Today, nearly 70% of all Rhode Island bus riders are going to and from work or school. That’s why having good public transit is so important to growing Rhode Island’s economy.

Gas is nearly $4 a gallon and, as a result, more Rhode Islanders than ever are taking the RIPTA bus. Meanwhile, many of Rhode Island’s bridges (maintained by DOT) are unsafe, and we all know what the pot-holes in our local streets are like.

In 2011, the Rhode Island General Assembly had a chance to address both sides of the transportation issue – RIPTA and DOT – with the “Transportation Investment and Debt Reduction Act.” The General Assembly did a good job back then with the first half of the problem, the DOT part. Now it’s time for the legislature to help RIPTA. The right way to do that is to pass H-5073, also known as the O’Grady Bill, for one of its chief sponsors, Rep. Jay O’Grady.

The Transportation Investment and Debt Reduction Act, passed two years ago, provides a stable and secure source of funding for the DOT without burdening Rhode Island taxpayers with huge debt-service obligations. In the past, Rhode Island floated a bond issue of $80 million every two years to raise the local matching funds needed to bring hundreds of millions of dollars of federal highway funds into the state. This constant borrowing was unsustainable, and was saddling our children with huge debt-service costs. According to the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s Voter Guide, Rhode Island tax payers are now obligated to repay $59.85 million in debt service alone (over and above principal repayment of $80 million) on just the 2010 bond. The Transportation Investment and Debt Reduction Act ensured that DOT would be able to get its matching funds without bonding and without more debt service.

That law is now saving Rhode Island tax-payers tens of millions of dollars over the life of those bonds. That’s a lot of money, especially when the economy is in tough shape.

But transportation is more than just roads and bridges. With gas at almost $4 a gallon, RIPTA ridership is at an all-time high. The O’Grady Bill provides much-needed sustainable funding to RIPTA. With those funds, RIPTA will be able to maintain existing service, put more busses on the busiest routes, increase the number of commuter Park-and-Rides, build more bus shelters at stops, and create new hubs for faster transfers and connections.

Today, nearly 70% of all Rhode Island bus riders are going to and from work or school. That’s why having good public transit is so important to growing Rhode Island’s economy – and why the business community supports the O’Grady Bill.

Other people use to bus to get to medical appointments and doctor’s visits. Having good public transit is linked to cleaner air. That’s why Rhode Island health organizations, including the American Lung Association in Rhode Island (and others), are supporting the O’Grady Bill.

The O’Grady Bill also provides additional funds for DOT’s construction projects. That’s why the unions are supporting the O’Grady Bill.

By providing additional funds for public transit, the O’Grady Bill will help reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector. That’s why environmental organizations like CLF are supporting the O’Grady Bill.

In fact, when the O’Grady Bill was heard last year in the House Finance Committee, dozens of people spoke in favor of it – from business and labor, from community groups and environmental groups. There are not many bills that have such widespread support. Not one person spoke against the bill.

The General Assembly did not pass the O’Grady Bill last year. It should pass it this year. The O’Grady Bill will help us grow the economy, and will help all Rhode Islanders. That’s why it has garnered such wide support.

After extensive discussions with CLF, Deepwater Wind has agreed to voluntarily adjust its planned construction period to minimize potential impacts to migrating North Atlantic Right Whales -- like this breaching beauty here.

Deepwater Wind is taking exciting new steps to build on last month’s historic agreement to protect critically endangered right whales while developing offshore wind projects. The offshore wind developer, expected to begin construction on the proposed Block Island Wind Farm in 2014 or 2015, has announced an agreement to voluntarily adjust its planned construction period to minimize potential impacts to migrating North Atlantic right whales. This announcement follows extensive discussions with CLF, and shows a willingness to go above and beyond to protect North Atlantic right whales in the pursuit of renewable energy.

In order to fasten the five proposed turbine steel foundations into the steel floor, the developer must undergo pile driving, a process of hammering steel pipes up to 250 ft into the ocean floor. This stage of production could potentially harm migrating right whales, which have been documented feeding in Rhode Island Sound throughout the month of April. Deepwater Wind has adjusted its construction schedule accordingly, deciding that no pile driving will occur before May 1 of the project’s construction year.

Deepwater Wind’s decision to alter its construction schedule for the Block Island Wind project follows another agreement to adopt protections for endangered right whales in federal waters. A first-of-its kind coalition of offshore wind developers and environmental organizations agreed to adopt voluntary measures to protect right whales while expediting responsible offshore wind development. This historic agreement sets out measures that developers will voluntarily implement over the next four years in the Mid-Atlantic Wind Energy Areas stretching from New Jersey to Virginia. In it, key ocean stakeholders have shown great leadership in setting a model for future coalitions, and they have demonstrated a commitment to developing clean energy projects while protecting critically endangered species.

