Who’s to blame for biomass plant closures?

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A handful of Democratic politicians on Wednesday stood in the snow outside an obsolete power plant and reversed their party’s customary line of attack when an industrial facility closes. Instead of blaming greed or billionaires or out-of-state corporations or winged monkeys for the recent closure of two N.H. biomass power plants, they blamed the government.

Wait, what?

Yes.

Well, not the government in general, just Republican Gov. Chris Sununu. They objected to his having vetoed bills that would have forcibly taken money from average people and given it to large, out-of-state corporations.

Wait, what?

Yes.

These Democratic politicians were attacking a Republican for opposing corporate welfare.

Specifically, the vetoed legislation would have created new ratepayer subsidies for biomass power plants. The vetoes caused two of the six plants (ones owned by a private New Jersey corporation) to close, they alleged.

Never mind the plants that didn’t close (one of which did get new state subsidies).

Never mind that the governor doesn’t run the shuttered power plants, didn’t make the decision to close them, and didn’t prevent their parent company from investing in them more heavily.

Also ignore a 2018 study published by none other than the State of New Hampshire, which showed the state’s biomass power plants to be expensive and inefficient compared to rival power producers.

The Office of Strategic Initiatives study showed two unmistakable trends, both driven by consumer demand for lower energy prices:

The removal or reduction of artificial price supports over many years.
The innovation-driven drop in the cost of other fuel sources.

Supposedly, the state has to force all Granite State residents and businesses to subsidize biomass power plants because they buy and burn wood pulp, thus keeping New Hampshire’s tiny timber industry alive.

But the state doesn’t have similar subsidies for paper companies or home construction, which are more important for the timber industry. Biomass accounts for only 3 percent of the value of a timber harvest, but sawlogs account for 90 percent, according to New Hampshire Business Review.

The state’s report showed that biomass plants might not have become so reliant on subsidies if they had invested more cost-savings initiatives or experimented with new business models. To conclude that the governor alone, rather than company officers and directors, was responsible for the fate of 1/3 of New Hampshire’s biomass plants (just the ones that closed) is a rather interesting position to take.

The state’s report concluded that biomass plants would continue to struggle because they inefficiently produce expensive electricity while most competitors, even other renewable power generators, more efficiently produce cheaper electricity.

“As new projects are connected to the grid, predominantly wind and solar, biomass will cede its market share to other forms of generation. These more flexible resources will contribute to more volatile, but lower market prices, leaving biomass generation at a steeper competitive disadvantage. New Hampshire ratepayers would likely need to provide continuous subsidies at above market prices to sustain Class III biomass generation.”

In short, burning wood (at least with existing technologies) is not the way to power a 21st century economy. A March U.S. Energy Information Agency report on the future of U.S. power generation didn’t even mention biomass, concluding that “most of the electricity generating capacity additions installed in the United States through 2050 will be natural gas combined-cycle and solar photovoltaic (PV).”

Biomass power generation is dying a natural death. That’s why companies that own biomass plants are reluctant to sink any more money into them. Forcing ratepayers to make up the difference between what people are willing to pay for power and what biomass power costs is neither compassionate nor morally defensible. It is massively wasteful — of other people’s money.

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50 years after start of anti-Seabrook protests, a turn toward nuclear power

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If San Francisco tech bro hipsters invented a carbon-free way to generate power 24/7, they would be hailed as saviors of the planet. Though they might yet come up with some use for a venti Matcha Green Tea Frappuccino, the energy technology in question predates them and even their retro clothes. In 1951 in Idaho, scientists for the first time used a nuclear reaction to generate electricity.  

Though 59 nuclear power plants generate about 55 percent of the non-carbon-emitting power in the United States, they are still opposed by environmental activists who came of age in the 1970s.

Some of those greens are celebrating 50 years of activism in New Hampshire this month. As they celebrate, there are signs that younger Democratic politicians and activists, fearing climate change more than nuclear meltdowns, are ignoring them and embracing the promise of carbon-free nuclear power. 

This spring, the Pilgrim nuclear plant in Plymouth, Mass., closed. It followed the retirement in 2014 of Vermont Yankee. The closings leave only two nuclear plants in New England: Seabrook Station in Portsmouth and Millstone in Connecticut. 

These closures have left New England more reliant on carbon-emitting fossil fuels. 

When Pilgrim closed, ISO New England, the region’s power grid operator, concluded that three new plants that burn natural gas or oil would more than make up for Pilgrim’s 680 megawatts. 

Vermont Yankee’s closure increased carbon emissions in New England as the 604 mw of nuclear power was replaced with natural gas, ISO New England confirmed. 

As the Springfield Republican reported at the time, “while replacing coal with a natural gas plant reduces carbon emissions, replacing a nuclear plant with natural gas-fired generation has the opposite effect.”

