After setbacks to adopting electric vehicle sales targets in Maine and Connecticut, New England clean transportation advocates are regrouping with a focus on charging infrastructure and consumer education. 

Maine’s Board of Environmental Protection voted 4-2 on March 20 against adopting California’s Advanced Clean Cars II rules, which would have required electric or plug-in hybrids to make up 82% of new vehicle sales in the state by model year 2032.

Board members initially signaled support for the proposal, which came from a citizen petition last spring, before their first planned vote was delayed by a severe storm in December. 

Last November, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, pulled a comparable proposal from legislative consideration after it was not expected to have the votes to pass.

Neither state had opted to consider California’s Advanced Clean Trucks standard, which sets similar targets for heavy-duty vehicle sales. 

Maine and Connecticut are among more than a dozen states that have had earlier versions of California’s clean car standards on the books for years. Both states have also prioritized transportation emissions, the region’s biggest contributor to global warming, in their climate plans. 

Some advocates fear progress in this sector will stall in these states until they adopt the updated California rules. They say debate over the standards was clouded by false and misleading claims, often pushed by fossil fuel industry groups, that have ramped up as part of the 2024 presidential campaign. 

“It was really an attempt to confuse and agitate consumers, and unfortunately it was successful,” said Charles Rothenberger, the climate and energy attorney at the Connecticut nonprofit Save the Sound. 

Fear of ‘losing ground’

Even if Connecticut or Maine successfully revisits adopting the California rules next year, it would likely push implementation out to model year 2029 at the earliest, advocates said. 

States that don’t use the new California standards will default to federal rules for reducing vehicle emissions. These rules were just overhauled but have a slower timeline than California’s, designed to accommodate states with lower EV sales rates than in much of New England, Rothenberger said.

“Standards that really cater to the laggards when it comes to EV adoption are really not beneficial to states that are well ahead of that curve,” he said. “I fear that it will lead to us losing ground to states that continue with the California standards,” such as Massachusetts and New York, Rothenberger added. 

This could mean less choice and supply for both new and used electric vehicles as carmakers focus on those other states, he said. 

In the meantime, Connecticut EV advocates are backing a bill in the General Assembly to allow state bonds for charging infrastructure and EV incentives and create an Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Coordinating Council to work with utility regulators on system planning, among other provisions. 

Peter LaFond, the Maine program director for the Acadia Center, a regional nonprofit, said the delay in adopting California’s rules provides time for combating misconceptions and for utilizing increasing state and federal funds for charging infrastructure. 

“Every month that goes by, I think there’ll be more and more chargers, and once there are, I think people will see the clear advantages,” LaFond said. “(EVs and plug-in hybrids) lower the carbon footprint and they’re less expensive to operate, and the cold doesn’t present as much of a challenge as the misinformation would have you believe. I think education is going to be a big part of this.” 

A snowball effect in rural areas

Scott Vlaun, the executive director of the Center for an Ecology-Based Economy, a nonprofit in the small western Maine town of Norway, said he sees a snowball effect of EV acceptance in his region.

“It’s happening, it’s just not happening fast enough,” Vlaun said. “This is the future, and if Maine doesn’t get its share, then … we’re going to be kind of stuck — in, especially rural Maine — with people driving beat-up, old, inefficient cars, and it’s not good for anybody.” 

CEBE has led a push for a large public EV charger network in and around Norway, which Vlaun said has helped make EVs and hybrids a more common sight everywhere from Main Street to nearby ski resorts. 

“We do this annual EV expo, and if you get people driving an F-150 Lightning, or a Chevy Bolt, depending on what their needs are, they get it,” he said. “So much of the misinformation — it’s almost comical, because it’s obvious that these people have never gotten behind the wheel of an electric car.” 

Vlaun was speaking from his own EV parked at a public charger outside CEBE’s office, having just driven back from a meeting in Portland, Maine, about an hour away. He said he would have liked to take a train or bus instead of driving, but doesn’t have an easy option for doing so. 