Keeping the lights on shouldn’t be this difficult. The response by Entergy to the outage at the Super Bowl is very reminiscent of the responses by Entergy to the many problems at its Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. It boils down to a piece of equipment failed and the power went out. A repeated problem at Vermont Yankee has been equipment failures – from cooling tower collapses to leaking pipes.

Sure problems happen, but c’mon. Enough already. The problem is that the same company that can’t keep the lights on for the Super Bowl is also challenged to keep its nuclear fleet running smoothly.

Even without news of the Super Bowl outage, UBS issued another report  about the shaky financial future of Vermont Yankee. The report states:

“We continue to believe Entergy is likely to decommission at least one of its units, such as Vermont Yankee, in 2013. We anticipate the process of decommissioning will become of greater importance to Entergy shareholders, as concerns around shareholder-financed contributions to decommissioning funds continue to garner concern.”

The financial outlook looks bleak. Meanwhile, next week hearings begin at the Vermont Public Service Board about Vermont Yankee’s future. Entergy has money to keep four law firms employed working on the case. That money would be better spent closing the plant and cleaning up the site.

The Boston Harbor Association has a powerful message about the very real threat of sea level rise driven by global warming.  Their report, “Preparing for the Rising Tide”, is a dramatic wake-up call about the fundamental threat to the historic and economic heart of Boston.

The report starts with very solid science that shows how the homes, businesses and cultural institutions (like the New England Aquarium) that sit on the waterfront are now on the edge of entering, and have in some cases already entered, a very real danger zone.  A zone where the flooding and catastrophic damage that Hurricane Sandy brought to the New York region would tear across our coastline – with the prospect of worse to come.  Indeed, had Sandy hit only 5 ½ hours earlier than it did, when tides were high, the floodwaters would have reached Boston City Hall, nearly ½ mile inland from the City’s waterfront. In other words, Boston got lucky compared to New York City and other communities that were brutally whacked by the storm.  And this near miss begs the question:  do we really want to leave the vitality of our coastal communities to chance?

The report provides a few key lessons:

• Many vulnerable places, like the entrance to the UMass Boston campus, key MBTA stations like the one at the New England Aquarium and sections of waterfront buildings like the Long Wharf Marriott are in very real danger, today, from the severe storms that are becoming an unfortunate, and all too frequent, visitors to the Northeast.
• Indeed, some of these vulnerable places would have suffered very real and painful damage if Sandy had slightly changed course and struck Boston instead of New York, or if Sandy had arrived just a few hours earlier.
• As climate change continues to worsen due to the build-up of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, a build-up that grows a little bit every day, the likelihood of a severe flooding event increases. In a very real way the march of time is our enemy here – with each passing year, as we continue to pump enormous quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the chance of a catastrophic flooding event grows.
• Addressing this fundamental problem will require an integrated approach that reaches across all aspects of society, the economy and government – fundamentally transforming the way we plan, use our land and water resources, build, travel, manage our buildings and use energy – in order to make our communities more resilient and able to handle inundation and other impacts from the changing climate but also to reduce the emissions that are causing the problem in the first place.

In other words, while it remains critically important to tackle the root causes of climate change by reducing energy waste and cleaning up our energy supply, that’s not enough any longer. The emissions we produce today from driving our cars and heating and lighting our buildings will produce effects that are beginning to materialize now – as with Superstorm Sandy – and that will present ever more daunting challenges for future generations. We therefore need to brace for impacts that already have been set in motion. And we must adapt a broad range of infrastructure and institutions to make our communities more resilient to those impacts.

Conservation Law Foundation, as a group with roots in Boston and nearly 50 years of work here, applauds the work of the Boston Harbor Association in preparing and releasing this Report.  As a regional organization that works across New England, we recognize that the Report reflects an absolutely vital case study that provides guidance for planning and preparations in Massachusetts’ largest city, while also providing an example of the kind of sober analysis and planning that needs to unfold from Connecticut’s Long Island Sound coastline to the frigid waters of Downeast Maine.

This Report is a reminder that we must act now to protect our communities from the harm that has already been done – and we need to act on emissions reductions to prevent even worse and more catastrophic harm beyond the massive flooding outlined in TBHA’s chilling maps.   This is the mandate of the Massachusetts Global Warming Solutions Act that has been on the Commonwealth’s books since 2008. Having had the foresight to enact this law the question becomes whether we here in Massachusetts will have the courage to truly implement it.  TBHA’s Report, which looks at both the impacts that are unavoidable and the even worse impacts if massive greenhouse gas emissions continue, provides a compelling reminder of the  consequences of inaction.

