State House leaders unveiled their version of climate legislation on Tuesday, finding common ground with the State Senate on the need to speed up the siting of clean energy infrastructure but taking a very different approach on future procurements, the natural gas industry, and the competitive electricity supplier market.
Rep. Jeffrey Roy of Franklin, the House chair of the Legislature’s Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy Committee, said there are relatively minor differences on clean energy siting reform between the bill the House will take up on Wednesday and the bill approved previously by the Senate.
“We tried to stay on the same page,” he said.
But in other key areas the bills differ quite dramatically, which could complicate efforts to reach a deal between the House and Senate before the legislative session ends on July 31. Less than two weeks remain.
One major difference is how clean energy will be procured going forward. The Senate bill incorporates a Healey administration proposal that would give the governor near-total control over when and how procurements are done and removing the Legislature and the state’s utilities from the process. The goal is to speed up the procurement process and the purchase of clean energy to combat climate change.
The Senate proposal would also do away with the practice of negotiating 20-year contracts directly with clean energy developers. Instead, the state would purchase a project’s clean energy attributes but the electricity itself would be sold through existing wholesale markets, putting offshore wind more on a par with other forms of energy.
By contrast, the House bill hews very closely to what offshore wind developers say they would prefer. It retains the existing procurement system and even proposes extending the length of contracts from 20 to 30 years, giving developers the certainty they say they need to strike deals with investors.
Roy said he did not favor moving ahead with the Healey administration proposal because it didn’t go through the legislative hearing process, which would have given stakeholders the opportunity to weigh in. Instead, his bill would direct the Department of Energy Resources to explore new ways of procuring clean energy that could be acted on in the future.
Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association, initially raised concerns about the Senate’s approach when its bill was first released, but he was won over after meeting with Healey administration officials, who agreed to some language changes.
On Tuesday, Dolan said he strongly opposes the House’s approach, particularly the decision to allow 30-year contracts. “This provision doubles down on a long-term contract regime that has seen delays, followed by failures, on top of higher-than-expected costs,” he said in a statement. “The Healey-Driscoll Administration itself has acknowledged that long-term contracts for energy are an inefficient and costly way to meet clean energy goals and that it would be better to find a market-based, regional structure moving forward.”
Dolan said his organization and the region’s power grid operator both agree.
Sen. Michael Barrett, the Senate chair of the Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy Committee, said his major concern about the House bill is that it doesn’t reduce costs in any significant way for consumers who are being encouraged to rely more and more on clean electricity that will not come cheap. Barrett said one way the Senate bill tried to offer savings to consumers was by giving regulators the power to scale back natural gas infrastructure wherever possible.
Roy said he does not favor that approach, which he worries will actually drive up consumer costs.
As expected, the House bill also doesn’t adopt the Senate’s call for doing away with the competitive retail electricity supply industry. The Senate, taking its cue from Gov. Maura Healey and Attorney General Andrea Campbell, proposed shutting down the industry because of a pattern of bad behavior by many of the companies.
“We do not want to shut the market down,” Roy said. “We are open to making a change in the market.”
The House bill also doesn’t adopt a Senate proposal to expand the reach of the bottle deposit law and raise the deposit from 5 cents to 10 cents.
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