“We don’t see electric cars as a one-to-one replacement for gas cars,” he said. “We see electric vehicles as an interim step and a better solution to individual transportation than gas-powered vehicles — not the answer to the world’s transportation problems by any stretch.” 

Advocates in Connecticut agreed that encouraging cleaner public transit, more walkable cities and less driving overall is as much or more important to reducing transportation emissions as EV adoption. 

Community health impacts

Those emissions are linked to disproportionate asthma rates, low school test scores and other adverse public health ripple effects in Connecticut, said Dr. Mark Mitchell, the co-chair of the Connecticut Equity and Environmental Justice Advisory Council. 

“The people who have the least ability to afford cars and to drive suffer the most from the pollution caused by cars, and so we need to change that — we need to invest in public transportation and making cities walkable and bikeable,” he said. “We’re not going to get rid of cars… but we should make sure that the cars that drive through our communities are as clean as possible, as quickly as possible.” 

Mitchell said he lives in an especially low-income part of Hartford, the state capital — one of the lowest-income cities on the East Coast, with a mostly Black and Latino population. Mitchell said many of his neighbors don’t drive at all and can’t afford new cars, so they don’t yet “see themselves in EVs.” 

“But that’s not the point,” he said. “The point is that they’re very concerned about asthma, they’re very concerned about ADHD, they’re very concerned about school test scores.”

EV adoption across the state is one solution to those problems, he said.  

Jayson Velazquez, the Acadia Center’s Hartford-based climate and energy justice policy associate, used the term “through-emissions” to describe pollution from diesel trucks and other vehicles that traverse low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in Connecticut’s cities en route to nearby highways. 

Unlike those vehicles and their non-local drivers, Velazquez said, “the lasting health effects that come from that pollution don’t just get up and go.” 

Despite concerns about misinformation, advocates acknowledged that they share certain concerns with opponents of the California rules — such as affordability, charging access, the sustainability of minerals mining to build batteries, and strain on the power grid from increasing EV use. 

“There are real issues,” said Mitchell. “We do need to build up the infrastructure, both the charging infrastructure and the electric grid. … But until we set goals, we don’t know how quickly we need to do that. And it’s much easier to put things off if you don’t have a goal.”

Amid progress on electric vehicles, political setbacks frustrate advocates in Maine, Connecticut is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Correction: Connecticut’s Innovative Energy Solutions Program is working with the consulting firm Strategen. An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the program and firm. Also, the participating company Kraken is not affiliated with the similarly named cryptocurrency company.

Connecticut regulators have approved the first round of pilot projects in a new program aimed at accelerating innovation across the electric grid. 

Seven tech companies have received the go-ahead to partner with utilities Eversource or United Illuminating to test the potential of their hardware or software to help decarbonize the state’s electric grid. 

The Innovative Energy Solutions Program is part of a broader effort by the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) to modernize the grid. It encourages utilities to embrace new technology while limiting the risk to ratepayers. 

The selected companies were winnowed from an initial 50 applications. While some of the technologies have been deployed successfully elsewhere, none have been tested in Connecticut, said Julia Dumaine, PURA’s supervisor of strategy and operations. The projects, funded at a total of just under $10 million, were chosen after a multi-step review process that included scrutiny from a nine-member advisory council. 

“Having these increasingly stringent reviews minimizes ratepayer risk,” Dumaine said. “These are technologies that have demonstrated the potential to provide real ratepayer and grid-level benefits.”

None are startups in the research and development phase — they are all prepared to scale up at a later date, she said.

After the pilots launch, each company has a set of metrics they must meet and will be required to report on them quarterly, said Eli Asher, a senior manager at Strategen, the consulting firm responsible for developing and administering the program. 

“We will be gathering data on how effective the projects are,” he said. “At the end of the deployment period, we’ll have a cost-benefit analysis to inform the recommendations as to whether they should be fully deployed at scale across the state.”

