure, socioeconomic impacts and health disparities. 

“It will show which areas are highly likely to be impacted for any kind of environmental justice,” said Yaprak Onat, assistant director of research at the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation at the University of Connecticut, which is developing the tool in partnership with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. 

“Environmental activists know the issues in their neighborhoods,” she said. “They can use this tool to say, ‘Hey, here’s the data to back it up.’”

On Monday, the development team opened a two-week public comment period on the tool with an online demonstration of its capabilities. People can try out the tool in English or Spanish on the institute’s website and submit feedback. The final version will be released next month.

The main map presents an environmental justice index for the entire state. Clicking on an individual tract gives its ranking between 1 and 10, with 10 being the most highly impacted based on the cumulative effect of a host of factors.

There are myriad options for diving more deeply into the data by breaking out the individual risk factors. For example, the tracts can be represented according to the potential sources of pollution within their boundaries, such as brownfield sites, Superfund sites and incinerators. Tracts with the highest potential for pollution show up darker in color.

Tracts can also be viewed according to their vulnerability related to socioeconomic factors, such as poverty and race/ethnicity, and health disparities, such as asthma rates and elevated lead levels.

The data used — much of it from state agencies — isn’t anything new, but only specific people know of each set’s existence, Onat noted. 

“Now it’s going to be easily accessible so everybody can see the general picture,” she said.

Two years in the making, the tool came about through a recommendation contained in a 2021 report from the Governor’s Council on Climate Change. More specifically, the council’s Equity and Environmental Justice Working Group called for the development of the tool, which it said could be used in existing state programs, including the distribution of grant and bond funding. 

It was developed incorporating input from residents of environmental justice communities at a half-dozen public forums in which attendees could try out the tool on iPads. The developers also consulted a Mapping Tool Advisory Committee composed of people and organizations active in environmental justice work. 

At a May presentation of the tool to the Connecticut Equity and Environmental Justice Advisory Council, some environmental justice advocates expressed skepticism as to whether state agencies and lawmakers will actually incorporate the tool into their decision-making. Edith Pestana, administrator of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s environmental justice program, responded that the tool wasn’t developed “to just sit on a shelf.” 

“Hopefully,” she said, “this tool will make the case for legislators because they’ll have to see it. Some of them will type in their own neighborhoods and they’ll see they live in a dark blue area.”

Lynne Bonnett, a long-time environmental justice advocate who lives in New Haven, said the tool will be helpful, but only if it is used. 

“It is on paper and remains to be seen whether EJ communities will continue to bear the brunt of regional infrastructures that create harmful conditions for their residents,” Bonnett said in an email.

The tool can work in conjunction with the state’s newly updated environmental justice law, said Alex Rodriguez, environmental justice specialist with Save the Sound. Rodriguez and other advocates lobbied hard for the measure, which finally passed on the last day of the most recent legislative session after its scope was reduced.

The law (Public Act 23-202) authorizes the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the Connecticut Siting Council to deny or place conditions on a permit for new polluting facilities in environmental justice communities if the cumulative environmental and health impacts there exceed a threshold higher than impacts borne by other communities.

The bill’s original language also applied that authority to permit applications for the expansion of existing facilities, but that language was removed, Rodriguez said. 

“I think the tool is going to be needed for other policies as well,” he said. “It’s really going to force the state to look at the discrepancies in environmental protection across the state.” 

At Monday’s presentation, Pestana said that once the institute hands off the finished tool to the department next month, an environmental analyst will be assigned to manage it and keep the data up to date. 

“It is a living tool,” she said. “It is not stagnant.”

Connecticut mapping tool aims to bring visibility to environmental justice communities is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Few government officials will have a bigger say in how states transition from fossil fuels than public utility commissioners.

Yet, for the most part, these boards operate below the radar, rarely drawing the level of scrutiny faced by other agencies or officeholders.

Jared Heern wants to change that.

In an effort to draw more attention to the role of state utility commissions, Heern, a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute at Brown University for Environment and Society, recently assembled data on the more than 800 commissioners who served on public utility commissions across the country between 2000 and 2020. The results are laid out in a new study published in the journal Energy Research and Social Science.

“PUCs are so central to the rapid action that’s needed in decarbonization, especially since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the amount of money that’s going to be going out for that,” Heern said. “They should be getting a lot more attention than they have been and climate change makes that much more important.” 

Utility commissions set rates, oversee investments in generation and transmission equipment, and enforce renewable energy requirements, among other things.

Heern’s study found that public utility commissions are appointed by governors in 41 states; elsewhere they are elected. The dominant role governors play in determining who sits on these commissions is something that is all but overlooked at election time, Heern said. 

“We should be evaluating governors on what kind of PUC they’re going to appoint,” he said. 

When it comes to their backgrounds, most commissioners, 42%, previously worked in utility regulation, something Heern views as positive. Next common was having been an elected official, or part of a governor’s network. A quarter of commissioners came from the utility or fossil fuel industry, experience that could potentially influence their policy preferences in favor of those interests, Heern said. 

