The ISO-NE Consumer Liaison Group’s first meeting of the year March 12 featured a discussion on the impact of the Biden administration’s energy policies on New England consumers.
The CLG meets quarterly and serves as a public forum between the RTO and New England consumer organizations and advocates to exchange information about the economic impacts on the region’s bulk power system and wholesale electricity markets.
“There are still battles about natural gas pipelines and other infrastructure, so we’re still very much, as the rest of the country is, in the fossil fuel era,” said David Cash, dean and associate professor at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. “It’s that whole era that the Biden-Harris administration is attempting to move out of.”
Cash said that “any time” New England spends money on imported natural gas, “those are dollars that are leaving the region.” He added that the “volatility of energy costs” and “$20 billion a year on fossil fuel subsidies” also mean consumers’ taxes support a “well established, 100-year-old sector.” He said vulnerable communities bear the economic costs and public health impacts of maintaining the status quo.
“These racial inequities of energy-related health burdens and environmental justice of the current fossil fuel system are intertwined with issues of wealth disparities, education and other social inequities,” Cash said.
President Biden, he noted, laid out “aggressive goals” in an executive order, such as 100% net-zero emissions by 2050 and 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035, plus $2 trillion for clean energy spending on buildings, cars, transportation in addition to wind, solar and battery storage. There is also “a real focus on American union labor and American-made materials for infrastructure.” Environmental justice is “integral to the energy transformation that needs to happen.”
“The term ‘justice’ is used 32 times in this 15-page document,” Cash said. Disadvantaged communities dependent on the fossil fuel economy would receive 40% of the proposed $2 trillion investment.
However, David Springe, executive director of the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates, said his group is “very concerned about cost, and how that cost gets addressed in any given state is subject to state policies.”
“One of their policies they announced was that they want to put in 500,000 [electric vehicle] chargers by 2040, which is a huge amount,” Springe said. “A lot of those chargers are obviously going to affect the distribution-level system, in terms of where those chargers get in, and honestly the Biden administration has been a little unclear about whether they’re going to also include as part of that money, the upstream, make-ready costs for electric vehicles.”
Springe said policies promoting electrification would increase retail prices through ISO-NE’s transmission planning and operations.
“Nothing that [ISO-NE] does is free,” Springe said. “Unfortunately, it all gets passed down to consumers.”