The program allows the utilities to recover their costs for testing these new technologies, something they might be reluctant to do otherwise.

“I think it’s great to have regulators backing a program like this,” said Alex Ghanem, commercial manager for Piclo, one of the companies participating. “It’s a risk to test things out and it costs the utilities resources to do so. I think this is a great framework.”

Based in London, England, Piclo will work with United Illuminating to launch a grid flexibility market. They will recruit owners, operators and managers of any type of distributed energy resource — battery storage, electric vehicles, and other types of dispatchable power sources commonly known as DERs — to operate in an independent marketplace in return for compensation.

Piclo will work with DER aggregators on their platform. They will provide United Illuminating with local flexible DERs that represent alternative — and ideally, cheaper — places to buy energy than on the wholesale market when the utility has insufficient supply to meet customer demand. 

Piclo is already operating in New York in partnership with National Grid. 

“The penetration of DERs is disrupting the grid and the utilities need to pull on multiple different levers to manage that,” said John Bayard, Piclo’s chief commercial officer. “Grid flexibility marketplaces are one of the tools they can use.”

Another British company, Kraken, will also work with United Illuminating to help them better manage DERs. 

Kraken’s platform “can connect to any kind of DER — electric vehicles, heat pumps, smart thermostats,” said Devrim Celal, chief executive officer. “We can connect to them in an effective way, monitor them in real time and control what they do.”

This pilot will focus on customers that use heat pumps and drive electric vehicles. The company will recruit ratepayers to sign up to use their mobile app, which will give Kraken access to their DERs. For example, they might tell the company what kind of EV and charger they have, and what time of day they need to have their car charged by. 

“We will determine when is the best time to charge their cars to achieve low-carbon emission targets, and in exchange we’ll give them a reward,” Celal said. 

The pilot is intended to help the grid run greener and more cheaply.

An EV charging software company called AmpUp will work with Eversource to try to balance electricity demand during peak periods by decreasing load at electric vehicle chargers. Based in Santa Clara, Calif., AmpUp will provide incentives to compensate charging station owners for decreasing charging during peak periods. 

They are still working out what level of incentive might stimulate participation, as well as whether it might appeal to a workplace with four chargers as much as to a company operating a fleet of vehicles, said Matt Bloom, director of partnerships.

“We’re really excited,” he said. “It’s good to see the regulators take a little risk. This is a good way to innovate, see what we learn and whether it’s something Eversource could adopt long term.”

Connecticut will tap clean energy technology to find emission-cutting efficiencies on grid is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Connecticut’s utilities commission is the latest to begin offering payments to help environmental justice and ratepayer groups participate in regulatory proceedings. 

The Stakeholder Group Compensation Program was required to take effect this month as part of an energy consumer protection bill passed by the state legislature last year. It seeks to encourage more diverse engagement in proceedings on utility regulation, which can set direction for grid resiliency, rate relief, clean energy development, corporate accountability, storm response and more. 

In a Jan. 3 decision and new online guidance, the state’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) says each eligible stakeholder group can apply for up to $100,000 at a time. Each docket is limited to $300,000 in funding across all groups, with $1.2 million total available per year. 

The program covers groups and nonprofits representing at least one of a few types of utility customers: a person living in a designated environmental justice community; a “hardship” case, defined as someone seeking to reinstate shut-off electric or gas service in winter who cannot pay their bill; or a small business. 

“The process of engaging with proceedings at public utility commissions across the nation is historically exclusive,” wrote Jayson Velazquez, the climate and energy justice policy associate with the nonprofit Acadia Center, in comments on the PURA docket creating the new program. “Compensation can play a significant role in ensuring diverse stakeholders are included in proceedings, specifically at PURA.” 

Groups that might use the program say this approach, which has also been contemplated at the federal level, is an important step forward — and they argue that more can be done to encourage inclusive engagement in regulators’ work on climate and economic justice issues. 

