Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: Rick, my house.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Right, welcome back everybody to House Energy and Digital Infrastructure. It is Tuesday, January 27, and we are here with the Department of Public Service to go over the annual energy report. So I'm representative Kathleen James from Bennington 4 District.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Scott Campbell from St. Johnsbury.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Richard Bailey from La Jolla too.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Chris Morrow in the Windsor, Bennington. Michael Southworth, Caledonia to Christopher Howland, Rutland Pour.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Dara Torre, Washington Post. Graham Kleppner, president of Arlington. Laura Sibilia, Windham too.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great. And in the room.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Dana Lynn Perry with Newgrastard. Great. John Bram from Monarch Circle Data Fire. Matt McMahon with End of Horse.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Super. For the record.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I'm TJ Poor. I'm the director of regulated utility planning at the Public Service Department.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Welcome back.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's almost a month, and you haven't had me

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: I know. So What's wrong? Yeah.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Thank you for having me to talk about the annual energy report. So you all have a copy in front of you, and copy was provided today to Alex here, the your your the assistant. It is only slightly different from the annual energy report that was filed. There's one additional slide that I thought would be useful for you. And I pulled some things to the front in order to cover here in this committee meeting today. There is, like, 95 pages, slides here, graphics, and information. We're not gonna be able to get through it all today. So what I thought we would do, we structured the report this year with some key insights from the energy picture over the last year and identifying those and the data that supports those key insights and that we could go over those and talk about them. We do have some policy recommendations that are articulated, clearly in the in the first section here. I dropped those down to the end of today's presentation. So that just, logistically, we'll go over the key insights and then talk about the policy recommendations after. Really, today, the intent or what I've come to present is to just really provide you a lot of information here for form the basis of the rest of the conversations this year. We will, you know, talk briefly about the policy recommendations if there's time, but really, I think those come in a different in the next conversation as they come up if that works for you, Jared, if accurately reflects our email exchange.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: I think that was the plan.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yes. Great. Okay. Thank you. I will share my share the screen here so everybody can follow along.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: K. Great.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: So, we'll skip past the table of contents, but really as an introduction here, the annual energy report is really flows from the comprehensive energy plan. So every six years, the last one being in January 2022, we publish a comprehensive energy plan. And the annual energy report is a requirement in, February that we up update every year on progress towards our comprehensive energy plan goals and and various different updates on, for example, renewable energy standard or or net metering or different policies and programs that we put in place pursuant to energy plan regulations. Just as a really brief reminder, I know all of you know this, but our energy plan has goals of 90% renewable across all sectors by 2050. And it had a couple of themes this the last time we published it of, equity, ensuring full, fair, and timely participation in, in processes and developing policy, but really that, both the benefits and the burdens of our energy policies are equitably distributed. And then also grid evolution, recognizing that we're at a time of really great change in our electric grid, and they need to evolve both the resources that we look at for our options and both front of the meter and behind the meter, flexible resources and, ensuring reliability and resilience giving our change in climate. So I I really wanna just dive right into some key insights, and we'll we'll start here with an overview of them, and then I'll go what kind of one by one over them. First the first and the first insight is, something that you've probably been hearing and feeling in your own electric bills is that Vermont's electric rates are increasing really quickly. Dozens of rate cases over the last few years, and our electricity cost burden is is going up. I'll talk a little bit about what is, what is driving those, increases and how we fare compared to the rest of the region and the country. Weatherization progress continues, but we feel like it it's kind of on a slow and steady pace. We have opportunities for more efficient delivery. Federal funding is really uncertain at this time. We saw that 2025 had a lot of federal funding disruption, affected current programs, expectation of future programs, and was a big change from the previous several years.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Our

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: in state near term clean energy market remains really strong. We have a lot of renewable energy being cited and proposed. We have a lot of storage development in the in New England, and we are number one in the nation in clean energy jobs for capital. Can I ask

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: you a question about that? Yes. When when you say market, you mean development? The development of new generation? Is that is

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: that Yeah. So I really, our job market is what I'm meaning. Our clean energy job market. Okay.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Thanks. Yeah.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: And then finally, that really flexible load management, the ability to shift load and better match it with our demands really would provide multiple benefits if we aggressively advance flexible load capabilities.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. Chittenden, go back? Sorry.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: It's jumped way ahead. Sorry about

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: that. That happened.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: So

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I'm just scanning really quickly here. Do you quantify in terms of the rates increasing quickly, what the percentage or what the overall cost is related to the regional cost pressure pressures, the renewable energy requirements, and the storm cost?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I have a slide that starts to speak to that. I don't have it broken down in kind of percentages. Think they go through the last couple of years. It's this much, you know, from as a percentage Okay. From each

