 This is Bill Doyle on Vermont Issues and with me is Sophie Kersen and we'll do that doing it together. And tell us something about yourself and how I make sure I pronounce your name correctly. Okay. It's Avram. I'm Avram Pat. I live in Worcester and we're talking about some energy issues today and I think the reason I'm here is because I was involved, still am, but I was involved in my work for many, many years on energy issues. For about 16 years I was the general manager of Washington Electric Co-op. I retired in the middle of 2013 and before that I worked in state government where I dealt with running the low income weatherization program and also a lot to do with energy and fuel assistance, helping people pay for energy you can't afford to. So that's my background. Like I said, I retired from the co-op job and I did spend two years in the legislature as well and I'm running for office again in the house. Good. Avram? Avram? Avram. Okay, I want to make sure. People call me either one and that's fine. Okay. I'm used to it. Well, we've had a long unproductive relationship between the two of us and I admire what you've done with your life. Thank you. And I'm saying to you, Bill. We're here to talk about net metering so why don't you start off by saying what is net metering? Explain what net metering and why it's important. Okay. Net metering is one way of generating renewable energy. It is where the individual or groups of customers of a utility put up very small scale renewable energy generation at their home or their business and the energy that's generated by that is credited against their bill so that they actually in effect are selling back renewable energy to the utility. It's very important and I'll get to this later that this is very much integrated and connected with the utility grid because it's always been possible not always but since we've had solar panels for someone to be off grid to not have be a utility customer at all. Net metering is where you're connected to the grid. The economics and how it gets paid for is very much tied to being connected to the grid and the utility. It's mostly almost entirely solar and I just looked up some numbers the other day. In Vermont right now there are over 6,800 net metering customers who are generating power through solar panels and there's only you can also net meter with small scale wind, much smaller towers, farm methane or even small scale hydro but there's really maybe a little bit over 200 of those different types across the whole state whereas solar is by far the most popular and in the last few years has the number of people has grown very dramatically. It's also possible to do what's called group net metering if someone doesn't have a good site or doesn't own a good site either on their roof or their land they can be part of a group that is net metering from a somewhat larger project with many solar panels so let's say 30 different people are getting a piece of the generation from this one project. Those are ones that you typically if you're driving by them you'll see a field with a lot of solar panels and that's serving a larger number of customers. Are those set up by the electric companies? No, although there are some electric companies that have built their own solar generating there are quite a few companies in Vermont mostly Vermont based not entirely that are in the business of putting up solar panels and in some cases offering people financing mechanisms that allow them to get involved in net metering without having to put money up front. It's expensive to buy the equipment and install it and in the past that was a stopper for a lot of people that either had to have the money or be able to take out a loan in a pretty large amount. Now some companies offer a different way of just starting to be involved without having to put money up front. So that makes it much easier. But it is private businesses, developers that are selling a product and the installation of the system. Can you tell them about your legislative experience? Are you running for the legislature? I am running for the legislature. What do you hope to accomplish? What do you hope to accomplish as a legislator? What do you hope to accomplish? Well, I am interested in continuing to see that Vermont attempt really pushes to achieve its goals of significantly more renewable energy than we have now. We're already somewhat of a leader nationally in that but we're not where we should be. What my other issues have to do with economic fairness and taxes and things like that and in healthcare is the issue that I've cared about since my father, who was an old school family doctor, talked to me about it when Medicare was first started back in the 1960s. Thank you for being with us today. Bill, we still have some questions. I just want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your past service and your future service. Thanks, Bill. Let's talk about net metering, which is bringing this together. How much is there in Vermont and can anybody be a net meter? I did mention some of that. I think I'll talk about some of the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of small scale net metering compared to some of the big projects. The advantage of net metering, which like I said a few minutes ago is almost entirely solar, is that you can put up solar panels almost anywhere. You can put them on your roof if it's facing in the right direction. You can put it on a pedestal in your yard. You can put it in a neighbor's yard. You can have a group of people put up panels together. They can go almost anywhere where there's enough daylight exposure. The other advantage in this kind of arrangement is that the utility customers, the people using the electricity, actually