Just 19% of commissioners overall had an environmental background. However, that proportion has increased faster than any other, more than doubling from 12% in 2000 to 29% in 2020. 

“That was pleasantly surprising,” Heern said. “There seems to be a lot more focus on appointing commissioners that have connections to renewable energy or environmental NGOs.”

Lack of diversity

But another study found that public utility commissions are still largely lacking in a diversity of life experiences and in an understanding of how their decisions can differently affect low-income and environmental justice communities. Issued by the Chisholm Legacy Project, a Maryland-based nonprofit that supports Black communities seeking to advance environmental justice, the report captured the gender and race of the country’s 197 sitting commissioners as of August 2022. 

It found that 65% of commissioners were male; in six states, the commissioners were all male. Eighty-two percent were White; 24 states had no commissioners of color. Four states — Idaho, Maine, Mississippi and Utah — had all White male commissioners.

Only 11% of commissioners were Black, 3% were Hispanic or Latino, 3% were Asian, and 1% were Native American.

“This makeup does not reflect the racial diversity of the US as a whole,” the report noted, “with 19% of Americans identifying as Hispanic/Latino, 14% identifying as Black, and 6% identifying as Asian, according to the 2021 US Census.”

The lack of representational governance is the most glaring in the deep South, one of the most racially diverse regions of the country. Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia have the highest proportions of Black populations in the country, yet minimal diversity of representation, if any, on their public utility commissions, all of which are elected, the report said. 

“That’s not an accident — that’s a whole overlay of segregation, voter suppression, and other factors,” said Charles Hua, a Harvard researcher who co-authored the study with Jacqui Patterson, Chisholm’s founder and executive director. “But those four states have some of the highest energy burdens in the U.S. The regulators have the capacity to do something about it, but they have allowed the utilities to run with their proposals that exacerbate these problems.”

Patterson said her organization plans to begin putting out information on commissioners running for office so voters in frontline communities can make informed choices. 

“They want to make sure that they look at this office when they’re going to vote, and we, as advocates, will make that information easier to find,” she said. 

New approaches to engagement

Yet another report issued earlier this year by the Brown University Climate and Development Lab explored how the New England states can advance an equitable energy transition. The findings, based on a series of workshops held throughout the region, include a list of actions that utility commissions can take to better engage a broader group of stakeholders.

The recommendations include improving communication with the public, being proactive about reaching out to affected stakeholders, and making it easier for the public to participate in proceedings.

“These proceedings can be very technical and opaque,” said Oliver Tully, director of utility innovation at the Acadia Center. “It can be challenging for groups who are already limited in terms of resources to participate meaningfully in proceedings where there is a lot of jargon and data to wade through.”  

The climate lab report highlights one utility commission that is going out of its way to be more accessible: the Connecticut Public Utility Regulatory Authority, known as PURA. Chair Marissa Gillett has made it her mission to make the authority much more transparent and highly visible since her appointment in 2019.

“It started as an attempt to ‘brand’ PURA — it didn’t really have an identity with legislators, the media or stakeholders, beyond the traditional utility stakeholders we interact with,” Gillett said. 

She began building that brand herself with what she calls her “PURA 101 roadshow.” Gillett travels around the state delivering 40-minute presentations — some four dozen of them so far — explaining what PURA’s mission is, how electric rates are set, and how to engage with the commission. 

“I give the presentation to whoever shows up — two people or two dozen,” she said. 

The authority also built out its social media channels, including posting tutorial videos on YouTube explaining, for example, how to navigate the online docket system or what a particular decision means. 

Still not satisfied with the level of public comments they were receiving on important dockets, Gillett more recently decided to introduce a quarterly newsletter highlighting major decisions in plain language, and alerting recipients to future cases they might want to weigh in on.

During the past legislative session, the authority threw its support behind a new stakeholder compensation program contained within SB 7, a major energy regulation reform bill. The program, which launches in 2024, will provide financial assistance to stakeholder groups that represent limited-income residents, environmental justice communities, or small business customers in a PURA proceeding. 

These groups will be eligible to receive up to $100,000 per stakeholder group, and up to $300,000 for all stakeholder groups per proceeding, with a cap of $1.2 million for all stakeholder groups per calendar year. 

“For some proceedings, you really need an attorney or expert witnesses, and the idea is to start to empower groups and bridge that gap,” Gillett said. 

Looking ahead, Gillett said, she recognizes that much, much more investment will be required to help states adapt to climate change. And consumers are going to want to know where that money is going and who is managing it. 

“There’s so much more attention and urgency,” she said. “And consumers are increasingly more aware of what they’re spending on power. The commissions that have not figured out that they’re going to increasingly be in the spotlight are going to be caught flat-footed.”

Who decides where we get electricity and how much we pay? Mostly White, politically connected men is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.