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: of those. I think it would be helpful to understand, maybe not at the minute level, but kind of a scale, like, what order those are in.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Right. Okay.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I will talk about it a little bit here, and then I will get back to you with further detail on it. So electric rates are rising quickly. This chart here, is data through August 2025. We're updating this now, but have a vacancy over the last few months. So I haven't been able to, weren't able to update it through the 2025. But what it shows is that we've seen dozens of significant race increases over the last several years. So the dots different colored dots are different utilities here, and, the scale on the left hand side is a percent rate increase. You can see some utilities have had as much as a 25% rate increase all at once. That's a big hit for their rate payers. And some have had multiple rate increases. You know, if you follow an orange orange dot, you can see seven and then, know, 12 and then another another four. And so they're piling up. And it's been just about every utility at the state has been in for a significant rate increase.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I have a question.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: GMP is about what percent of Vermont rate payers?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: About 70%.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: And that's GMP or the green dots at the bottom.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Right. And so you see they have increases in every year. What you'll see there is, these are their annual adjusters in in 2019 and 2021, 2022, etcetera. And then you can see multiple dots where we see they also adjust rates quarterly. And so what happens under their multiyear regulation plan is we set a a base trajectory for rates to enable smooth rate trajectory for customers. And that goes through a public utility commission process where things like labor costs or some operational costs are increased by an agreed upon level. And they they have performance metrics for things that are under their control, and there's kind of a if they do better than the projection, then ratepayers save money and they get to earn. If they do worse than the projection, then ratepayers only pay or don't pay for they don't pay. And then if they get to a certain threshold, ratepayers pay a little bit, but really, GMP is on the hook for most of it. And so that setting that trajectory helps stabilize rates. And you can see quarterly adjustments on things that are are past the room more often. You don't see them as regularly in those early years. There's been a little more volatility in some of the power supply costs, and and I say power supply broadly to include transmission as well here. And because those those costs have been changing more frequently. And they go they go up and down. There was cost, for example, for the Mystic Generating Station in Connecticut that ISO New England entered into a a contract with that plan to ensure reliability of the region, and those costs are just passed through to ratepayers. They weren't planned for by in the multiyear rate plan trajectory, and GMP really didn't have any control over it. Those costs ultimately get passed through to ratepayers in their rate. And last thing is is storms are also a cause of volatility. There's about in the current rate plan, there's about 6,000,000 a year that is collected from rate payers to cover major storms. A year. A year. Per year. And to cover major storms. And and then on top of that, you know, the first year, I don't think we hit six million in that year. After that, we were way above 6,000,000, and so we saw some additional collections.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: And that's just GMP?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: That's just GMP.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: And they can't recover.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: So some can do it through FEMA. Right? GMP cannot get FEMA reimbursement. And can all the others All the others have the capability to. Yes. Thank you.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: That was not my question. Was just in terms of multiyear rate plans, do all the utilities have most? They do not. Is it just you?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Right. Is that because of that? And Vermont Gas as well. Okay. So there's authorization for think I it's 30 VSA two eighteen b is authorization for alternative regulation for investor owned utilities. Other utilities do have some provisions to offer innovative rate structures and innovative pilots in a different part, but it's not so it's only one one small piece of what encompasses the whole of GMP's multiyear regulation plan. They're they have that ability, but that's kind of the only mechanism for alternative

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: regulation. Seems to have a smoothing effect. No? Or yes?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: It does. If that's and that's one of the really intended outcomes of the multiyear rate plan is to have a smoothing effect. The other the other piece that other municipals and coops can have available to them is to if they have had a full rate case in the last ten years, sometime in the last ten years, then they can submit to the commission to have a streamlined rate process for a 3% rate increase once a year and that can they can have that until it cumulatively reaches 10% right now. And so that does encourage some of these utilities, smaller utilities to come in a little more frequently. So, you could see in this chart, there's not a lot of dots on the left side of the chart. There actually was from 2012 to 2020, there were very few rate cases for, municipal and cooperative utilities because, they had rate cases in 2010 when there was a big spike in prices, and then, they didn't they their rates were sufficient so that they didn't need to, you know, have enough to increase and reflect additional rates. Once once the regional cost pressures went down, those pressures slowly came up and then dramatically came up in 2022. So they all came in.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: this chart, does that include the 3% or less applications that were

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: It does. It it includes that in here, in those dots. So some of those, you know, in 2024 and '25 in particular, some of those lower dots that are green on the on the chart here are are most likely taking advantage of that process.

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: And then these dots don't have the same base. Correct. And Correct. Though, is there some place else that we kilowatt hour?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yes. Present it. I don't have it by utility in this presentation, but I can provide that, the total. We do have the total cost of electricity by utility. So we don't have it by their kinda end retail rate necessarily, but they have it we have it by their total revenues collected divided by total kilowatt hours and by sender. That includes their customer charge. It's the distinction there. So this is a statewide picture compared to other states here. This is a that total cost of electricity. All the revenues collected divided by total kilowatt hours. This is all customer classes here. This is pulled from data reported to the energy information administration. Vermont is the green line here, and it's comparing to the rest of New England and New York. And it is showing that Vermont, despite all the re rate increases that we have had over the last few years, that Vermont remains more stable and lower rates than the rest of Northeast. Now pictured here is, the nation as a whole. The Northeast, in general, is, has some of the highest rates in the Continental US. It's like California, the Northeast, Hawaii, and Alaska are their own special cases, of course. But so this is a this is a good picture, I think, for where Vermont sits in the Northeast, but but it has to be just taken with that caveat of where the Northeast sits nationally. The raised stability, in part is due to the fact that we remain vertically integrated in in Vermont, as opposed to other states who have restructured. What that means is that our utilities can own transmission generation and distribution in all three phases of electricity delivery there, and they can enter into long term contracts for power. So we see a lot of volatility in the other states here, and that's really a lot of states. Their electric distribution service companies are really only allowed to enter into contracts for power to serve their customers every for six month duration or a year duration. And so they're really subject to whatever the price is in March when they go out to procure get that power again. It may be higher or lower. Yeah. Like in 2022 here, kind of the right center of this chart, you start to see a lot of that volatility going up. That's when Russia invaded Ukraine. Wholesale energy natural gas prices went way up. Wholesale energy prices went way up. Vermont was insulated from that. You start to see that pressure come over time with our rates going up, but we are insulated from that volatility. Actually

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: So people ask me, well, why are the rates in in in New England and in the Northeast among the highest in in the in the country? And I can make up an answer, but I thought I'd see. Okay.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Well, I like to hear your answer. I think there's a there's a lot of reasons for that. Our infrastructure, our capability, we don't have, you know, the natural resources that we have. And Infrastructure meaning our transmission infrastructure is is older? Our transmission infrastructure is it's older now and going through kind of a asset condition rebuild, but it's also very robust relative to some other regions. We have really good reliability. We do pay for that they're compared to other regions. There some of it is policy choices that we have made that put upward pressure on rates. And then some of it is just resource availability in terms of what generation resources are in in the area. We're also really populated in Vermont aside, especially Southern New New England and where all the most of the kilowatt hours are. And siting of any new infrastructure is challenging, whether it's a a renewable resource or a fossil resource. It's really difficult to sight something, and that increases. So I I wouldn't say it's any one reason, but there's there's several that well, the reasons I would make up have to do with

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: with with generation constraints. It's hard to build their generations and and and also transmission. It's hard to build it's hard to build anything. It's a it's a more populated part of the