have a strong sense of connection to the fact that the energy they're using is renewable. They have the connection because there are the panels on their roof or out in their yard. It's something that they did rather than it just being delivered to them. I think for a lot of people that's important. The disadvantage compared to very large solar farms that take up lots of fields and lots of bakers or wind projects, which in Vermont as we know are huge towers that have to be put on ridgeline because that's where the wind is. They're very, very visible, whether it's a wind project or a very large solar project. They're very, very visible. All of these things have an environmental impact of some kind. They use land. They require construction. But a large commercial scale wind project, even though it's visible from miles away, uses far less land on the ground for the same amount of electricity produced. I'm familiar from my past work with the Sheffield wind project that Washington Electric Co-op takes a piece of the power from. That has 14 of those giant towers. But the total amount of land taken up by that project on the ground itself is 26 acres. To generate the same amount of electricity from solar panels, you would need, at least when I calculated this about 8 or 10 years ago, you would need 300 or 400 acres of solar panels, just the panels themselves. That's the advantage and disadvantage that I see. Large projects can be controversial inciting them. Someone putting up solar panels on their roof or in their yard is usually not controversial. I think those are the advantages and disadvantages. You can generate a lot more electricity with a lot less space, with a big project at a lower cost, but you don't have the kind of personal connection to it. You are going to run into controversies around siting and maybe having to build new transmission lines to get to the project and things like that. I'd like to thank Sophie Kirscher for being here today. Please, you have the first question. I'm curious about public resource. As a town, Barry put in a couple of these solar fields in the last few years. I'm wondering if that was a municipal project for the community to bolster its resources, or if it was privatized within the community, or if it's just completely of its own. I don't know specifically about those projects. I'll give you an example, though. There is a project being considered in Worcester where I live now, and I went to a meeting about it. One of the things that would happen if this gets built is that the public facilities, the municipal and school buildings in town, would be getting a piece of that electricity. Well, they would be more generated than those buildings use so that it would be sold to other customers as well. In Barry, I don't know that could be a group in that metering projects. It could be commercial. I haven't read just in the news that the municipality is actually the developer of the project. I was wondering about that. And in the Worcester project, has the conversation of solar versus wind versus hydro been an issue, or are people just going for solar? In this case, it's solar because that's what's doable. There really isn't a larger scale wind site available. And the river isn't wide enough or something right there? No, it's the north branch of the Winooski, which is generating electricity a few miles south at the Wrightsville Reservoir, which is a Washington Electric Co-op hydro plant. So while there are some old dams, they're really not of a scale that if you wanted to get them back in service, I don't think they generate a whole lot of electricity. So the one at Wrightsville, when was that initially created? Do you know? Yes. The dam was built after the 1927 flood by the Civilian Conservation Corps, same time as the Waterbury Reservoir more or less, as a flood control to protect Montpelier from that happening again. The hydro plant was not put in until the 1980s, and that was originally a couple of local hydro pioneers, Matt Rubin and John Warshaw, who built a lot of other facilities, had the rights to that, decided not to develop that one, and so the co-op took it over, and it's a small plant. But has it been running since... It's running all the time. Before we go any further, I want Sophie Kersen to introduce herself. Oh, Bill, you're so sweet. Let's get on with the questions. Everybody already knows me. No, I want you to introduce yourself. Okay. My name is Sophie Bettman Kersen, and I was born and raised around here, and I am very deeply committed to the health and well-being of this community and those surrounding it, and so it's a great honor to work with Bill in being able to contact and question our local authorities on things of great interest to all of us. I want to thank you guys both very much for this opportunity. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thanks for being here, Sophie. Thanks. Come from both of us, too. Talk about net... What is net-matering? Well, we already went through that. I think what I wanted to talk a little bit about... Go ahead. ...is the one area that's been controversial with the sources of some disagreements over the years is exactly how net-matering gets paid for, because that's changed a number of times. And I'll talk a little bit about it. It used to be very early on that when we described net-metering and said what it does... And this was before people had what we now call smart meters, that had the old meters with a disk that spun around. And what we basically said was when you're net-metering, when your solar panels are generating electricity, it's actually spinning the meter the other way and physically spinning the meter the other way and making less and less kilowatt hours showing up on the