Vermont keeps working on better ways for people and goods to get where they need to go. The threats from climate change and the high cost of maintaining our travel ways mean we need to be smarter and greener.

In 2011 Vermont’s Governor Peter Shumlin announced that the Circ Highway – an expensive, polluting and ill-conceived highway project outside Burlington — would not be built as planned. In its place a Task Force would work on solutions that won’t bust the budget or foul our air and water.

Over the past year a good part of that work looked at targeted improvements in the immediate Circ area. The result is a study of the network . With this are recommendations that were just adopted by the Task Force to move forward with making improvements to some existing roadways in and around Williston.

A public meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 from 7:30 – 9:00 PM at Williston Town Hall, with a presentation of the findings of the study and the recommendations. The meeting is hosted by the Williston Planning Commission. Refreshments will be served.

CLF has been mostly pleased with this work and encouraged that new and more effective solutions are moving forward. As we noted in comments to the group, a bigger role for transit and roundabouts could cut costs and pollution further.

Come learn about new projects and let the transportation officials working on these projects know what you think.

The massive drag on New Hampshire’s economy caused by PSNH’s continued operation of the uneconomic and obsolete Merrimack Station and Schiller Station coal-fired units—extracting hundreds of millions per year in above market costs for its shareholders—is spiraling out of control, and several recent developments at the NH Public Utilities Commission raise troubling questions about what the agency empowered to protect ratepayers is doing about PSNH’s problems.

While competition among energy suppliers in New England is fostering efficiency, benefitting the environment and saving ratepayers money, PSNH’s energy service business, for which it collects its cost of service and a handsome profit, is increasingly looking like a dinosaur ready for extinction. Thousands of NH ratepayers are taking advantage of lower cost, more efficient electricity suppliers, but those remaining with PSNH are being dragged down into its death spiral.

One recent indicator is PSNH’s skyrocketing energy service rate. In early December, PSNH requested a 34% energy service rate increase (to 9.54 cents/kwh, equating to hundreds of dollars extra per household per year) beginning in 2013. At the end of December, the PUC approved the rate increase. CLF is challenging that increase at the PUC on the grounds that, even aside from the fact that it entirely consists of above market costs, NH law prevents the PUC from approving a utility’s requested rate increases when the utility has not submitted required planning documents demonstrating that it has a sound plan for serving its customers at the lowest cost. PSNH failed to submit long term least cost planning documents due last September; until they do so, the PUC is not authorized to approve their rate increases.

Fundamentally, the job of a utility commission dealing with a regulated utility like PSNH is to ensure that prices mimic the results of market competition while ensuring the best service for ratepayers. Thus far, the PUC has shielded PSNH from the consequences of its poor decisions, lack of meaningful planning, and insistence on retaining antiquated power plants that sit idly due to their high costs. It also is once again delaying the release of economic and environmental information that PSNH used when deciding to build the $422 million scrubber project at Merrimack Station. And days ago the PUC approved PSNH’s 2010 plan for its energy supply resources – a plan that utterly ignored lower natural gas market forecasts and impending environmental regulations when planning its future operations.  CLF is acting to protect ratepayers from PSNH’s dying business model; the extent to which the PUC is doing so is less than clear.

The PUC is engaged in dockets investigating both the costs of the scrubber project and PSNH’s increasing energy service costs. It remains to be seen whether these investigations will have any impact on the expensive mess PSNH has yoked to NH ratepayers, and whether PSNH will continue even farther down the path of  eroding New Hampshire’s advantage as a low cost state to grow a business and a family.

On Thursday, January 28, 2013, Maine’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) approved, by a 2-1 vote, the terms of a long-term contract for the first floating turbine offshore windfarm in Maine. After a few months of negotiation, this is good news for the state, and for renewable energy.

This vote clears a major hurdle toward Statoil putting four, three-megawatt wind turbines on floating platforms in deepwater 12 miles off Boothbay, and marks the early days of implementation of Maine’s Ocean Energy Act. Signed into law in 2009, the Act encourages projects like this one, so as to support the development of renewable energy technology that harnesses ocean energy. In this project, energy generated from the project would be transported via underwater cable to a transfer station on land, delivering renewable energy to the mainland.

Approval for this project has been a long time coming. Statoil, which has successfully operated a one-turbine pilot project off the Norwegian coast for the past year, originally sought approval for a version of its project in October of 2012. At the time, CLF submitted comments supporting the project and the long-term contract, but the PUC tabled its deliberations and asked Statoil to come up with terms that would have a lower price for the electricity generated and guarantee more future benefit to Maine. Click here to see PUC Chairman Welch’s notes from deliberations. Since then, the project has only improved.