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: part of the country for one thing, and we and should say, like, offshore, maybe, like, wind towers or something.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Oh, wind towers. That's a good idea.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great idea. Reps, Sibilia. Yeah. Let's see that.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I have two questions. One is Vermont's ability related to so we're in New England, and the rest of the country has much lower rates. I mean, does Vermont have the ability to act? I I don't think we do, but I just wanna make sure of that assumption. Outside of ISO, like, do like, are we kind of tied to the fate of ISO in a big picture way? Can we get a lot lower than ISO New England?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: It's a interesting question. So we are very much tied to ISO New England, especially, you know, about 20% of our costs are regional transmission infrastructure or even some local too, but 20% is our transmission infrastructure. Right? And those are very tied to New England. We pay our share of that infrastructure in Southern New England. They pay, you know, for most of the infrastructure that's built here, And so, and it that kind of is the cost sharing mechanism. So we're very tied there. We're we can enter those longer term contracts and secure power, at prices that may be different than the rest of New England. And that ability allows us some flexibility in the timing of when we enter those contracts. And so there's ability for some separation there, I think, because we are not necessarily tied to that real time or just day ahead market price as closely to other as others are. And so that allows for the ability to separate a little bit. And some of that means, like, you know, our utilities could sign a contract or a power from New York or Canada or somewhere else. It needs to be deliverable into New England. Mhmm. But we could potentially encourage that power to to come. Everybody in New England is kinda looking for those right now, so I don't see that as as as much of a differentiator.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So So, Mary, you say a little bit. Yeah. But probably not a lot.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I think that's accurate.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: My second question is, of the other New England states that are up there, how many of them have renewable energy standards?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: All of them.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: All of them. And they're all

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Actually, I I should say, New Hampshire does have a renewable energy standard, but it's not very aggressive. So

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Thank you. Yeah.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Are are you going to get into cost pressures that we can we could foresee in the next ten years or so? Yes.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Good. Yeah. Okay. Good. Two slides here away from that. This slide is really just talking about wholesale market prices. Again, these are the these are the really real time prices. Yes. The wholesale price electricity for kind of the Vermont zone here. And just another example of it going up, but we are insulated from that. So this is kinda what the real time prices are. They went up from an average of $40 in a megawatt hour in 2024 roughly to 60 in 2025. They're somewhat insulated from that. One portion of our that, but it eventually impacts us down the line when we enter into new contracts. The the benchmark is, well, what do we think these these prices will do? Or what have they done? And what do you think we think they will do? And, again, you see that big spike in 2022 that caused the volatility on the last for other states. Okay. Cost drivers to to your question, representative Campbell. One of them is this RNS rate forecast. This is the RNS stands for regional network service. These are charges for both transmission in the region. And as I said, there's a lot of asset condition projects, old transmission that is being refurbished. And there are some, but not that many right now, reliability, related projects that all go into this rate and costs are shared across the region. I circled this forecast here. This is showing what it is in 2025, what it was 2025 and '6, and then we see, about a 15% increase by 2029 forecasted by ISO 2021. These are usually pretty close, these forecasts, because these infrastructure projects, the ones that are expected to be in service in 2028, 2029 are already starting to be built. They're really far along in the planning stages. So we can expect that to to really be close to accurate. I think if you had if I put in here what the rate was in 2019 to give you a ten year picture, they were about a hundred and ten, a hundred and eleven dollars a kilowatt year, or about 1.7¢ a kilowatt hour to the equivalent of the circle applying there. So roughly, in ten years, they will have roughly doubled. So these are really significant component of costs. We are really working hard regionally to get a handle on these. There's really a lack of transparency and accountability by a lot of regional transmission providers that the Department of Public Service has really been pushing hard for ISO New England to host what they're calling an asset condition reviewer. I'm not sure I know ISO was in I think they were in this committee if if Sarah, as Adams talked about that. Okay. So I won't go into too much detail, but this is a really big deal that we pushed really hard for and really took a lead with the regional states. I'll I'll give a shout out to Velco who's been very helpful by nature of their structure, where they are owned by the all of the utilities in the state. They have a little different mindset than the other transmission owners in the rest of New England, and they've been very helpful in helping us articulate, hey. This is not hard. You can be very transparent about what these costs are and provide a cost comparison points. Companies like Eversource and National Grid who have billions and billions and billions of dollars of projects that are going into these rates are now going to need to be more transparent and accountable to their their costs. And so so we're working hard on that, but we do still see an increase here. On the left, there's there's a picture of storms. I don't have the specific storm costs here for you today. I will follow-up with that to representative Sibilia's question. And and I'll put the transmission cost in, you know, absolute dollar terms as well so you can compare everything here.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: I think that would be really important info to have because I feel like we we talk a lot about these three drivers, you know, of electric rates and electric costs, but I feel like I I don't have the ability to stack them up and see the overall impact of regional transmission costs, storm costs, and then policy choice costs. Right. It's hard to it's it's hard to see how they compare.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yeah. Understood. And I will do a better job. I'll I'll I'll follow-up, and I I can I'll follow-up with the committee. And then if you have questions about what I follow-up with, I can just have you come back in and talk about it.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. That's