Balancing the voices at the table

Mark LeBel, a senior associate with the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonprofit energy consulting firm, said the concept of intervenor compensation dates back decades and goes hand-in-hand with other consumer protection initiatives, like citizen utility boards and stronger ratepayer advocate offices. 

The idea is regaining steam amid a trend toward more attention on equity and the overall mechanics of utility regulation, LeBel said. 

“Each state spends implicitly millions of dollars to support utility regulatory participation,” he said. “It’s a perfectly reasonable idea to apply a version of that to other parties, including those in need.” 

Six states have similar, active programs: Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin and California, the largest such program in the country with $10 to $15 million in payouts per year, according to a 2021 report from the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. A handful of other states have authorized such a program but don’t use it in practice, the report said. 

Perfecting the scope of these programs can be tricky, LeBel said. In designing rules and setting funding levels, legislators and regulators may choose either to target money narrowly to the groups that need it most — or to cast a wider net to a range of stakeholders.

Lillian Brough, associate director of the Connecticut-based energy nonprofit Efficiency For All, noted this trade-off as she reviewed the new PURA program’s details. 

Brough said her organization’s executive director Leticia Colon de Mejias, a longtime Connecticut environmental justice advocate, has participated in several PURA proceedings over the years, but they don’t have designated staff or resources for this complex work and can’t currently prioritize it as a result. 

This means the new compensation program could greatly benefit Efficiency For All in theory, Brough said, especially “if we were fully funded in other areas,” such as in their energy efficiency workforce training program. 

Barriers to accessing aid

In practice, however, Brough saw a range of barriers to actually applying for and using the new funding to participate in PURA work — including a tight application window of two weeks at the beginning of a case, potentially onerous rules for proving a group needs funding up-front rather than reimbursement after the fact, and the challenge of writing an itemized budget ahead of time with limited PURA experience. 

“How am I supposed to know my budget if I don’t know how much lawyers are going to cost, how many hours it’s going to take, how many people — I don’t know unless I’ve already participated,” Brough said. 

In its online guidance, PURA says the new funding may be used for “reasonable attorneys’ fees, reasonable expert witness fees and other reasonable costs for preparation and participation in Authority proceedings.” 

In all, Brough felt the new program would fit best for larger or better funded organizations — those with firsthand knowledge of what participation requires, such as hiring attorneys and expert witnesses or translating questions and comments in and out of regulatory jargon. In some states, like California, certain frequent utility intervenors make this kind of funding a major recurring part of their budgets. 

Though the PURA program nominally seeks to benefit the ratepayers and communities that are the most disenfranchised, Brough argued that many smaller groups representing these people may be too overstretched to even navigate the application process.

In the Acadia Center’s comments on the new program’s docket, Velazquez said PURA should also begin a broader look at equity and inclusion across all of its work, similar to a docket now underway in Hawaii. 

‘Substantial contributions’ required 

Brough also raised concerns about what LeBel of the Regulatory Assistance Project said is a relatively common feature of these compensation schemes: To get paid, groups must make a “substantial contribution” to the proceeding. 

The PURA order creating the program says regulators will define this case-by-case, but emphasizes an intervenor’s active engagement throughout the process and its capacity to provide “unique or meaningful” facts and perspectives — contributions that “substantially assist the Authority in its decision making.” 

Brough said she would worry about subjective interpretations of this leading to further disenfranchisement: “Like, ‘you came to all the meetings, but you didn’t say as much as we wanted, or we didn’t agree with you, or you caused a ruckus, so you can’t have the money.’ So that’s a problem.” 

LeBel said ideally such requirements as part of these programs will be relatively loose and forgiving, a low bar designed to prevent funds from going to waste. 

PURA’s order points to the program’s basis in utility rates in explaining this approach: “The cost of stakeholder group compensation is ultimately borne by ratepayers, and the substantial contribution requirement ensures that the interests of customers are meaningfully being represented in exchange for that compensation,” the commissioners wrote in their order. 

