This commentary is by Jock Gill of Peacham, an internet communications consultant who served in President Bill Clinton’s Office of Media Affairs. He is town energy coordinator in Peacham.

An article April 19 in VTDigger discussed the Department of Public Service’s recommended cuts in net metering rates. It quotes T.J. Poor, director of the department’s Regulated Utility Planning Division: ”Maintaining low electric rates for ratepayers could incentivize Vermonters to make more general transitions to electricity. We want to make sure that that economic proposition to switch fuels is there for people to decide on their own, and that should lower the cost of our transition altogether.” 

While the goal of affordable energy is laudable, it misses the key question: Is there a set of regulations, policies and incentives that would offer much less expensive electricity than is presently offered by the legacy utilities with their obsolete hardware? 

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The answer is: Yes. 

Sound regulatory policy should encourage customers to either go off the grid as much as possible or, where transmission is sufficient, to share energy to the grid to benefit all. This would reduce the need for new or upgraded transmission systems and would create a hybrid electrification model, both on and off the grid, based on local generation and storage. 

Batteries, combined with solar and wind, are an essential enabling technology. The combination is much greater than the sum of the parts. A residence would, in this model, be connected to the grid only to send electricity to the grid if the batteries were full, or to recharge the batteries when necessary.

This arrangement would turn the current model on its head: The grid would become the backup rather than the primary source of electricity. Instead, the grid would receive as much energy as possible from self-powered residences. 

The goal would be to maximize the amount of energy sent to the grid and minimize the amount of energy taken from the grid. This would help the grid meet demand for enough clean, renewable energy for 100,000 new heat pumps and electric vehicles. 

This more affordable electricity would make getting to an all-electric decarbonized future easier and much more likely. Clearly, it would be better to heat our homes with low-cost electricity rather than oil at $6 or more per gallon.

Unfortunately, the Vermont Climate Action Plan makes matters worse. It gives short — or no — shrift to storage in any form, much less to vehicles with V2X (Vehicle to Anything) capacity. As, for example, the new Ford F150 Lightning can be configured to power your house. 

Why the Climate Action Plan fails to recognize batteries as strategic tools for dealing with our climate emergency is a mystery. It is worth noting that America’s largest home builder will be building 200,000 homes with batteries included. Why not in Vermont?

If the Public Utility Commission and the Department of Public Service want to provide the most affordable electricity, then they need to enable citizens to use the least expensive sources of energy: renewable wind and solar combined with local storage. This will require new and innovative policies and regulations.

In the cause of equity and social justice, the state or the utilities should offer “Pay As You Save” financing, or some equivalent, so all Vermonters can have the benefits of solar generation and battery storage. 

The world is spending trillions of dollars subsidizing fossil energy that is destroying our environment. Why not redirect those subsidy dollars to fund the transition to clean, renewable energy for all? Isn’t it time to invest in the future we want?

Can this work? I know it can because I was recently able to test it at my home. Thanks to Tesla’s forward-looking hardware and software, I was able to go off the grid for 18 hours. In the daylight, even on a cloudy day, the batteries became fully recharged while simultaneously powering the house. At that point, I went back on grid to have a place to send the electricity coming from my solar panels. Once the solar panels stopped producing, I took the house off the grid once again. Of course, this could all be automated, as Tesla has done. 

This is a better path to the affordable electricity desired by the Public Utility Commission and the Department of Public Service. It would also help reduce the high cost of living in Vermont. Only old policies and regulations stand in the way.

My solar system, even at a cost of $3-plus per installed watt, lets me lock in a fixed price per kWh for 25 years: $0.113 per kWh (14.5 cents before any subsidies). This is much lower than current utility charges. If the cost per installed watt were in fact $1, as it is today in Australia, my cost would be around 5 cents per kWh produced. 

We need to ask why it costs over $3 per installed watt in Vermont but only $1 per installed watt in Australia, despite similar technologies in both places. The difference is that Australia has put in place regulations and policies that allow the price per watt to be just $1.

If the Public Utility Commission and the Department of Public Service truly want the most affordable electricity for all Vermonters, they have to liberate Vermonters from the utility monopolies, whose outdated technologies produce the most expensive electricity. 

As Saul Griffith points out, even if utilities had zero cost for generating stations and zero cost for fuel, their transmission and their distribution costs would still make their electricity more expensive than the lowest-cost locally generated and stored energy. Why not make this low-cost approach a goal in the next 10 years?

Of course, in this new and/both hybrid model, we would still need to pay the utilities to maintain and improve their wired grid. This should help the utilities unlock their grid capacity limits.

The hardware and software technologies for lower-cost distributed electricity and storage have converged and are now available. It is time to leverage this new possibility. It is past time to stop forcing consumers to subsidize high-cost legacy electrical systems and protect outmoded systems from competition. What is missing today are the policies and regulations to support what is now possible. 

It is time to embrace a renewable and distributed energy system. A first step in this transition might be to convene a yearlong investigation, such as the 5270 process that led to the creation of Efficiency Vermont, on how to assist all Vermonters to move to a hybrid energy approach. 

We can choose to do this. The question is will we?

Saul Griffith presentation to Burlington Electric

History: how to halve the cost of residential solar

Quoted average prices for solar installations

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