BURLINGTON, Vt. — More than 300 people last week attended the annual Renewable Energy Vermont conference, where state officials, renewable energy advocates and a Vermont congressman described their efforts to combat climate change while calling for even more measures.

Here’s some of what we heard.

Local, State and Federal

REV Executive Director Olivia Campbell Andersen asked state officials what action has had the most impact on their work to transition to a clean energy economy.

Vermont Department of Public Service Commissioner June Tierney highlighted the increase in media coverage of renewable energy, which has helped drive legislative engagement.

“Our legislature is really engaged now, which really makes a difference,” Tierney said. “Kudos to Connecticut and New York for leading. … I’m not so concerned about being in the vanguard, but of bringing people along.

“We have been leaders in Vermont. … When we adopted a renewable energy standard in 2015, it was the finest in its time,” she said. “But the most impactful thing has been the regulator’s mind, and the degree to which the regulator has been open to these changes.”

She said more is demanded of regulators in a small state like Vermont, where the legislature has invested the responsibilities for planning, envisioning and economic regulation in the DPS.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said, “Tax credits make a huge difference at the beginning of a technology,” adding that the House of Representatives “may be able to do something on the electric vehicle front by extending the tax credit.”

Welch is a member of the bipartisan Advanced Energy Storage Caucus in Congress and co-sponsor of the Energy Storage Tax Incentive and Deployment Act (H.R. 2096), which would establish an investment tax credit for energy storage.

The caucus is focused on integrating renewables into the grid, increasing electrification of heating and transportation, and improving energy efficiency, he said.

“Whether the existing investment [EV] tax credits we have now will be extended or not, we don’t know yet, but my experience has been that there is hugely bipartisan support to extend,” Welch said. “The question is always when and how that’s going to get done, and it usually gets done at the very end of the session, when there’s an overall omnibus budget bill and tax agreement. … My prediction is they will be extended.”

Vermont Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman said, “The Trump tax cuts supposedly offered about $500 million to Vermonters in savings in their federal taxes, but over $300 million is going to the top 10% of Vermonters. My guess is that most of that $300 million is probably not going to be spent in Vermont; it’s going to be sent to Wall Street.”

Zuckerman proposed instead to take half that money from wealthy residents and spend it on in-state programs such as weatherizing houses or expanding broadband access in rural areas.

“We do not have time for slow, incremental change,” Zuckerman said.

Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger proposed imposing a statewide carbon pollution fee in Vermont to help cut carbon dioxide emissions 37% by 2040, calling it “perhaps the most critical thing we can do to address the climate emergency, and that would create a transformative tailwind that pushes into all of our other efforts to decrease carbon emissions.”

Weinberger said the carbon charge would not be a tax, but a “revenue-neutral carbon fee,” as “money collected by the state would be rebated back to Vermont households and businesses and keep those resources working in the economy.”

Regional Reflections

Peter Olmsted, chief of staff at the New York Energy Research and Development Authority, said his state started its clean energy revolution a decade ago as it sought “to understand how the utility business model was going to evolve and respond to the needs of consumers, the need to respond to climate.”

However, understanding the necessary changes to regulators’ thinking has been “the bigger challenge for us, whether it be a matter of prioritization of issues, capacity and resources, [or] an asymmetry of information between the regulator and the regulated,” Olmsted said.

Regarding reliability, Olmsted said that “80% of our transmission lines were put in service before 1980, and over the next 10 years, the investment to upgrade those is going to be on the order of $30 billion.”

New York needs to reconcile aging infrastructure with plans to develop “a significant amount of renewable energy and clean energy resources on the grid simultaneously… so energy storage we believe is a key ingredient in that,” he said.

The interconnection “queue for NYISO has just exploded,” Olmsted said. “We were at 200 MW in the queue in 2018 when we commenced our energy storage roadmap process, and we’re now seeing upwards of 5,500 MW in our queue, so we know the demand and the interest is there.”

Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority Chair Marissa Gillett said her agency had just a week earlier initiated a proceeding on grid modernization. (See Overheard at the 163rd NE Electricity Roundtable.)

“We’re trying to enable an economy-wide decarbonization, which mirrors the executive order seeking 100% zero carbon by 2040,” Gillett said. “We’re also working to make a resilient, reliable and secure electricity commodity supporting growth in the green economy.”

The cornerstone of the state’s grid modernization proceeding is affordability, not only for residential customers, but also for commercial and industrial ones, she said.

RMI View

Jules Kortenhorst, CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, said, “We were a think tank, but the time for thinking is over. We are facing a climate crisis and the clock is ticking.

“The accelerating pace of an energy transition may become the wind in our sails, just when we need it most,” he said in comparing two contrasting views of the transition, one that thinks it best to go slow and the other that says the planet is on an exponential curve for warming.

Kortenhorst finds hope in the seemingly most mundane area of efficiency: “boring old building codes.”

“If we don’t get our buildings to near net-zero emissions, there is no way we’re going to reach our climate goals,” he said.

He also highlighted that solar is in many places of the world already the most cost-effective way to produce electricity, and 90% of natural gas projects in the country are now beaten economically by wind and solar.

“And it’s a global trend … in the buildup to the Paris [Agreement on climate change], India said it would build half coal and half solar. … Now they see the economic benefit of leapfrogging,” he said.

“As we are starting to deploy batteries to stabilize our electricity grid and to make solar available at the end of the afternoon when the sun is setting, we are driving down the cost such that electric cars become cheaper, at which point Ford, GM and Chrysler see that the future is electric, which drives costs down even further, which makes it easier to store the solar energy in batteries for our grid,” Kortenhorst said.

“These feedback loops are starting to build on themselves, and we see a dramatic shift in the way in which people are starting to understand that if we weave a complex of web of renewable energy solutions, we will be able to shift to a low-carbon energy future much faster and much more cost-effectively.”

Diverse Experience

Vermont imports four times as much energy as it produces within the state, and the largest utility, Green Mountain Power, “is highly dependent on imports from [Canadian] hydropower and nuclear power from Millstone and Seabrook, [which] are long distances away, as is most of the hydropower,” said Kim Hayden, who leads the energy and environment practice group at the Burlington-based law firm of Paul Frank + Collins.

“Seabrook and Millstone are among the two most vulnerable nuclear units in the country subject to inundation, based on [studies that took] a lot of time and effort by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after Fukushima,” Hayden said. She noted that one study resulted in NRC adopting a rule (84 FR 39684) requiring owners of coastal plants to modify their infrastructure “to withstand the levels that are now expected from storm surges and severe inundation.”

Hayden called for better planning, such as fixing the transmission constraints associated with the Sheffield-Highgate Export Interface (SHEI), which prevents the development of new renewable energy resources in northern Vermont. She also said the state should increase its renewable energy standard.

Rebecca Towne, CEO of the Vermont Electric Cooperative, agreed with Hayden’s concerns about long-distance imports, saying that utilities would ideally like to pair load and generation in the same location — and hopefully synchronize the periods of demand and output.

“Vermont is not a very big state, and so it doesn’t take a very far transmission line to get out of state … and anything that goes by transmission line, by nature, whether it’s in-state or out-of-state, is not paired generation and load,” Towne said.

“So the SHEI challenge is too much renewable generation in the northern part of Vermont, versus the load,” she said. “The problem we run into is the location and timing of all that generation and the load is mismatched. The real way to fix that is to go with more transmission lines, but that doesn’t really make any sense, mostly because our load is going down.”

Storage has the unique characteristic of being either load or generation, depending on when it’s needed, said Chris McKay, director of sales for battery energy storage solutions at WEG Electric in Barre, Vt.

“That ultimate dial or control is something you can do with a battery that the utilities and other planners are trying to create through other means, with controllable loads and dispatchable generation,” McKay said.

— Michael Kuser