
(Newport, RI) – Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) pulls no punches when discussing climate change. That’s only fair- as recent extreme weather events have proven, the environment isn’t much for platitudes.
“When you slap Mother Nature, be very careful. She will slap you back,” warned Senator Whitehouse in his keynote address at the interconnection event GridTECH Connect Forum in Newport, Rhode Island.
Whitehouse, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, warned of a massive forthcoming economic shock related to climate change, which is making storms worse, riskier, and more unpredictable. Insurance companies are leaving regions where risk cannot be priced correctly and once insurance becomes unavailable in an area, mortgages also become unworkable. One crisis cascades into another, and Whitehouse fears we are about to take an “economic punch to the face” akin to the housing collapse of 2008 all over again. This is already happening in Florida, he said, where insurance rates are multiplying and companies are abandoning the state.
Despite the success of the Inflation Reduction Act and ongoing permitting work at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and ISOs, Senator Whitehouse argues we’re not in a good place when it comes to finding a pathway to climate safety. Citing a recent analysis of more than 1,000 projects addressing climate change, Whitehouse told attendees we’ve only got 12 viable options left, and each of those potential solutions overshoots the 1.5 degrees Celsius target we’ve been trying to avoid.
“We are going to have to claw gases out of the atmosphere,” he concluded. Each remaining solution also mandates pricing carbon pollution, a sticky topic for some.
“We’ve been shy about that, anxious about that, misled about that by the fossil fuel industry,” Whitehouse admitted. “We could’ve done it other ways if we started 14 years ago, but we blew those chances, the fossil fuel industry misbehaved, and this is what we’re left with.”
Whitehouse implored the GridTECH audience to get over any reservations about taxing carbon emissions, arguing it’s “the right thing to do.” He pointed out some good news on that front an ocean away, as the U.K. is joining the European Union on its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAN), a carbon tariff Whitehouse hopes to see the U.S. embrace in turn.
“It has been a free subsidy,” he quipped. “But it’s wrong, and at this point it’s lethal.”
Whitehouse also recommended we address clean energy permitting directly, alluding to a bill bouncing around Washington, D.C. right now. He won’t support the legislation unless it includes a reliable net emissions reduction score and an offshore wind component that accelerates the engagement of developers with interest in an affected area. Rhode Island was the first state to get steel into the water and electrons onto the grid via offshore wind generation, thanks in part to “a robust opening process,” which Whitehouse says has not been the case with the federal process.
“We have work to do to improve the offshore wind permitting system,” he said, adding he’d like offshore wind to be put into similar footing from a revenue perspective as offshore oil and gas.
Ultimately, we have to do more. And faster.
“It’s not about polar bears and green jobs and 2050 commitments anymore,” Whitehouse leveled. “It’s about the American economy taking a savage punch to the face because of system collapse due to unpredictability knocking it down.”
“It’s here. It’s now. It’s happening,” he added. “And the only way out that remains is putting a price on carbon pollution.”
Following Whitehouse’s remarks, GridTECH Connect Forum hosted a collection of key regulators in New England for a discussion led by moderator Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School.
Electric load growth (and what we’re going to do about it) headlined the conversation.
“Large load users and big industrial users are starting to shift the paradigm in New York to massive amounts of near-term load growth,” explained Jessica Waldorf, chief of staff and director of policy implementation for the New York State Department of Public Service.
That’s making New York and other states think differently about system planning. Waldorf said NY is always looking for ways to incentivize utilities and shared progress on the state’s “Cost Sharing 2.0,” under which the first interconnector no longer has to bear the upfront cost of system upgrades.
James Van Nostrand, chair of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, told attendees his state is getting into cost recovery incentive mechanisms as a result of the Electric Sector Modernization Plans (ESMPs) investor-owned utilities filed in January.
“We don’t want anything to slow down the transition in Massachusetts,” Van Nostrand said, keying in on the importance of affordability while accommodating load growth.
Marissa Gillett, chair of the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, lauded the opportunity to look around at colleagues in the Northeast and implement similar efforts by design. She said she borrowed heavily from the cost allocation docket in NY and is working on a non-residential one as well.
“One of the great challenges,” shared Philip L. Bartlett II, chairman of the Maine Public Utilities Commission (PUC), when considering load growth “Is when is it going to show up?”
Bartlett knows growth won’t come linearly, but small states like Maine cannot build out the grid ten years early. He said they’re conducting a 100+ stakeholder process to determine priorities for utilities, including which data sets to use.
Gillett lamented constant asymmetry when it comes to access to information, creating a struggle to figure out how to level the playing field for stakeholders in Connecticut. She believes there’s lots of room for innovation as the state works on residential solar tariffs and incentivizing behind-the-meter battery storage.
“These are really challenging times for regulators,” confesses Van Nostrand. Regulators must make sure infrastructure is built to support the clean energy transition but also need to ensure utilities aren’t billing more than they have to. “We have to do our jobs to protect ratepayers,” he added, encouraging ways to incentivize non-wire alternatives (NWAs) and virtual power plants (VPPs) as lower-cost solutions.
Waldorf underscored the importance of New York’s advanced technologies working group. She pointed out it’s more efficient to build a system once than having to rebuild it to accommodate tech and other specifications. She sees distributed system integration plans from utilities as an essential element in maximizing grid efficiency.
Integrating DERs into the system isn’t something utilities have typically done, but utilities need to improve the speed of studies said Bartlett, who wants to see a more stable process instead of huge boom and bust cycles. Gillet questioned whether utilities view interconnecting resources as a core responsibility, and how a utility approaches that question has a lot of downstream effects.
“Data lately shows customers posit that they don’t care what the timeline is, they just want a commitment and to achieve it,” said Gillet.
Van Nostrand recommends aligning utility incentives with DER integration as a means of moving things along faster in Massachusetts. Waldorf expressed how important (albeit difficult) it is to provide regulatory certainty in an uncertain environment.
“We’ve been traditionally economic regulators,” she pointed out. But in more green years, new directives ranging from clean energy policy to resilience have changed the way she and her colleagues need to do their jobs.
“Our regulatory process has to change,” concluded Barlett. “How do we evolve our process to meet this moment?”
Van Nostrand thinks it starts with being more proactive and getting involved in informal processes and working groups to try to make the clean energy transition as inclusive and efficient as possible.
“Our door is always open,” Waldorf offered. “Nobody has the perfect solution for the future. Everyone has to come together.”
Originally published in Renewable Energy World.