Dan Haar: Emergency action on Connecticut electricity prices won’t solve much, but could make us feel better

Aug. 27—HARTFORD — The message and occupation were essentially the same Tuesday as 19 days earlier, with Republican lawmakers calling for a special pre-election session to lower electricity rates.

Even the room was the same in Parliament buildingWhat is different is the urgency – political and financial – as the summer bills from Eversource and United Illuminating continue to hit ratepayers and Labor Day comes to usher in the final round of the election season.

The GOP Lawmakers want to spend state tax money to reduce or replace the “public service” portion of electricity bills. They want to cap the price Connecticut They fund clean energy, especially wind energy. They want to “restore the independence of the public utility regulator” and they want to redefine renewable energy so that more sources can compete with each other and thus reduce the cost of government climate goals.

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Nothing that can be done in a one-day session out of season. No easy solution to the price shock we experienced on electricity bills in July. That’s because there are no easy solutions.

No, but there is clearly anger out there. Anger from taxpayers at the system and anger from politicians at each other. republicanto their credit, began making this noise a long time ago and called for some of the same measures to regulate electricity prices during the winter and spring sessions.

“It was already unaffordable and we knew it would become even more unaffordable,” said the Senate Republican leader. Stephen HardingR-Brookfieldsaid on Tuesday. “We begged, we asked. … We heard nothing.”

Governor. Ned Lamont said at an unrelated event that he was open to ideas about a special session but that the real answers were complex. He said he would convene the chairmen of the legislature’s energy committee from both parties within a week.

Regarding a special session, Lamont said: “Probably not.”

However, there is no doubt that taxpayers want to see action – creating a conflict between the realistic chance of tangible relief and the political demand for it.

“Our voters feel that,” Harding said. “In the grocery store, in church, in the synagogue, wherever we go, we hear: ‘You have to do something.'”

Mike Cerullipolitical reporter for WTNH-TVasked the two dozen or so representatives behind the podium to raise their hands when they heard from their constituents over the summer that electricity prices were the state’s biggest problem. Most of them did indeed raise their hands.

The problem is that doing “something” if done quickly is unlikely to have a big impact on our bills. And if it does, we’ll have to pay for it in other ways, like higher government taxes or a slower transition to clean energy.

In short, a special session, for example, to 100 million US dollars or 200 million US dollars of government money to cover the now famous portion of our “public service” bills would not reduce tax rates all that much.

Public services are the items added to bills to achieve one policy objective or another, such as subsidising low-income consumers, financing energy savings or financing complex, long-term electricity contracts. We usually don’t notice them at all; this summer we see them mainly because of a contract with the Millstone nuclear power plant that 600 million US dollars Payment – ​​this is not solely the fault of Eversource or UI.

And we notice above all that 600 million US dollars Payment that is slightly more than 4 cents per kilowatt hour for 10 months, about $300 in total for an average household – due to the heat waves in early summer.

“Look, the increase in your bill is largely due to the air conditioning running at full blast because we had the hottest July on record,” Lamont rightly said Tuesday.

Despite it, republican take advantage of the anger of voters, er, taxpayers.

“Today we are here to say that we are not going away,” said the Republican leader in the House of Representatives Candelora WineR-North Branfordhe said at the press conference. “What we’re hearing from voters is not, ‘I don’t want to pay my electric bill.’ It’s, ‘I can’t pay my electric bill.'”

Last month I drew criticism when I wrote that maybe we should find a way to use less air conditioning. Not none, just less, like in the days of yore when we weren’t addicted to cool air 24/7. Memorial Day To Labor Day. Was that insensitive? I’ll phrase it more nicely. Please try to find a way to use the air conditioning less. That goes for me too.

But okay, let’s say we scratched together 150 million US dollars of state funds. republican We want to use federal funds for the pandemic, but they are already allocated, and if we were to divert them, we would have other problems, such as rising tuition fees. But let’s assume we found them. That would increase the average Eversource bill by $9 one month for 10 months.

That’s not nothing. And it might be smart to do it. But ultimately, it’s just taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another.

The other ideas of republican These are all big-picture strategies that are well worth discussing, but they require much more than the quick solution of a one- or two-day special session that – for better or worse – comes at the exact time when parliamentarians are starting to campaign intensively in the autumn.

Sen. Ryan FazioR-Greenwichpoints out that, according to him, the state is about to pay three times the market price for a long-term wind energy contract. Therefore, haste is required.

Harding and Candelora declared that every Republican in the House of Representatives and Senate supports a special session. And they corrected themselves when they said that they had not received any response in all these weeks from Democrats. As luck would have it, Lamont sent a letter that reached their ears, 9:59 am Tuesdaya minute before they appeared before the reporters.

Lamont said in the letter that the problem is one of supply and demand: there is not enough cheap supply. That’s an oversimplification, of course, but the point is that the July electric bill shock we all experienced was only just the result of policy decisions, such as the government forcing electricity customers to pay for electric vehicle charging stations and giving cash to those who didn’t pay their electricity bills.

These controversial points are on our bills and should be discussed in more detail. But no, they do not drive up the rates to any significant extent. Not even close.

A special session before the start of the regular session in January seems unlikely. What this hot summer will bring is a greater focus on the many factors driving up electricity prices. That alone won’t bring prices down, but if it leads to the kind of bipartisan cooperation we saw in 2017 during the state budget crisis, it’s a start.

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