In their comments on the docket, Connecticut’s utilities sought more clarity on the timing of this cost recovery process and its application to gas companies as compared to electric utilities. PURA did not appear to adopt the utilities’ requested changes on this issue in its final order. 

“While PURA did not grant our reasonable request on full cost recovery, we look forward to having more stakeholders participate in the regulatory process and share their views, as we always value and appreciate feedback from our customers,” said Eversource spokesperson Jamie Ratliff in a statement. 

The Connecticut gas and electric companies owned by Avangrid, including United Illuminating, said in a statement from spokesperson Sarah Wall Fliotsos that they “appreciate the creation of a program that will provide underrepresented groups greater voice in the important issues the energy industry currently faces, including grid modernization and the transition to a clean energy future.”

Connecticut program aims to alleviate cost barriers to utility oversight process, but challenges remain is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2023. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals. 

The operator of New England’s power grid should establish a new position to engage with low-income and minority communities unfairly burdened by pollution, five Northeast states said last week.

Such a role could serve as a “critical bridge” between ISO New England and the communities it serves as the Northeast looks to transition to cleaner energy resources, officials from Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, Maine and Connecticut said in a letter to the nonprofit grid operator. ISO New England oversees the flow of power in those states and in New Hampshire.

The independent system operator, or ISO, would be the first regional grid operator to establish an executive-level position focused on environmental justice, or the notion that no one should be subject to disproportionate and excessive pollution. The role could be carved out in the grid operator’s budget plan, according to the letter.

“We encourage ISO-NE to be first in this critical area,” state officials said in their letter.

As it evaluates the states’ request, ISO New England has added a “placeholder” in its 2024 budget proposal for an environmental justice position, grid operator spokesperson Mary Cate Mannion said in an email Friday. The grid operator, whose mission is primarily to ensure electric reliability, is eager to continue discussing environmental justice issues with the states, Mannion added.

“The ISO has been actively engaged in developing cost-effective and efficient solutions to ensure a clean and reliable energy future and [is] currently working on several initiatives to facilitate wholesale market participation and delivery of clean energy across the region,” Mannion said in an email.

While ISO New England does not permit or site energy infrastructure, it plays a role in planning where new transmission projects are developed. It also sets rules geared toward promoting reliable and affordable electricity that can influence what types of energy resources are built.

A senior environmental justice official at ISO New England could advise the organization’s board of directors on how its own rules and policies affect historically disadvantaged communities, the states said. The position could also help build relationships with those communities, officials suggested.

“As community engagement and responsibilities grow, this executive position could build out and manage additional team members providing EJ expertise to ISO-NE and enhancing community, government, and industry engagement,” state officials continued.

Signers of the letter include James Van Nostrand, chair of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities; Anthony Roisman, chair of the Vermont Public Utility Commission; Katie Dykes, commissioner at the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection; Christopher Kearns, acting commissioner in the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources; and Phil Bartlett, chair of the Maine Public Utilities Commission.

Phelps Turner, a senior attorney at the Maine-based Conservation Law Foundation, said that adding an environmental justice perspective to ISO New England’s senior leadership could have implications for electricity costs and the future energy resource mix.

Last year, 45 percent of the energy produced for electricity in the regional grid came from natural gas, according to the grid operator. All of the states signing the letter want to significantly expand renewable energy in New England and reduce the use of fossil fuels for electricity.

“Disproportionate air quality, environmental and human health impacts on low-income communities and communities of color often stem from our over-reliance in the region on fossil fuel-powered generation,” said Turner, who supports the states’ request for an environmental justice role.

“When the market design, as it has, favors fossil fuel generation and fails to create a level playing field for renewable generation, there are negative air quality impacts and resulting negative human health impacts on [nearby] populations,” Turner said.

ISO New England says it is committed to working with the states to meet their clean energy goals and integrate more solar and wind into the energy resource mix. It has also agreed to work with New England states in a joint effort with New Jersey and New York to identify transmission solutions for offshore wind projects.