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: just around those projections also on the rest, we can make sure it's as you may recall, there was some difference of opinion about what that might end up being. Administration recall. Right. I I do recall. So it's just site, the projections, but I think it would be really helpful for us to understand that. Not in this, but when you bring that.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yep. I will say that the every year as part of the annual energy report, one of the statutory requirements is for the department to do a renewable energy standard model or a ten year outlook on what the cost of the renewable energy standard will be. We send that model out for comment every year. It didn't change a whole lot this year. You know, we knew what the new res was going to be. We only received comments from one utility and nobody else. We send it to utilities and rev and other advocacy groups, EAN. And that was the only comment we received. So Great. I will translate this into so that they're all in dollars here. We will say this the annual res cost here, they are expected to jump in 2030. That's when you have a jump in the tier one requirement for the renewable energy standard. So we go from around 70% required renewability to a 100% required renewability in 2030. And you can see the breakdown of the costs by tier here on this page as well. Won't go into detail now because I'm gonna provide this in more comparative format later, unless you want me to.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Thanks. I do have a different question on this. If I may. Yeah. Just in terms of regional transmission, and and I'm aware that Vermont has been fighting really hard for our parents there. It's the transparency. I mean, that's the answer to my question. I mean, we're we're a pretty small part of is it four percent?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Four yes. So we're roughly 4% of our of these regional transmission costs, and we're around 7% of the region's annual kilowatt hours, like, load. And so the reason for that is we have a a high load factor as in we utilize our system pretty well. And so and we're doing a good job at managing our peak and flattening our load. We still have peaks, of course, right now, but you can see on this, like, line three in the r r and s rate forecast 70 summary. It it says it assumes around a 55% load factor, and that's just your annual annual demand divided by your peak demand. Our Vermont is closer to 70% because we do well, and that's reflected in and it must be at 4% of the regional transmission cost even though we have a a larger amount of the. And I'll get into one of the other insights here is about how we can continue to push on on that peak and are using our flexible resources. Okay. So I'm gonna transition to weatherization here. It remains slow and steady here. We're I think you've had presentations in this committee on weatherization, so I'll I'll go through this relatively quickly. But we're at about 41,000 homes since 2008 that have been retrofitted relative to the goal that has has been around for a while of a 120,000 by 2030. We are not gonna make it. If we have five main providers here that are are listed that public dollars go to, efficiency Vermont, Burlington Electric Department, Vermont Gas, office of economic opportunity, and the weatherization agencies, and the three d Thermal, which does a lot of multi family work for both OEO and Efficiency Vermont, but has specifically called out here. There's a lot of text on this slide, but what I really wanted to point out here is in weatherization. The average fuel usage reduction is over 25%, 26.6%. We see for the low income weatherization where we're doing comprehensive retrofits retrofits, that's actually much higher. It's like thirty, thirty five, 40%. And for, more market based programs where we may provide incentives for just doing your attic ceiling or just attic in a wall, you see, you know, 18%, 20% savings at home. So there's a big disparity in

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: the

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: programs in which ones, but on average, across all of our programs, we we are saving a little over 26% when we go into health. And that's been fairly consistent over the years either this twenty twenty four numbers here. This slide was not in the filed in energy report. This is the one slide. It's in it's in your packet that you have here, but this is just the estimated near term future weatherization funding. I wanna make sure you have this in this context of this report. I know you've seen this. These these are the same numbers that, I believe, mister Wunderbill presented to the committee before. So you can see that the weatherization funding for a few years there, it's it's slow and steady. Right? And I think after 2029, we start to see more much more of a a drop off, and so now is the time for us to continue to think about it. We we don't have legislative proposals this year about that, but we are working with the efficiency utilities and the demand resource plan proceedings to add more weatherization funding through their thermal efficiency and and process fuel, in particular for low income. The other thing I wanted to mention about weatherization, it's really about all all thermal and and use programs here and energy saving programs. And there was a the Public Utility Commission did a investigation about energy burden. And our in our in that investigation, I found that there are over a 100 programs that are delivering services to Vermonters either directly or indirectly with the goal of reducing costs. And we proposed in this this docket, and we're we're drafting the scope of work now. It's just about ready to go. Analyzing all of these programs. A 100 programs really difficult for customers to navigate, to understand where there are opportunities for a more efficient, more clear program delivery that can actually get us a better bang for the buck with our with our doctors. And so I'm, in particular, very excited about this study, and I think it's going to really help us design programs going forward that get better value for the workers. Do we do you have a list of those 100 programs? Yes. They were so a lot of them are discrete efficiency Vermont programs. Maybe, you know, say half off the top of my head, plus or minus, but the list was filed in the this docket here, and I can I can get at that that list for the committee? Thank you.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Of course. When do you think the report opened? Right?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Hoping by in late twenty twenty six. That that is the target.

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: And of those under programs, do have a sense how many are state government, local government, independent nonprofit?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I think most of them are are publicly funded programs, you know, state with state funds, whether they're ratepayer or taxpayer funds. That is the that was the genesis of that. So there are there are some I think there are some that are independently funded or federally funded outside of kind of state government, but

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: thank you.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I'm thinking back to act one forty two and the inquiry into whether Vermont should have a statewide energy program to have a little more efficiency. And then and your department have some suggestions. So can you quickly summarize your takeaways from Yeah. How that would relate to this effort?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Well, I think, one, I think one of the biggest things we suggested was to examine whether we should have a navigator for customers to to help customers get through the process and go to the right place. And I think it can be really challenging even for me at my house. I, you know, wanna make an investment and I'm really not sure who I should call. And it it can be and I work in this policy space every day. And so really having somebody that can help that's an independent voice that can help, We wanna explore that. You know, I think as far as the study goes, we we really think we we should, like, look at what are those threats first to understand, you know, do we need all of these programs? Should some of them be combined? Are the goals of tier three and weatherization, or the efficiency utilities overlapping such that it's creating additional costs and infusion in the marketplace. So I think this is like this evaluation kind of a process of our program delivery is step one. And then step two, we suggested, well, if we have anything like what we have now, then a navigator could be a good idea. And there have been some pilots in that space. Think the Climate Action Office funded some. I think they were hosted at Capstone, excuse me, navigators to help low income customers. I think we can help evaluate and understand the barriers or the challenges and opportunities from that program, going forward as well. I think another example is, this is going back a while for my particular experience, but I think they still do this. This neighbor works at Vermont offers a lot of help for low end restaurants, Western Vermont. And they they did a lot of work in the Rutland area. A lot of that was federally funded. And so there's the challenge of making sure that you're getting enough efficiency so that you can actually help pay for the navigators and that processes. So, hopefully, I have answered your question.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Well, it sounds like this report's gonna be really I

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: hope so.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Yes. Improving delivery. Yes.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: You had mentioned

