A drop in anticipated funding will significantly alter New Hampshire utilities’ plans for their large commercial and industrial energy efficiency programs.

Liberty Utilities, Unitil (NYSE:UTL), Eversource Energy (NYSE:ES) and New Hampshire Electric Cooperative filed a revised 2022-23 energy efficiency program plan on Tuesday to accommodate a 47.5% cut in their originally proposed $287 million budget for the period. The utilities’ large business C&I budget had the biggest decrease across the program offerings, dropping from $88.3 million to $29.4 million.

The NHSaves EE program went into lockdown last November after the Public Utilities Commission rejected the utilities’ proposed 2021-2023 Triennial Energy Efficiency Plan, which would have more than doubled spending. (See NH EE Plan Approaches 2nd Year Without Funding Certainty.)

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu restored funding certainty on Feb. 24 by signing HB549, a bill that establishes funding rules for NHSaves. For this year, the law caps funding at the 2020 level and allows annual increases based on inflation. In addition, the law directed the utilities to file a revised 2022-23 program plan at the new funding level by Tuesday.

The utilities estimated in their revised plan that the large C&I sector program will serve 2,595 customers in 2022-23, which is 2,273 fewer than they expected to serve for the same period under their 2021-23 plan in September 2020. Annual kWh savings for the sector program will decrease by 136.1 million to 56.5 million, while annual Btu savings will decrease by 110.7 million to 135.3.

Offerings for the large C&I segment, which includes energy users with an average annual demand of at least 200 kW or 4,000 Therms, are pared down in the revised plan to incentives only for EE projects. Offerings under the original plan proposal included:

• expanding retrofit services;
• developing segment-specific services, such as chiller optimization for manufacturing;
• exploring opportunities to integrate combined heat and power systems with energy-efficient projects; and
• pursuing a codes and standards initiative.

Appeals

In its Nov. 12 order, the PUC said the utilities’ triennial plan was a burden on ratepayers and stood behind its decision to deny the plan, despite requests for rehearing and appeals to the state’s courts.

Legislators moved quickly at the start of the year to send HB549 to the governor, so the PUC is no longer able to change the basic components of the EE program and how it is funded. (See Legislators Step into NH’s Battle over EE Program.)

Passage of the bill means utilities are beginning to reopen programs they had suspended due to funding concerns, Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy NH (CENH), told NetZero Insider.

But the new law does not settle all outstanding issues from the PUC’s order, he said.

On Feb. 7, CENH and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) filed an appeal of the order with the New Hampshire Supreme Court after a Superior Court judge denied an earlier request for a temporary injunction.

The appeal says the commission did not follow the law in its order when, as the petitioners claimed, it essentially “dismantled” the Energy Efficiency Resource Standard, a framework the commission established in 2016. Under the EERS, programs are based on annual savings of kWh or Btu, and a budget is set to meet those annual savings.

Instead of focusing first on savings targets, the PUC’s order focused “solely” on rates and program budget, which “signaled a sharp departure” from the EERS, the appeal said. And the commission, the appeal claimed, failed to give stakeholders a chance to comment on that departure from the standing framework.

“What [HB549] does not do, that a repeal of the PUC’s order would, is re-establish the [EERS] policy framework,” Evans-Brown said. “There’s a symbolic policy discussion that can happen legally over whether the PUC had the right to dismantle the framework without telling anybody that’s what they were planning on doing.”

The state’s utilities and the nonprofit Listen Community Services each filed separate Supreme Court appeals in early February that are substantively similar to the CENH-CLF appeal.

On Feb. 10, the commission reached a settlement with the Office of the Consumer Advocate, which had asked the Supreme Court to stay the commission’s November order. Under the agreement, the OCA said it would withdraw its request and the commission reverted current EE program rates to the 2020 level, which is also what HB549 does.

The new law, however, takes the additional step of tying annual increases to inflation.