Senate President Stanley Rosenberg said Friday that he doesn’t favor any legislative provision imposing a tariff on electricity customers to pay for building gas pipelines.
One day after the state Supreme Judicial Court heard arguments on whether to allow a Department of Public Utilities order for such a tariff to help electric utilities invest in natural gas infrastructure in the state, Rosenberg told editors at the Greenfield Recorder Friday that he favors an emphasis on renewable energy and conservation in the state. The Recorder is a sister paper of the Gazette.
Rosenberg echoed comments made in a letter from Rep. Stephen Kulik, D-Worthington, to House Speaker Robert DeLeo and signed by 97 of the state’s 140 House members urging that such a tariff not be part of a planned energy package. Rosenberg said he agreed it would be a bad idea.
The idea was first broached by the Baker administration to pay for infrastructure projects like the proposed Northeast Energy Direct pipeline through Franklin County, which was suspended last month because of insufficient demand.
“We have a long-serving system of how we pay for our utilities and our distribution and our supply,” said Rosenberg. “We shouldn’t be changing that for a project or two projects, as has been proposed. No. We don’t need to pay for it a different way. They’ve been building transmissions lines how we’ve been paying for those. We don’t need to pay for it another way. There’s no argument that’s been presented other than ‘It’s too expensive and we don’t want to pay for it, we want somebody else to take the risk.’”
Still, as the Senate prepares to work on a comprehensive energy bill over the next three months, Rosenberg said, the state still needs to bring its high energy costs down, particularly with 8,400 megawatts of fossil fuel-burning generators coming offline over the next five years, in addition to the planned shutdown of the Pilgrim nuclear plant, he said.
“We are already making progress,” said Rosenberg. “Our energy growth and demand is already being met by conservation and solar right now. Our first job is trying to replace that (generation tapering off), even as we’re trying to grow the green energy supply chain. It’s all doable, but it’s sophisticated, it takes some work and it takes a lot of focus.”
Offshore wind from Maine and hydro from Quebec are part of the solution, along with conservation that can help “dramatically change” the state’s energy use, climate-change impact and sources of supply over the next 15 or 30 years. These initiatives would cut dependence on fossil fuels and drastically reduce the 90 percent of energy money that now goes out of state, Rosenberg said.
“I’m not going to say that there aren’t going to be any more pipelines,” said Rosenberg. “But I will say that there’s a vision that minimizes the chance there’d be more pipelines, and the chance that you need more pipelines.”
The Amherst Democrat also said that while the NED project has merely been suspended, with further notification to the Federal Energy regulatory Commission due May 26 pending negotiations developer Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. is now making with its contractors, “I’m having trouble seeing how it could come back” even though opponents have said they want to put “the last nail in the coffin” by calling on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to dismiss and deny “with prejudice” the application for the project that would have passed through eight Franklin county towns.
“The body’s in the coffin, and they want to put another nail in the coffin to make sure,” Rosenberg said. “But I’m having trouble seeing another scenario where it could come back.”
Given tremendous opposition by citizens, towns and environmental groups, as well as a state constitutional provision making nearly impossible the taking of conservation land for another purpose and “the project collapsing of its own weight because of the economics of it,” Rosenberg said, “that was just a huge mountain to climb with all of that on your back. And none of that’s going away.”
Meanwhile, Rosenberg and Kulik have met with Berkshire Gas Co. officials to discuss how the company can lift its self-imposed moratorium on accepting new customers in Franklin and Hampshire counties until NED was to be built.
None of the options the company was given for augmenting its supply are cheap or easy, Rosenberg said, “but all of them are more doable than the pipeline.”
Rosenberg said he plans to meet with the company officials again, and has met with the state Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs and the DPU on ways of working with Berkshire Gas to lift the moratorium.
There’s no statutory provision for a gas company to serve all its potential customers, he said, but the moratorium is on adding new customers.
“We’re going to keep working with them” on alternatives like trucking in liquefied natural gas or expanding its Whately LNG facility, where only two of five allowed tanks have been installed, he said.
“It’s compromising economic development, it’s compromising development and improvement of housing, and these are problems we need to be addressing together,” said Rosenberg.
The company is scheduled to update its five-year forecast with the DPU in August, he said.