New Jersey last week announced it allocated $70 million in Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) funds to purchase 156 electric school buses, garbage trucks, shuttles and other heavy-duty vehicles, and began an outreach campaign to solicit public input on how to spend future funds.

The Board of Public Utilities (BPU), Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Economic Development Authority (EDA) on Tuesday held the first of four hearings in which agency officials laid out broad spending objectives and gave stakeholders an opportunity to voice concerns and offer ideas for future spending priorities.

The first hearing, an 80-minute online session with about a dozen speakers, was focused on clean transportation, which the latest figures from the state show accounts for 37% of its greenhouse gas emissions.

“Transportation was a major topic and our first strategic funding plan,” Helaine Barr, chief of the DEP’s Bureau of Climate Change and Clean Energy, told the meeting. “And I think that the state would like to carry that through into the next one as well.”

Future meetings will cover the broad range of clean energy topics (April 11); buildings, grid and refrigerants (April 13); and carbon sequestration (April 18).

Questions raised at the hearing included how school districts could access RGGI funding; whether the state had considered projects to reduce the reliance on private vehicles (not so far, but the suggestion could be considered, a state official said); and whether there were plans to use RGGI funds to help drivers in disadvantaged communities repair personal vehicles that failed the state’s emissions test.

Peg Hanna, assistant director of air quality monitoring and mobile sources at the DEP, said the state has not  considered a project such as the last one.

“I suppose we could consider it. I’m not sure we’re going to get a big return on investment,” she said. “Our greenhouse gas-reduction goals are so ambitious that focusing on decarbonization or electrification is really our first priority.”

Touting Transportation Initiatives

The state’s announced transportation investment comes as it seeks to jumpstart the embrace of electric vehicles of all types, and the installation of vehicle charging stations statewide, through a growing portfolio of programs.

The strategies include offering incentives for EV purchases, incentives for charger installation, and vouchers for the purchase of light- and heavy-duty trucks, among the largest sources of emissions. The state legislature last year approved the creation of a $45 million program that would create a pilot project to test electric school buses in 18 school districts. That’s expected to be launched in the next couple of months, Hanna told the hearing.

The $70 million will fund the purchase of 114 school buses, eight garbage and dump trucks, 26 shuttle and transit buses, and four forklifts. The vehicles will be put to work in 20 overburdened communities across the state.

Some of the funds also will also go to four projects to bring electric ride-sharing programs to “communities that lack access to reliable transportation,” according to the state. The project will be executed with Via Transportation and Blink Mobility, both of which operate ridesharing apps; Envoy America, which schedules transportation for senior citizens; and Zipcar, the car-sharing company.

Those spending decisions were made in the first phase of RGGI expenditures, which began in 2020. But the broad principles are the same, now and into the future, said Bob Kettig, assistant director of climate change, clean energy and sustainability element for the DEP. (See NJ RGGI Spending Focuses on Transportation.)

“A key tenant of what we are stakeholdering today, and [the] mandate to be good stewards of the investment of these proceeds, is that these investments have to show this reduction in energy consumption, this reduction in greenhouse gas emissions relative to the cost of the project or program,” he said.

Shaping Future Spending

Gov. Phil Murphy (D) directed the state to return to RGGI in January 2018, after his predecessor, Chris Christie (R), pulled it out in 2012.

Since returning, the state has received about $372 million in auction funds and spent more than $240 million, leaving about $100 million not allocated, according to state officials.

The 153 projects funded include the incentivization of the purchase of 497 EVs, the planting of 17,000 trees and the restoration of 56 acres of forest, Kettig said. The money also will fund the restoration of 155 acres of wetlands. Combined the projects have avoided the emission of about 208,000 tons of carbon dioxide, he said.

The state’s RGGI scoping document released Tuesday sets out three broad funding priorities for potential initiatives from 2023 to 2025:

• providing meaningful benefits to communities most affected by pollution and climate change;
• sparking the electrification of different modes of transportation; and
• launching the beneficial electrification and decarbonization of the residential and commercial buildings sector.

Kettig said the state is “teeing up” five broad initiatives in the next phase of RGGI fund investment. They include one to “advance healthy homes and incentivize a stronger electric grid” and another to “catalyze clean and equitable transportation.” A third seeks to strengthen the state’s forests, and a fourth promotes “blue carbon”: the capture of carbon in the ocean and coastal ecosystems by restoring marshes and other projects. The fifth initiative is to reduce the use of “highly warming refrigerants,” he said.

While transportation is the largest source of carbon emissions, electric generation accounts for 21% of state GHG emissions, and residential, commercial and industrial buildings together account for 34%.

Doug O’Malley, director for Environment New Jersey, questioned whether the state tracks how other states spend their money and whether New Jersey is “borrowing some of their best ideas.”

Officials said the state closely watches what other states do and has set up work groups to evaluate their strategies and projects.

Kettig said that although the 12 states that participate in RGGI have common policy goals, including greenhouse gas reduction, they each have their own regulatory framework that guides their investments.

“The individual funding decisions are totally within the purview of the individual states under their own policy and their own their own legal processes,” he said.