The Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council (EC4) has approved the final 2025 Climate Action Strategy (CAS) and will send it to the General Assembly and the Governor’s office. The final plan falls short of being a strategy. Unfortunately, we had low expectations after reading the draft executive summary.
In 2024, third-party “competitive” electric suppliers increased residential electric rates by $80.7 million, according to data from the Energy Information Administration and Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities.
We are reporting here a continuation of a pattern in which retail electricity suppliers who sign up individual customers greatly overcharge them compared to what the customers would pay if they received supply service from either their utility (Eversource, National Grid, or Unitil) or their municipal aggregation if it was available.
These companies did this by signing up residential customers, often by promising to lower their electric bill, and then charging their customers an average of 2.1 cents more per kilowatt-hour (kWh) than customers would have paid had they stayed on either their utilities’ basic service rate or their community’s municipal aggregation program (if it had one).
Our friends at theBuilding Electrification Accelerator asked us to present information about legislation, House Bill 4744, now working its way through the Massachusetts House of Representatives. This blog is an adaptation of the presentation.
Rhode Island is at a crucial juncture in taking meaningful action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Climate Action Strategy (CAS), which is a plan required of the state under the Act on Climate, is scheduled to be released to the public on Monday, December 15th, and the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory released by the Department of Environmental Management has been updated for 2023. These two reports provide context for where the state’s emissions are and what ought to be done to achieve the 2030 GHG reduction mandate. Prior to the release of the final CAS, the Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council (EC4) – Rhode Island’s interagency organization tasked with coordinating climate change efforts – released a draft executive summary for the Climate Action Strategy which claims that the state will be able to meet the 2030 Act on Climate (AOC) with the current policies RI has on the books, e.g. the Renewable Energy Standard, Advanced Clean Cars II, and Advanced Clean Trucks regulations (currently under litigation), current incentives for electric vehicles and heat pump, etc.
Most of Rhode Island is served by one utility, Rhode Island Energy, and they have a monopoly over the distribution of electricity (poles, wires, meters, billing), but not over the supply of electricity. This leaves residents of Rhode Island with three choices as to who to buy their electricity supply from: “Last Resort” power from the Rhode Island Energy, their city or town through municipal aggregation (if the community has a program), or from a third-party, sometimes called a competitive supplier.
On Monday, those of us who were working to defeat a proposal in the Mass. House of Representatives that would roll back our climate commitments and decimate Mass Save were thrilled to learn that the House decided to postpone action on the bill pending further review by the House Ways and Means Committee.
On Friday, we were disturbed to read in the Commonwealth Beacon that Representative Mark Cusack, Chairman of the Massachusetts House Energy Committee, is contemplating taking two dramatic actions to weaken the state’s fight against climate change.
This summer, we collected data every day from ISO-New England, the nonprofit Independent System Operator responsible for ensuring reliable electricity delivery across the six New England states. We tracked the forecasted high temperature, the forecasted and actual peak load, the time of said peak, the peak price of electricity and its timing, the CO2 emissions at peak, the output of behind the meter (BTM) solar and its timing, and whether or not we sent out a Shave the Peak notification to our subscribers who receive alerts on when and how to reduce electricity use during times of high stress on the grid. Stay tuned to find out how many Shave the Peak alerts we sent out this summer!
It is becoming clear that the cost of maintaining and modernizing our electricity grid is going to require large capital expenditures by our local electric utilities. Financing these investments, while keeping electric rates from rising further, is going to be a challenge.
One policy that could help do this, which has already been used across the country, is utility securitization.
On his first day in office, the president issued an executive order halting the future permitting and leasing of all offshore wind projects. That action alone was damaging—and is currently being challenged by 18 state attorneys general. But since then, the administration has escalated to an all-out assault on offshore wind.
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