meter. So to the utility, it simply looked like you were using almost no or maybe no electricity. But you're still paying a flat. Every utility has a flat, what's called the customer charge that pays for some of the fixed costs of the utility. Like $30 a month or something. Well, in Vermont it's mostly less than that right now, although some are proposing that they need to raise that up a little bit. And anyone... Do you net-matering? Yeah, so over time with changes in the law and regulations in Vermont, instead of just spinning the meter backwards, a financial $1 value was actually attached to each kilowatt hour generated and you got a credit of that amount against your bill. And it became possible for a while to completely zero out your bill, including that flat customer charge. And the utilities were saying, wait a minute, this whole system of net-metering is dependent on us being here, on having the poles and wires up, on having line workers go out and put the lines back up after an ice storm and all of those costs. And so there's been a number of changes, including one this year, that affect how much the value, financial value each kilowatt hour is worth to the customer. And it's gone down a little bit and the people in the business of selling net-metering who would want to do more of that aren't happy with that. Most of the utilities have been on the other side and the Vermont Public Utilities Commission recently, I would say, came down somewhat in the middle and said, okay, we do need to strike a somewhat different balance financially because it was beginning, because net-metering is so popular in Vermont now that it was actually having an impact, a real impact on rates. And particularly on people who, for whatever reason, are not net-metering. And that's been the balance. And I think that for utilities in Vermont, the amount of net-metering it varies differently by different utility, but is approaching 15% of their peak load. That's how it's measured. When I first, back in 2013, a few months before I left, I wrote a letter to the public service board saying Washington Electric Co-op had passed the 4% cap that was in law at that point that said a utility shouldn't take more than 4% of its peak load in net-metering and the co-op was the first utility that went past that number. And so that's been raised now up to 15% and utilities are starting to approach that. That's great. Yeah, on the one hand, it's successful. It's having very beneficial financial arrangements for the net-metering customers certainly helped encourage people to do that. And on the other hand, the balance swings the other way and it starts hurting financially in other ways. So I think that's a balance that this discussion is not over. And as someone who worked at a utility, I've had my opinions, but I can also effectively argue with the other side of that as well. It's not either or. It's finding a balance and probably needing to adjust that over time. You used the phrase zero out the bill. How many do all the customers zero out the bill? They can't now. For a period of time, they could zero out both the value of their electric usage, the kilowatt hour charge, as well as the flat customer charge. Now, the customer charge is called a non-bipassable charge which means you have to pay that and then you get a credit against the energy part of your bill. But it's also complicated because the arrangement has changed a few times. So if someone started net-metering at a time when this was the payment scheme, they will continue that for a period of time. You can't just get away from them what they signed up for. So you have groups of people who are getting paid in different rate structures depending on when they first started participating. Do other states do this? Many other states do. And many, the payment arrangements can be different, but it's quite common. I'm not sure whether it's in every state. I don't think it is. I think in some states, the utilities have fought this much more than in Vermont. Why would they fight it? Because they saw it as bad for business. And in Vermont, utilities are people, too. And I think the attitude and the understanding about the need for promoting more renewables was accepted by most of the people in the utilities in Vermont, as well. So it becomes an issue of, is how we're paying for it fair or does that need to be adjusted from time to time? Sophie, do you have any questions? You're like this. Well, it seems that this is a sort of an issue that's happening in several areas. It's happening in cable, television, the transfer of information, the transfer of electricity or energy. And I'm interested in the question about how to maintain the usage, but also how to provide the things that you want to provide as individuals to the communities that have been receiving them without losing. There's no doubt, and I know that people throughout the utility industry know that things, the business is changing. It has been changing. It's continuing to change. It's not the old model where you put up lines. You got wholesale sources of electricity. You get it out and people pay for it. Now it's much more dispersed, decentralized. There's generation happening at people's homes and much smaller generators dispersed throughout the system. And how we pay for it is also changing. The other thing that's changing is that for years and years, we talked about using less electricity. Washington Electric Co-op, certainly. Now, if we want to get off of fossil fuels and stop driving gasoline-fueled cars or using oil for heat, we're electrifying. We're encouraging people to do that with electricity. The only issue then is it doesn't do us any good the climate and the planet unless that electricity is renewable