Northeast grid operator weighs first environmental justice position is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Connecticut is about to adopt a new environmental justice mapping tool designed to infuse equity into policy-making and empower residents of overburdened communities in their efforts to prevent exposure to additional hazards and improve overall quality of life.

The mapping tool incorporates more than 50 different data sets to show which census tracts in the state are most at risk from pollution exposure, socioeconomic impacts and health disparities. 

“It will show which areas are highly likely to be impacted for any kind of environmental justice,” said Yaprak Onat, assistant director of research at the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation at the University of Connecticut, which is developing the tool in partnership with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. 

“Environmental activists know the issues in their neighborhoods,” she said. “They can use this tool to say, ‘Hey, here’s the data to back it up.’”

On Monday, the development team opened a two-week public comment period on the tool with an online demonstration of its capabilities. People can try out the tool in English or Spanish on the institute’s website and submit feedback. The final version will be released next month.

The main map presents an environmental justice index for the entire state. Clicking on an individual tract gives its ranking between 1 and 10, with 10 being the most highly impacted based on the cumulative effect of a host of factors.

There are myriad options for diving more deeply into the data by breaking out the individual risk factors. For example, the tracts can be represented according to the potential sources of pollution within their boundaries, such as brownfield sites, Superfund sites and incinerators. Tracts with the highest potential for pollution show up darker in color.

Tracts can also be viewed according to their vulnerability related to socioeconomic factors, such as poverty and race/ethnicity, and health disparities, such as asthma rates and elevated lead levels.

The data used — much of it from state agencies — isn’t anything new, but only specific people know of each set’s existence, Onat noted. 

“Now it’s going to be easily accessible so everybody can see the general picture,” she said.

Two years in the making, the tool came about through a recommendation contained in a 2021 report from the Governor’s Council on Climate Change. More specifically, the council’s Equity and Environmental Justice Working Group called for the development of the tool, which it said could be used in existing state programs, including the distribution of grant and bond funding. 

It was developed incorporating input from residents of environmental justice communities at a half-dozen public forums in which attendees could try out the tool on iPads. The developers also consulted a Mapping Tool Advisory Committee composed of people and organizations active in environmental justice work. 

At a May presentation of the tool to the Connecticut Equity and Environmental Justice Advisory Council, some environmental justice advocates expressed skepticism as to whether state agencies and lawmakers will actually incorporate the tool into their decision-making. Edith Pestana, administrator of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s environmental justice program, responded that the tool wasn’t developed “to just sit on a shelf.” 

“Hopefully,” she said, “this tool will make the case for legislators because they’ll have to see it. Some of them will type in their own neighborhoods and they’ll see they live in a dark blue area.”

Lynne Bonnett, a long-time environmental justice advocate who lives in New Haven, said the tool will be helpful, but only if it is used. 

“It is on paper and remains to be seen whether EJ communities will continue to bear the brunt of regional infrastructures that create harmful conditions for their residents,” Bonnett said in an email.

The tool can work in conjunction with the state’s newly updated environmental justice law, said Alex Rodriguez, environmental justice specialist with Save the Sound. Rodriguez and other advocates lobbied hard for the measure, which finally passed on the last day of the most recent legislative session after its scope was reduced.

The law (Public Act 23-202) authorizes the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the Connecticut Siting Council to deny or place conditions on a permit for new polluting facilities in environmental justice communities if the cumulative environmental and health impacts there exceed a threshold higher than impacts borne by other communities.

The bill’s original language also applied that authority to permit applications for the expansion of existing facilities, but that language was removed, Rodriguez said. 

“I think the tool is going to be needed for other policies as well,” he said. “It’s really going to force the state to look at the discrepancies in environmental protection across the state.” 

At Monday’s presentation, Pestana said that once the institute hands off the finished tool to the department next month, an environmental analyst will be assigned to manage it and keep the data up to date. 

“It is a living tool,” she said. “It is not stagnant.”

Connecticut mapping tool aims to bring visibility to environmental justice communities is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.