Vermont Tiger

Danger Ahead?

by Art Woolf

 VPR and VTDigger report that a bill in the legislature would simplify the registration process that small  residential electricity providers need to go through.  Under the "net metering" law a wealthy Vermonter who puts a solar electric array on her home gets paid for any excess electricity she produces and doesn't use. 

Why do I say "a wealthy Vermonter"?  According to Renewable Energy Vermont, a 5 kw system will cost $30,000, although, and I will quote directly

With financing, the Incentive Rebate, and the Federal Tax Credit, this system can be as low as $18,375.

But wait. There's more!

After the system is paid off, your electricity will be 90-100% free!

Of course, they don't tell you when that will be.  I won't get into the math here, but we're talking about a long time until we get to free.

Even with a price "as low as $18,375" I don't think too many low or even moderate income Vermonters will buy them.   Putting solar panels on your roof is not a good way to get rich, but if people want to put them on their house, fine.  

It's that $12,000 subsidy that is the problem, and an even bigger problem is the price that utilities pay for the electricity they buy from net metering.

On Appeal

Vermont spent more than $200,000 on the losing end of a lawsuit brought by Entergy Corp. to keep the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant open, and is still weighing whether to appeal the decision in federal court ...
“I'm disappointed and surprised, and I thought that both legally and factually we had the evidence and arguments in front of the court to have the case come out differently,” Attorney General William] Sorrell said.
Sorrell said he has been talking with Gov. Peter Shumlin, a fellow Democrat who has led the opposition to Vermont Yankee, and to other state officials about whether Vermont should appeal.
    John Gregg, Valley News

There is a lot of speculation about where the feud between the state and Vermont Yankee will go from here.  This is the best appraisal yet.

Real and Rate-Friendly

that's the kind of energy plan Vermont needs 

by Bruce Lisman
 
The state’s renewable power plan is filled with contradictions and unknowns.  Like the proposed health care reform, it has no cost framework, no clear understanding of consequences, nor even a firm grasp on the problem it would “solve”.  As such it threatens all Vermonters’ economic prosperity.
 
Campaign for Vermont supports renewable power and energy innovation because enriching unfriendly countries is bad policy, and fossil-fuel emissions are dangerous.  Vermont and its citizens require energy reliability and affordability.  Vermont needs more information.  In a nutshell, here’s what we know about renewables right now: who pays?  We do.  But how much will it cost and how reliable will it be?  We don’t know.
 
Campaign for Vermont believes our state needs an electricity plan without empty sloganeering.  Politicians say building a 90% renewable energy future will create jobs, save the climate and foster energy independence.  It all sounds good.  And it is, in the abstract, until we learn about the cost and reliability.  For example, most renewable power sources are intermittent; that is they don’t operate reliably all the time.  But citizens and job creators need affordable, on-demand “base load” electricity every minute of every day.  Furthermore, Vermont state law obliges utilities to provide customers with low-cost, reliable power.

“Scribblings” An Occasional Newsletter from the Legislature

about those court cases and legal fees ... told you so

by Tom Koch                                                      

I hate to say “I told you so,” but….  
 
In 1997, the legislature passed a new campaign finance law, severely restricting both contributions and expenditures permitted in Vermont elections.  The restrictions were, for most offices, totally unreasonable, without any inflation factor for future years, and in clear and absolute contravention of the 1976 United States Supreme Court decision in the case of Buckley vs. Valeo, which held that for the exercise of First Amendment rights in this day and age, it is often necessary to spend substantial amounts of money, and that many campaign finance restrictions, therefore, were unconstitutional.
 
During the debate, I quoted the Buckley case, and the answer I received was that the committee was well aware of that case, but that it was 20 years old, and the committee thought it was time for the Supreme Court to reconsider the case, and the bill before us was designed to set up the necessary challenge to Buckley.  Obviously, the committee was totally unaware that in constitutional law, 20 years is like yesterday, and there was absolutely no reason to believe that the Supreme Court was inclined to change its mind.
 
Eventually, the bill passed, with only 17 negative votes in the House, mine being one of them.  The court challenge eventually came, it went up to the Supreme Court, Vermont lost, and the Court threw out most of Vermont’s 1997 law.  No surprise there.  But in certain federal cases, including cases based on constitutional claims, the loser often has to pay the attorney fees of the winners.  In this case, the state paid about $1.5 million—a rather poor use of the taxpayers’ money for what was a thoroughly improvident escapade in the first place.
 
One would think we would have learned our lesson.  Don’t be silly.
 
In the February 1, 2008 issue of “Scribblings,” I wrote:

Decision

more like a TKO, actually

A ruling yesterday by U.S. District Court Judge Garvan Murtha allows the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant to continue operating past the looming shutdown date imposed by the Vermont legislature.  Only the Senate actually voted but by not voting, House members were able to accomplish the objective of shutting down the plant without putting individual members on record. 

The ruling is the latest in a string of losses Vermont has suffered in the federal courts.  Campaign finance, data mining, and, now, this.  One clear lesson from yesterday's defeat is that the Vermont Attorney General's office should quit trying to punch above its weight.

A couple of others, taken from the judge's ruling and reformulated into layman's language by the indispensable  Meredith Angwin

1. You [Vermont] cannot unilaterally change the terms of the 2002 contract between the State and Vermont Yankee.

2. You cannot use the spent nuclear fuel to shakedown Vermont Yankee.

3. You cannot extort ruinously low wholesale rates for Vermont Yankee power.

600 Jobs

by Geoffrey Norman

Since the flooding of state office buildings in Waterbury by Hurricane Irene, people in that town have been worried that the jobs would not be coming back.  Not all of them, anyway.  And Governor Shumlin has validated those concerns with talk of relocating certain elements of the state workforce to Barre and Montpelier.   The figure one hears is 400 jobs.  The reaction in Waterbury has, understandably, been one of anguish.  That is a hard hit to the town’s economy, and businesses there will feel the pain.