energy. If the electricity is being generated by coal, then why encourage people to get electric vehicles? If the electricity comes from a combination of their own solar panels and other larger renewable sources, then yes, we are definitely doing a good thing by encouraging people to make that switch. How many people are involved in renewability? In Vermont? Yes. Well, just in the solar business, I don't have the number, but there's thousands of people now. This has become a significant new employer, not one employer, but a number of businesses, larger and smaller ones throughout Vermont. And of course, there were people who were operating some of the larger facilities, wind projects and hydro projects and things like that in Vermont. Do you see more wind projects coming to central Vermont or to Vermont in general? I stuck my neck out when I was at Washington Electric Co-op in the middle of the wind energy debate and said things like what I said earlier about there were certain advantages to this, but also if we're serious about moving towards renewable energy, then we're going to have to look at it. We can't, for years, if you asked people in meetings and forums, I went to where's your electricity come from and they tell me the name of their utility and I say no, that's not what I meant. I know where your utility gets their electricity from, but to you and they didn't. It came from an outlet in the wall basically. So if we can't dramatically change where our power comes from, unless we're willing to accept it in our landscape, provided that it's responsibly developed and done in the right places and all of that. So I've been a supporter of wind projects in Vermont and there aren't that many ridgeline sites in Vermont that are feasible or appropriate and near existing transmission lines. You can have a site with great wind, but if it's 20 miles from the nearest transmission line, that's not possible. And there's nothing on Lake Champlain that would be windy enough? No, actually. That's so wild. The wind, if you think about it, the wind comes from the west. It hits the Adirondacks and it goes up and so when it's crossing over Vermont, it's at a high altitude. And so that's where the steady, consistent wind is up high as opposed to if we were in South Dakota or West Texas in the Flatlands, the wind is coming over a thousand miles from the Pacific and you're out in the prairies and that's where the wind is. Does Vermont have a goal on renewability? A what? A goal. Where would they like to go? I don't remember the number, but it's a very high goal to reach, not just for electricity but for all energy uses including transportation and heat by 2050. I really don't remember the numbers, but they have set goals. It's very set goals. And actually the biggest challenge is not in electricity but it's in transportation because we're a rural state and people travel in cars longer distances and don't have other ways right now of getting around other than getting in their car and driving there. So the challenge is to change the vehicles over gradually to electric vehicles. I saw in the news that Central Vermont, the GMTA, the public transit provider is getting funding to switch over at least some of their vehicles to electric buses. That's big deal. A few years ago electric vehicles, buses and trucks were not ready for prime time yet to try doing that with larger vehicles. Five, six years later it works and it may not be ready for prime time on the hill we live on in Worcester yet but I have a feeling five years from now it probably will be. Things are moving quickly. Sophie, have you had any experience in electric cars? Bill and I bought an electric car a year ago. We've put almost 16,000 miles on it in one year and it's a great local commuter and so I get about 70 miles distance in a one nights charge and basically I can go get Bill, we go do our morning projects, go have a nice lunch, go home, have a beautiful afternoon and I can make it home usually without having to charge. Sometimes maybe once a week I get stuck where I need to charge before I can get home. Now to talk about savings. We love it and I save about $100 a week in gas. Charging is, I also just saw in the news that there's some funding, I think Governor Scott had it. He did, $1.4 million? Yeah. Yesterday. For putting out more charging stations. Charging stations, yeah. Right now that's the, it's not just charging stations but most charging stations, if you're plugging it at home, you're charging in a very slow kind of trickle. 12 hours. Right. And people who are traveling can't do that. You need 15 minute max. Yeah. We need to get to where it's the equivalent of pulling into a gas station. Yeah. And a few minutes later you leave and you can go another 300 miles. Any other thoughts? No, but I think we're good. Right? Do you have some more thoughts on the subject? No. For questions? What I have in mind is both of us would like to thank you for the work that you do. Thank you. And for being here today. Thank you. Good to, you know, I did want to, I meant to say when I was introducing myself and I'll just say this, that any opinions I expressed here are, since I, you know, I learned much of this when I was at Washington Electric Co-op but I have not been there for a few years so the opinions are my own and I'm not speaking for the co-op. We appreciate you bringing them to the table as a member of the community then. And a consumer yourself. So that, you know, that part of it I think is fascinating. Any further questions? I think we got it. We both thank you for the work you did. Thank you. Thank you, Avram. Thank you for inviting me. And thank you, Bill, for having us. Yes. On your show. Thanks for setting it up, Sophie. It's a pleasure.