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: 100 programs, but how many providers? You had mentioned efficiency per month. Maybe had most of them? Yeah.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I think they had roughly roughly half. I think the providers that I listed earlier on weatherization, but then you have so I have all the utilities and tier three programs. You have all the weatherization. You know, when you have you have, oh, we know kind of the umbrella for weatherization, but you still have all the community action programs actually delivering the, services in each area of the state. You know, it's multifamily providers. So there's, I don't have a specific number, but it's dozens. Okay, the third insight for 2025 maybe goes without saying with federal funding, which is uncertain. There's a lot of slides on specific federal funding programs in the annual energy report. I did not go through the long term here today. But we really it has created program delivery challenges. You know, it's been I I know, director Bailey was in here talking about this a little bit, but I'll just reiterate, you know, we spent eighteen months going through all the requirements of developing a solar for all program and be ready just to, you know, right at the stage of delivery and having it pulled out from under us is a real real challenge. It really creates I'm sure she said this, but it creates a a challenge operationally for our office as well. Right? There's staff that are funded or dedicated to that program where we've been able to reallocate for now, but it creates operational issues as well. And so I think I'm gonna leave the federal funding at that because I think you've heard that a little bit previously this month and unless there's any questions. K. The clean energy market remains strong. The Clean Energy Development Fund, every year, issue has issued a report on the clean energy economy in Vermont. Vermont continues to be ranked number one in clean energy jobs per capita. Of all the energy jobs in the state, they report 82% of those jobs are clean energy jobs, and clean energy jobs are 6% of the total state jobs.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So this is, like, that I don't I'm not exactly sure what the answer is, but I know there's confusion. So here on this slide, clean energy. I'm interested in that meaning, as opposed to we have renewable energy as opposed to we've got this proposal about a clean energy standard, which I don't think means clean energy means the same as it does here. So can we define what this means?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yeah. Thank you for that. It should be more precise in this language here. So my my understanding is that the this report reflects renewables. It reflects storage. It reflects energy efficiency. This In the the report that's the this job on the slide here, the Clean Energy Development Funds report here. It's the Vermont Clean Energy Industry report. So I'm tempted to click on this link here and pull it up right now, the the the exact definition. Nuclear, it would not be included in this. And and don't believe it has historically. I wouldn't have been added. So this is really the focus on, you know, weatherization, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and include and storage.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: And is there a definition of this may be a better question for you, Tanya. Is there a definition of renewable in I think there is a definition of renewable energy.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yes. Yeah.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Is there only one?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: There's only one definition of renewable energy? Is there only one?

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: There could be multiple. Do you even help me? This

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I can yeah. Know.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. Probably I don't Melon thing.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I don't I don't know. I I'm most familiar with the one in 8002 or EVSA 8,002, which lists it's any resource that, produces energy faster than natural regeneration rate. And is this

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: do you know if there's a definition for any exudate exposure?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I don't believe there is. It I don't but I'm not sure. Oh. So what I was gonna say is nuclear would not fall in that definition of bringing one. Or in this report. Or or and it's not also in this report. Okay. And then I will just say the total number of clean energy jobs has roughly been stable over the last five years or four years and dipped in COVID. When COVID happened, it bounced back a little bit, but not all the way, and it's slowly been or I I would say that's stable. It's probably not.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Question. Yeah. But we need to move on.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: That

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: was yes, but Okay.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So just, with the amount of federal dollars that have come in, a little surprised by this. Do we think that there's still a lag or we might see an increase in the jobs or no?

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: I

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I don't not sure. I'd like to see an increase of the jobs, but I don't wanna, put my hope on here. I think I think a a continued steady slow really slow, but steady increase is probably most likely here.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Even with the federal tax credits going away?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yes. So when when the federal tax credits go away, that does still doesn't change the pace of, renewable energy generation that we, that we need in order to meet our renewable energy standard requirements. Okay. So that may drive some bigger projects, but those tax credits aren't going away for storage. It'll still be work in storage and you still have a robust energy efficiency and weatherization workforce. I say robust, at the same time, it is not enough. K. So we're seeing our on this slide, we have our penetration of renewable energy, and these are mainly distributed energy resources here. Can't actually see the total here. 600 megawatts of solar in the state on a less than a thousand megawatt peak. We have and you can see the other renewable deployment. Those are all sized deployment. We have and it's been increasing over time. We have in terms of distributed energy resources, over 700 of them, and that includes over 85 megawatts of battery storage. I'll, I have some other slides on battery storage in a in a minute. So how does that look when you look at our renewable energy standard requirements? So the bars here are deployment in every year. The the those are the vertical bars in megawatts. You can see the blue dash lines. That was the original renewable energy standard tier two requirement for how much renewables are necessary to meet that requirement, roughly 25 to 30 megawatts. To meet the new RAS, which started last year, we see a requirement of around 42 to 50 megawatts. So for many years, we had more renewables being deployed than our requirement. In 2025, this 2025 data goes through August, of 2025. So we're actually expecting about 30 a little over 30 megawatts of total distributed resources in 2025. So we see a lower amount than what we need in to meet our our target, but the state's utilities have lots of renewable resources that are already online that can help to meet the target. So, you know, a simple way to look at this would be to say everything over the previous line of 30 megawatts, you can almost shift over and say, okay. If it happened and later on, we would have that resource, those megawatt hours are going to be available to be the resource. So I will add that we have almost 60 megawatts of contract notices were filed in late twenty twenty five to or utilities to develop well, to contract with developers for solar. And so we see some lower commissioning in in 2025 here, but I don't think that's likely to persist given the, you know, the contracts that we have in place, the projects that are in process. Part of that, I think, is due to the tax credits expiring. Those are, you know, developers have until the 2027 for commercial projects to be fully commissioned. And, so those contracts and development being in place now is is really a direct impact to that. One utility did an analysis that showed that, you know, they they actually don't need any tier two resources until 2030, but contracting now and developing it so that it is in place by the 2027, even though they don't need any, it will save them roughly, 2 to $3,000,000 on that over the life of the contract in meeting the reservoir by by doing it now instead of waiting until they need it. And that's because of the tax credits. The difference in price, you know, a $100 a megawatt hour, give or take relative to after 2027 without the tax credit, we're looking at a $140 in that one hour. And, again, you saw those wholesale electric market prices at $60 in 2025. That's a that's a big difference. Provide other values. The energy value is the biggest one. So there's a lot of information on that slide that I just went through.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: I have a problem. What

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: would it look like if we put, like, load growth?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Load growth over time has been pretty constant. I so it's been flat. Load growth has been flat. Here's a slide. It's not in the early portion of this, but in

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: see. Have to find it as quickly as I thought. It is

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: in the electric sector portion

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: of these slides. Yeah.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: This you know?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: There it is. 41 slide 41 of the SPEAR packet. You can see the historical load growth. In fact, I could probably go to it here. So you see two charts there. The first chart is that the historical 2000 to 2024 are statewide electric load, and you can see it's been roughly flat. That line is almost straight across. In 2024, they did a long range transmission plan. Velco did a long range transmission plan, and it showed a, business as usual scenario and a policy case assuming advanced clean cars came into effect and we may net those targets for electric vehicles, lot more heat pumps than we're actually seeing for now. So I think the a revised long range forecast looks closer to the blue line, the lower line on the right hand chart here, which, again, stays pretty flat for the next five years and before it starts to take off again.

