Electricity, in America as in most of the world, has become nearly as essential as water. The 1974 noir film Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, chronicled the clandestine battle to control the supply of the water that made modern Los Angeles possible. A similar, shadowy battle, launched from Concord, is being waged over the future of small-scale alternative energy.
The organization leading the fight to lower the price paid to sellers of small amounts of electricity calls itself the New England Ratepayers Association, or NERA. The group operates as a 501(c)(4) “social welfare organization,” which means that it doesn’t have to disclose its members or source of funding.
Ostensibly acting on behalf of ratepayers, particularly low- and middle-income customers, NERA petitioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in hopes of convincing the agency that it, not individual states, should set the prices utilities pay small power producers under the rate structure called net metering. If the group succeeds, the solar power industry says, it will end the expansion of rooftop solar systems and put 1,000 or so New Hampshire residents out of work.
“I can say quite confidently that this would kill most of the work we do,” Dan Weeks of Nashua said of a FERC decision in NERA’s favor. Weeks is director of market development for Revision Energy, an employee-owned company that installs commercial, municipal and residential solar electricity and hot water systems.
States have regulated net metering for decades. NERA contends that the homeowners, nonprofits and small businesses who offset their electrical usage and feed excess power into the local power grid are wholesalers of power and as such should be regulated federally. Here’s why. The retail rate of power sold by New Hampshire utilities is about 19 cents per kilowatt hour. The net metering rate paid to Mom and Pop producers is about 12 cents, the wholesale rate, about 3 cents.
“So Eversource wants to pay me 3 cents for the extra 5 kilowatts of power I send to my neighbor Karen but sell it for 19 cents,” said Weeks, who has solar panels on his home. At wholesale rates, the incentive to install solar panels or remain connected to the utility grid disappears.
NERA’s president is Marc Brown of Newfields. In 2018, according to records on file at the Secretary of State’s Office, Brown joined Gov. Chris Sununu’s brothers Michael and James in forming a nonprofit company called the Ratepayers Legal Defense Fund. Its stated mission is to “support education about legal challenges to public policies that increase costs to utility ratepayers,” which is essentially the same mission as NERA.
NERA’s fight is not to protect the poor. It’s really an effort to protect utilities and preserve the dominance of the fossil fuel industry. The battle is heating up now that alternative sources of energy like solar and wind are poised to replace the old order with forms of power that are kinder to the planet and its inhabitants. The fewer green forms of power that come on line the more polluting fossil fuel power plants, which are predominantly located in poor neighborhoods, will have to run.
Four of the five seats on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission are filled by Trump appointees and one is vacant. A host of environmental groups, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the ratepayer consumer advocates of most states have filed objections to eliminating state control. New Hampshire’s consumer advocate, the emperor of less expensive power to cool ratepayers’ ice cream, said that like Switzerland, he’s staying neutral on the issue. The agency has extended the public comment period before it deliberates from May 14 to June 15.
The state’s congressional delegation, Gov. Sununu and every citizen concerned about climate change should let FERC know what they think of taking away the power of states to regulate Mom and Pop electricity sales.
(Ralph Jimenez of Concord is a member of the Monitor’s editorial board.)