The governor, one assumes, based his decision on what he thought best for the state and will do what he can to ameliorate the pain.  And in truth, Waterbury’s loss will be Barre’s gain.   It is a bad news/good news story.  And time will do its usual job of mending things. 

Meanwhile, in the case of more than 600 jobs, further south, the state is waging an energetic campaign not merely to relocate them but to eliminate them. 

Cars

A survey of 200 executives by KPMG Consulting on the eve of the [Detroit Auto] show found that electrics' costs would prevent them from gaining more than a small percentage of vehicle sales by 2025. Indeed, 2011 saw a continued decline in hybrid vehicle sales as a percentage of the market despite a record number of offerings. Most conspicuously, the administration's pet electric plugin Chevy Volt has fallen short of its 10,000 unit sales goal despite lavish public subsidies.
    Henry Payne, The MichiganView

Some Americans love automobiles and some Americans hate them.  Unfortunately, the political class is full of haters.  As a general proposition, the political class loves mass transit and hates hot, aggressive, fun-to-drive automobiles.  Too libertarian or something. 

The usual rules of political hypocrisy apply here, of course.  So we get high ranking members of the political class being chauffeured around in gas-guzzling SUVs and, even, owning some not very PC wheels in their own, private fleets.  But in public, they toe the party line which is that the internal combustion engine is a threat to mankind and must be replaced by something the average American doesn't want and/or can't afford.

One American is fighting back in the approved fashion.  That is ... by suing the maker (Honda) of a sanctioned, green, hybrid automobile that doesn't deliver on its promised 50 mpg.  Her case is being heard in small claims court which means the judgement will be relatively small.  A mere $10,000.  But, as she says, "... they have 200,000 of these cars out there."

You can do the math.

Anyone who has owned – or even driven – a hybrid will understand the plaintiff's frustrations:

    To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of any hybrid -- and I have driven all of them, extensively -- you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator as if it were a Fabergé egg. This is enervating if you have any consideration for your fellow drivers -- whose progress you will be constantly impeding -- as well as downright dangerous for you. Merge lanes become suicide lanes; semis loom large in the rearview; you can feel the Hate all around you. So, you give it some pedal -- and poof! -- there goes your 50 MPG.
    There are also hills.
    Hybrids work best on a perfectly horizontal plane. Once rolling, it takes not much power to keep on rolling -- and many hybrids can actually shut down the gas engine side of their hybrid powertrain entirely as you coast along.
But alas, the world is not -- usually -- flat.
    Eric Peters

Not, certainly, in Vermont.  But there are people working on it.

Transportation requires a series of steps so that we can reach a long-term goal of the electrification of our transportation system. This can only occur if we are also increasing our renewable electricity supply, and it needs to occur in tandem with smart grid.
                                                                                                                 Gabrielle Stebbins, executive director of Renewable Energy Vermont, in the Freeps.

That day is a long way off.  And with the utilities being mandated to buy power from boutique wind operations while turning up their noses at the reliable, affordable stuff available from Vermont Yankee, driving electrics will be more expensive than necessary.  

Think of it as a sin tax, like the one you pay on tobacco.  In this case, for the sin of driving.  

 

 

Good News for the New Year

by Tom Evslin

The ethanol $.45/gallon tax subsidy is gone! Happy New Year. This could be a small opening wedge for both good energy and good fiscal policy. Bipartisan inaction (a technique which Congress has mastered) let the 30 year old credit for corny ethanol, which cost us taxpayers $6 billion last year, expire with the end of 2011. This brave inaction was taken BEFORE the Iowa caucuses! BTW, this is a healthy recognition that a targeted tax break is every bit as much a subsidy as a government check.

At the same time the $.54/gallon tariff on imported ethanol was also allowed to expire, and so cheaper ethanol made from Brazilian sugar cane will set a price limit on what American producers of corny ethanol can sell their product for. This competition matters because Congress did NOT eliminate that requirement that refiners add ethanol to our gasoline and diesel supplies. We are still going to buy the stuff whether we like it or not.

Freezing to Death?

it's an outrage

by Geoffrey Norman

As temperatures in Vermont dropped into single digits last week, Jack Hoffman wrote on the Public Assets Institute’s blog that “Even if President Obama and some members of Congress don’t get it, Gov. Peter Shumlin understands that people can freeze to death in the winter if they don’t have heat.”

This blast was prompted by the governor’s announcement that his administration would provide some $6 million in funding to supplement what the state would be receiving from the federal government under LIHEAP (Low Income Heating and Energy Assistance Program).  Last year, the state received $27.5 million.  Under the Obama administration’s proposed 2012 budget, that figure would have dropped to $11 million.  Congress raised that to $19.5 million.  Still, a cut to the state of Vermont of some $8 million, which the state will now be partially covering.

Fading

  the economics of solar energy

Although global demand for solar power is still growing — about 8% more solar panels will be installed this year compared with 2010 — bankruptcies, plummeting stock prices and crushing debt loads are calling into question the viability of the solar energy industry that since the 1970s has been counted on to advance the world into a new energy age.
    Hugh Pickens on Slashdot

BP Solar, the alternative energy subsidiary of the oil industry giant which received a $7.5 million Department of Energy grant only four years ago, announced Tuesday it would exit the solar business.
    NLPC