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: Yeah. Do attribute the fact that load has been relatively flat in spite of bunch of electrification to office setting and efficiency?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Well, I would say slide 45 has efficiency impacts historically. I think that's about 14% or so, 13 or 14% of the state's load have been met by efficiency. I think it being relatively flat over the last few years, I think we we just haven't seen as many electric vehicles as we thought were going to come and as many heat pumps. So we've quite a few, but we've actually the trajectory has leveled off with heat pumps. There's a lot of reasons for that. But so I think efficiency has played a role in keeping our our load flat over time. Thanks.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Okay. So we're gonna go back to I was on slide 21 here.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I'm gonna go to 22. Just it's still talking about kind of the clean energy market. I said jobs earlier, but I these slides, and I get to jobs, but they're really what is what our portfolio looks like now. And so in 2024, our electric power mix based on our physical deliveries or entitlements or contracts or ownership of power is the it's 91%. That includes 19% nuclear contracts and ownership with nuclear power and 72% of removed resources. So in this case, clean. In this case, clean does include nuclear. Yes.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: And

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: after renewable energy credit retirements, were 92 percent clean already in 2024. That, again, include it includes 17% nuclear, a lot of hydropower, 55% from solar. I'll just flip back to the the pre rec slide. We're at 12% solar based on physical deliveries and our contracts, but then we're selling the equivalent of 7% of the solar wrecks in order to to reduce rate impacts, right, get revenue from those racks, but we have them available to meet future res requirements. Those will come at a cost because we'll no longer be selling them, but the the resources are available. Yeah. So both before and after the renewable energy standard and well, before and after renewable energy credits, you know, retired, we're over 90% nonemitted at the same for the question. Yeah.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Just wanna be clear. It's not argumentative, D. J. On this slide. Renewable slash clean energy credit requirements. Is that so we don't have a clean energy credit for oh, the retirement. Do we do we have clean energy credits as opposed to renewable energy credits?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: So we do not have a clean energy credit requirement, but utilities do retire the nuclear attributes in the regional tracking system. So those attributes become part of the portfolio as they're counted in the greenhouse gas inventory and our progress towards our global warming solutions act requirements. So that what what gets counted in there is our post renewable energy credit disposition mix. This this slide is what gets counted in there. And so in order to count those nuclear attributes, the utilities actually have to go into the system and say, these are ours. I'm claiming these as Greenmount Power or Bond Electric's credit. If they don't claim them, then they go into, the residual mix, which is that 8% brownish number there. That's that's kind of the mix of unclaimed attributes in New England. And there are some nuclear attributes in that mix, and it's mostly natural gas. There's some, like, oil and coal in there. There may not be any coal left there. In 2024, there may be a little bit, but the last the last coal plant in New Hampshire retired recently. So so there's a lot of fossil resources. That New England system mix is pretty dirty. There is some unclaimed attributes in there, including nuclear and Yes.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: And clean energy credits right now are the way that utilities count, like, their existing contracts in order to claim them?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yeah. So yes. Account accounts. They're they're every

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: I

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: really do appreciate your questions because it forces me to be much more precise in my language, which is better for every person. Thank you.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: If you like.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I I the every megawatt hour generated in that is imported into New England has an attribute Yep. Associated with it. And so here, I'm referring them to them as clean energy credits. They those are clean energy. Those attributes could be used by some utilities in meeting their own requirements. Connecticut and Massachusetts do have requirements that allow for nuclear, certain amount of nuclear. So in that sense, they are clean energy credits that could be used. A portion of them could be used. There's a lot of details on those rules, but a portion of them could be used in other states. A portion of them, there's nothing you can do with them. And so they are actually going in and claiming them and retiring them, and I'm referring to them here as clean energy credits. There's not a Vermont current there's not currently a Vermont definition of a clean energy credit. Right.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: That's your sex. Right. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you, madam chair. All great.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: This is this is interesting. I think you just said that every kilowatt hour megawatt hour of of generation has attributes associated with it according to the power source of from correct. That's behind that generation.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Mhmm.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: And so it's so this is this is interesting. So those attributes from renewable energy have value and can be sold or traded on a funded market. Do the attributes from nuclear power generation have value? Do they bring bring in revenue to from our utilities They

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: that purchase that power? They have not. So could they? I think there's a portion of at least one of the nuclear plants that would qualify for some of those Southern New England states. But the there's very specific rules and it caps it, and it's not the whole plant. So it's not the whole it's not the whole facility, like, it's not the attributes associated with all the generation that the facility could So it's only like a portion, a small portion of them. And so there are, there are a lot, a lot of nuclear attributes available for, you know, a small requirement that would so the value of those are really low. That makes sense.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. There's a lot there's a

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: lot of supply of them, and the requirements in other states are are small and sort of. And so so, you know, a

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: lot of supply, low demand, low values. Yeah. The attributes from gas generation and, I guess, I guess, gas generation. What happens to those? As I said, are those are those what has to

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: be offset with renewable energy grants? Those don't have value. Some utilities claim them in their system. Burlington Electric Department actually claims the few megawatt hours from its its peaker plant that it barely runs, but there's a few megawatt hours that that they often have, and they they claim those attributes. They said they in the system, they say, yes. We had these, and then they retire additional Reynolds energy credits

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: to cover that those. So you say claim them, is that an effect of speech? Yeah.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: So all of the most most of the the natural gas generation in New England, nobody has a reason to say raise their hand and say, those are mine. Uh-huh. Right? Because they have no value Right. Anywhere. And so they go into this residual mix.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: So it's like the leftover Okay. From everything that everything is aligned. Right? And some nuclear is in there too because, again, that's not bad. Exactly. That's that's