Working with PUC staff, Statoil revised the terms of its contract to reduce the price of energy to Maine consumers and add more assurances that if its initial small scale windfarm is successful, it will make all efforts to employ Maine companies as it scales up the project. Click here to see Statoil’s Revised Term Sheet.  We liked these additional terms even more than Statoil’s initial proposal. Again we wrote in favor of the project and expressed our increased support. Click here to view our additional comments.

The vote at this past week’s hearing was 2-1, with Commissioner Littell and Chairman Welch voting in favor of the project. Littell has long been a champion of efforts to reduce carbon emissions, whether during his time at the DEP where he championed RGGI or now at the PUC. Welch deserves credit as he was not supportive of the long-term contract in its initial phase, but recognized that Statoil had made efforts to address his concerns and even more so recognized the potential that offshore wind holds for Maine.

The data don’t lie. In line with the trends we’ve been warning about for years, PSNH’s coal-fired business model is in free fall:

Residential and small business customers continue to flee PSNH’s dirty, increasingly expensive energy service.

Source: NHPUC data

• Over the past year the number of residential energy customers in New Hampshire who purchased energy service from a supplier that is not PSNH jumped to around 30,000 households in December of 2012 (compared to around 2,000 households in December of 2011).
• That figure doesn’t include the veritable flood of customers who abandoned PSNH’s energy service at the end of 2012 when word got out about PSNH’s 34% rate increase (ENH reported signing up 1,700 customers on December 31 alone for service starting January 1). The stampede of residential and small business customers away from PSNH’s energy service shows no signs of slowing down.

PSNH’s coal plants are becoming even less competitive and will operate even less in 2013 than in 2012.

Source: ISO-NE, EPA, and PSNH data

• We noted before that PSNH’s coal unit capacity factors have taken a nosedive over the past five years, and they are projected to keep falling on an annual basis in 2013 (see chart below).
• A power plant’s capacity factor reflects the amount of power the plant generated compared to the amount of power it could have generated if used to its full potential; when that number is low, it means it was a better economic choice for the plant’s owner to keep the plant idle most of the time. While other coal plants throughout New England are also running at low capacity, PSNH is the only utility in the region that can force ratepayers to bear its fixed costs plus a hefty guaranteed profit, even when its plants don’t generate power.

The Bottom Line:

Even as many customers are taking advantage of cleaner, cheaper alternatives, PSNH’s dirty and costly power plants are a heavy – and growing – burden for the majority of New Hampshire ratepayers and for New Hampshire’s economy. In a future post, I’ll discuss how the state agency tasked with protecting ratepayers from unreasonable rates is handling PSNH’s implosion (spoiler: not well) and what CLF is doing about it (another spoiler: fighting to protect New Hampshire ratepayers and the environment).

The front page of the Boston Globe last week presented a powerful, timely and cautionary tale about  two liquefied natural gas terminals  that sit off the coast of Gloucester and Salem. Those terminals are the tangible reminder of a massive push undertaken by energy industry insiders to build such terminals.  The intensity of that push, which began to build around 2002, becoming most intense during the 2004  to 2007 period and then petering out in the years since, contrasts sharply with the reality described in the Globe article: that those two offshore terminals have sat idle for the last two years.

That push to build LNG import facilities, which was such a mania in energy industry circles circa 2005, yielded some crazy ideas, like the proposal to hollow out a Boston Harbor Island and the infamous Weavers Cove project in Fall River. The offshore terminals, while the least bad of those proposals, reflected short sighted thinking detached from careful regional planning.  Both in terms of the need for these facilities and design decisions like regulators not forcing the projects to share one pipeline to shore instead of (as they did) twice disturbing the marine environment to build two duplicative pieces of infrastructure.

Today, the hue and cry is no longer about LNG, instead we are bombarded with impassioned demands for more natural gas pipelines as well as more measured discussions of the need for “smart expansions”. Will we have the collective intelligence to be smarter and more careful this time? Will the permitting process force consideration, as the law requires, of alternatives that make better use of existing infrastructure and pose less risk to the environment and the wallets of customers? Fixing natural gas leaks and becoming much more efficient in our use of gas is a key “supply strategy” that needs to be on the table and fully examined before committing to new pipelines.

And as it so often is, the overarching issue here is protecting future generations by addressing the climate issue. Science and prudent energy analysis, makes it clear that we need to put ourselves on a trajectory to end the burning of fossil fuels, including natural gas by the middle of this century. Given this reality every proposal to build massive and long-lived facilities to import more of those fuels must be viewed with great skepticism.