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: And so in in Vermont, though, the utilities are raising their hand and saying these nuclear attributes are ours. You can't count them as in the residuals mix. They're ours. And so instead of our portfolio being 25% of the New England system mix, it is accounting for the nuclear and our portfolio is only 8% of that dirty system mix, that residual. I see.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: So at present, people who use particularly utilities in Vermont have to purchase or or or trade regs to

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: cover the the attributes of of nuclear generation. Is that correct? They will starting in 2030.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: They will starting in '20

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: So right now the requirement is in I think it's it's either '63 or 67% is the renewable energy standard tier one requirement right now. Right? So when that goes to a 100, it just jumps to a 100 in 2030. That's when they'll have to, buy renewable energy credits and kinda cover up the Yeah. Nuclear portion of its portfolio. Okay.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: So as it is now, since they're, purchasing less than 37% of their power less than 37% of their power is is from nuclear. They don't have to cover that that those purchases with regs. Right. Correct. Yes. And they don't until 2030.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: '20 correct. And they have contracts for nuclear that go out to 2034 '35 or ownership that goes out forever, a small portion of millstone. But, so, you know, I get to your point in the administration's proposal for a clean energy standard when we say $20,000,000 of savings, that's from 2030 to 2035, a million megawatt hours of nuclear and $4 a megawatt hour of

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: So savings of 4,000,000 a year not starting until 2030.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Correct. For five years. That that $4 is a low estimate. Prices right now are at $4.50, and I think it's so I think it's a conservative estimate, but it's sort of 2030 to 2035, five years. Yeah. $4 a megawatt hour. It's $4,000,000 a year, $20,000,000.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Right. Okay. Good. Thank you. And historically, how much has that fluctuated? It

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: you know, back when the res was originally passed, it those costs were under a dollar. They have spiked up to almost $10 in kilowatt hour. And it's they've been for the last I'll say for the last year, a little over a year, have been around this $545 range. So we'll say other states have increasing requirements for existing renewables also. And so that puts pressure on the supply of these, pressure on the supply, right? There's more demand with with the same amount of supply credits that creates upward price pressure, just the supply demand balance. How

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: are we doing for your slides and for the clients?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I was I have about four or five more substantive slides that I was gonna go through Okay.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: In fifteen minutes. I think we can then you can do it.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great. So I oh, great. So I just wanna make sure I know I already asked this, but I I just wanna be crystal clear. So the and I know we're not having an in-depth policy discussion right now, but I just wanna make sure I'm understanding that in shifting from a clean energy standard to or from a renewable energy standard to clean energy standard, no savings could be realized until 2030. It's not an immediate cost Correct. Okay. Thank you.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Okay. Representative Morrow, think it was you that was getting to this point when you raised offshore wind. Headwinds is a funny word to use in the title of the slide, but, you know, it is on again, off again for the current projects. I think most recently, there there was another court order to have Revolution Wind continue to work again, which is excellent. But, really, this creates a real roadblock for companies wanting to continue to invest in offshore wind, at least for the next few years. Right? And so we're expecting a real slowdown for any offshore wind projects that were planned. You can see these little colored spots are all the different leases for offshore wind plants that were originally given for companies to develop offshore wind. Only a couple of those are are likely to come to fruition. Revolution wind is about to start producing power, which is great. And Vineyard Wind is producing power now, not at full capacity, but it's producing power, which is, which is excellent. But those two, are probably the only ones that are gonna happen in New England for a while. And so there was an expectation, especially with tier four of the renewable energy standard, that offshore wind was going to be a resource that was gonna be available in the twenty thirties. Right? We didn't know exactly when, but, you know, and that is that's pushed out several years at least. And so we just need to highlight and be wary of that options that we have for new resources. States are exploring some onshore wind resources. Maine has just issued a request for proposal for 1,200 megawatts of onshore wind that, the department has facilitated, Fremont Power, and on behalf of other utilities, their participation in this. We're not really a contracting entity. I think we could, but better off with, with our utilities doing that evaluation. And so we're the point here is that we're working to expand our options, for our utilities to evaluate the least cost ways to meet our requirements going forward. And we did we we also did that with Connecticut issued an RFP to try and take advantage of the tax credits, and we were able to get our utilities some optionality in that. They don't have to take power if it's too expensive or if it doesn't meet our requirements, but they're in the game, which is, which is helpful. More options allows us to make the least cost option. And then Connecticut, it will be issuing is expected to issue soon another request for proposed for clean energy resources. And that would include in that definition of clean, it would include nuclear, and other resources.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Go ahead. Yeah. We have to make on this job. The do any of our utilities have contracts with

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Vineyard? Or No. Not that I'm aware.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Vineyard's the only one that's operation.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Correct. But they, you know, they don't have a voice of revolution either. They would those, I think, are fully allocated to Connecticut and Rhode Island and Massachusetts. So it's the other ones that we hear

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: potential Right.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: And these ones, they do have value to New England as they come in. They lower market prices

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Mhmm.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: And provide a resource in the winter, which is which is excellent. So it has value to Vermont just from being built. That's right. We're rooting for these and participating in New England States Committee on Electricity, our our jurisdictions in New England in supporting these projects, but we're

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: yeah. Yeah.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Oh, I thought you had a question.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I'm good. Just just answer now. Great. Okay. Okay. This is what our renewable energy standard compliance looks like. It is really mostly for tier one. Most of the attributes that are retired are either hydro Quebec or other or other hydro. So of the 72% renewable, At the seven of the over 70% renewable, almost 90% of that comes from hydro resources. And then you have a tier two slice there that is broken out on the right, and you can see most of tier two. That's the in state renewable generation, new renewable generation. Most of that comes from that metering. Okay. The last insight here, just the variability of load and generation has created a lot of challenges and opportunities that underscore the need for flexibility. I've shown this slide before. It's actually not a new slide this year, but, some of the analysis that was done, a couple of years ago for the renewable energy standard, that chart on the bottom left is just looking at the imbalance in supply and demand. Right? In the summer months in 2035, under a scenario that's reasonably close to what we ended up with has in May, in particular, we have over 40% more generation than we need. In September, we have 50% less generation that we need. So our renewable energy standard is on an annual basis. And but just recognizing that that generation comes at certain times a year and the load is at different times a year. And I know we only have seven minutes left, so I'm gonna skip the rest of those charts here and go to one of the benefits of flexible resources here. So in the 2024 long range transmission plan under the under the policy case, so the expectation that we were to have faster electrification side not happening and coming to our fruition. But under that policy case, some rely transmission reliability deficiencies were identified. And, through the Vermont System Planning Committee, it's a venue that has been created both statutorily with the long range transmission plan and through the PUC, to, evaluate non transmission alternatives. And the study group there found that just shifting the load from electric vehicles from uncontrolled to controlled and moving the time of control and the storage resources that are already on the system, right, we have no more built, no more storage resources built, would defer the constraints that are. So Okay. We you know, with the resources and the flexibility we have now, we don't have any transmission related reliability constraints, which is, which is great, load growth related. We're really analyzing, the lead utilities analyzed really on a temporal basis found that that, you know, the number of hours is really important to evaluate and know when they are. And so I just we really need to all of this is to say, we have the opportunity to shift load a little bit to better balance our systems. The chart on the top right is really the a a load shape over the course of a year, and you can see there's only a few hours where the there's actually load above the constraint. The constraint is the the orange line there. Same thing with the the bottom chart on the right. There's representative hours on where the load was causing the deficiency, and those can be met. Red that red part of the area chart is storage, meaning current storage. We don't even need any more according to this analysis, avoiding the reliability deficiency. So it's really just underscoring the opportunity here with, with those resources. And just really quickly going through what we have for those resources, 85 megawatts of energy storage now with another 72 permitted or in permitting. So, up to a 150 megawatts of storage capability, again, on a 950 megawatt week. This is grid scale, not It is house. Combination. Combination. Yes. Yeah. Combination total. And then we have other flexible management, the time of use rates or end use rates for electric vehicles. Most, if not all, of our utilities have either rates in place or are studying rates or piloting rates to make them happen. And then we have commercial and industrial flexibility, and then potential opportunities and programs with heat pump reduction, peak hour reduction as well. Quick question.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Do we have, any battery storage goals? As I know, don't have them in statute. Do we have any battery storage goals in plans?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Anywhere. We do not. We do not. Here's in in context here, we do have other states in New England that have those goals. Yeah. We have as a percentage of peak, we have far more storage than those other states now and, you know, up to almost 20%, 19% including what's in construction or permitting. Whereas other states, their goals are as a percent of summer peak. Only Rhode Island has a goal for something higher than what we already have. Okay. That makes sense. So we are deploying storage really quickly and in the context of New England much faster than our our counterparts in New England.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Is there a ceiling on how much storage would be?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: That's a good question. I don't know. There probably is. Once our load gets, you know, perfectly flat and our load factor is a 100%, but it really depends on what's cost effective as well. I think, you know, those one of the first slides, those transmission rates that I showed you all, that's a real opportunity to avoid those rates. And that's one of the biggest, economic benefits of storage. So when we ask the utilities for a benefit cost analysis to say, hey. You wanna do this program? Show us that this is worth it, or you wanna put this solar in the by far, the largest value is avoiding those transmission costs, those regional transmission costs.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Is what's second? Peak change?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: There are there's capacity values of the annual peak is probably second, but a distant second. And then there's frequency regulation markets, so some other markets that they can participate in that help. That that effectively is peak shaving, those two, like avoiding that regional peak, that's the monthly peak in every month. For the state, you wanna avoid that, and then you have lower costs, and then the capacity market is the annual peak for ISO New England. So that effectively is both of those are peak shaving.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yep. And then I think

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: we need to wrap it up. Repertory and the vanish? I was just thinking with storage in this study, did you consider EVs themselves as storage as vehicle to grid eventually? Batteries being able to

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Well, this this was really what was permitted and either online or permitted or under construction. And so so, no, we didn't count any. There may be some pilot or small scale there, but we don't they aren't in these numbers, and we haven't we haven't projected going forward here. And do you have a map of all those where all

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: these storage facilities are? Or state?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: No. We do not. I think the utilities do know where those are. We don't have one map, but the utilities will have where each of their own projects are, and that's something else to think about. We should develop.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: We don't have that publicized.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yes. Yeah. But we won't have we what what we wouldn't wanna publicize for sure is is which customers have them in their homes. Right? We we could have it, and that's, you know, not an insignificant portion of It's total. Real

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: quick.

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: Any large storage facilities been retired?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Been retired. I don't believe so. So the one that comes to mind is the Morrow's Green River Reservoir. It is I don't believe it's retired yet, but that is was able to, pond, and produce a megawatt or two on demand, to avoid peaks, but new FERC license and and water quality regulations caused that to them to not be able to I don't think I'm

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: in any storage facility that retired?

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Not that I'm aware of.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: TJ, thank you so much for being here.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: You're welcome.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I I didn't get to my policy recommendations. I think you may have heard some of those. This is the last slide, but

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Okay. Sorry. I don't wanna cut you off. We get

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: That's okay. So you've heard some of these, but one is a clean energy standard. This is just a common sense reform to us that real reduced cost to ratepayers without impacting our greenhouse gas emissions. Number two is to take a look at the res regional requirements in light of the federal policy changes that reduce the amount of offshore wind that is gonna be available and the investment tax credit. So understand the availability of resources and their costs. Three is to better allocate our current resources to low income weatherization. So we wanna do that study, be more efficient, better allocate our resources and support weatherization, and we're doing that in our advocacy and efficiency utility regulatory processes. Four is to continue to facilitate flexible resources, which I just talked about. And then five is to continue to advocate on these regional transmission costs, which are really cost drivers here. So the first two are things that I will be talking about, in the legislature, I hope. And the other three are things that we can take action on and are taking action on and wanna keep you up price up and updated on as we go forward. You.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Alright. Thanks very much.

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: For time.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Thanks. Thank you. Always a question.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. I

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: never you know, I never I should've just said two hours. It's TJ.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yeah. Right.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Take the week. Yeah. Thank you

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: for limiting it to an hour and fourteen.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. That's very interesting. Yeah. It's always very interesting.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: More time, I'd ask more questions.

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yeah. Yeah. Do appreciate the questions. Thank you.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Thank you so much, We have our

[TJ Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Do need a break?

[Unidentified Member (House Energy & Digital Infrastructure Committee)]: If