That’s why some politicians and activists on the left are questioning the wisdom of anti-nuke extremism.

Seabrook Station offers a cautionary tale. 

Scheduled to open in 1974, New Hampshire’s only nuclear power plant did not come online until 1990. In those 26 years, carbon-free power was replaced with carbon-emitting power. 

A planned second reactor at the site was scrapped after lengthy legal battles. The additional 1,150 mw of power that would have been generated by a second reactor were instead generated by fossil-fuel-burning plants. 

Coal-burning Merrimack Station and oil/gas-burning Newington have a joint capacity of 918 mw. Had the second reactor been finished, they might have been made redundant.  

In fact, instead of opening a nuclear plant in 1974, PSNH opened its oil-burning plant at Newington. The announcement of plans to build this plant came in 1969, shortly after activists formed the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League to fight the nuclear plant, according to Peter Evans Randall’s history of Hampton. 

To get an idea of how the anti-Seabrook movement led to unintended consequences, one need only look at NextEra Energy’s license renewal application for Seabrook. It estimated that replacing the nuclear plant with coal would create 9.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year and replacing it with natural gas would create 3.5 million tons. Those estimates were based on modern technologies, not the higher-emitting ones under which Merrimack Station and Newington operated for the 26 years before Seabrook opened. 

Environmental activists still claim the 26-year delay and the killing of the second reactor as wins for the environment. The ironically named Seacoast Anti-Pollution League, formed in 1969 to oppose Seabrook Station’s construction, is holding a 50th anniversary celebration next week. 

But this week’s CNN climate town hall showed that some Democratic politicians are not buying the anti-nuke nostalgia. 

Some presidential candidates, like Elizabeth Warren, remain steeped in the ‘70s.  

“The problem is it’s got a lot of risks associated with it, particularly the risks associated with the spent fuel rods,” she said on Wednesday. “In my administration we are not going to build any new nuclear power plants.”

Fears such as Warren’s are misguided, author Ben Rhodes documented for the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies last year.  

Other candidates seem to have been swayed by more recent research such as Rhodes’. The Washington Post identified five remaining Democratic presidential candidates as open to nuclear power development. At the CNN town hall, Andrew Yang and Cory Booker embraced the promise of new nuclear technology.

“Right now nuclear is more than 50 percent of our non-carbon causing energy,” Booker said, accurately. “So people who think that we can get there without nuclear being part of the blend just aren’t looking at the facts.”

“We can actually go to the kind of innovations that make nuclear safer or safe,” he said.

That one word — “innovation” — marks the change in mindset. 

For generations, environmental activism has been guided by a fixation on government control. Protesters believed that the only path to Eden led backwards into the past, formed by state suppression of disfavored technologies. 

New nuclear technology is showing the old greens to be wrong. MIT Technology Review reported in February that nuclear power is critical for reducing global carbon emissions, a fact being recognized even by some environmental groups: 

“If the current situation continues, more nuclear power plants will likely close and be replaced primarily by natural gas, causing emissions to rise,” argued the Union of Concerned Scientists—historically nuclear skeptics—in 2018. If all those plants shut down, estimates suggest, carbon emissions would increase by 6%.

At this point, the critical debate is not whether to support existing systems, says Edwin Lyman, acting director of the UCS’s nuclear safety project. “A more practical question is whether it is realistic that new nuclear plants can be deployed over the next several decades at the pace needed.”

The recognition that the path to Eden will be cleared by innovators, not regulators, is a huge insight. It hasn’t permeated the presidential field — or even Sen. Booker’s own environmental plan — yet. But the fact that some candidates and environmental organizations are embracing it at the risk of angering Prius-driving, Pete Seeger-listening Baby Boomers is encouraging. 

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Eliminating coal is a gas, gas, gas

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On Tuesday, a few protesters dumped a few buckets of coal at the State House. It was, they said, a bold act of civil disobedience because they stole the coal from the Merrimack Station power plant in Bow. Yes, they admitted this. They even helpfully provided the Bow Police with evidence by posting an incriminating photo on their own website.

Activists organized by the Climate Disobedience Center routinely commit crimes against fossil fuel infrastructure. They theorize that a rapidly arriving climate catastrophe justifies the criminality. The Tuesday publicity stunt was orchestrated to pressure the state to shut down the coal-burning Merrimack Station.

’60s-style protesting is a gas, as they said back then. But sometimes logic and clear thinking get lost in all the excitement of “sticking it to the man.” Inconvenient truths are hard to see when blinded by self-righteousness. Among them: these activists have helped prolong the life of Merrimack Station and increase the number of days it operates.

Merrimack Station is no longer in daily use because fracked natural gas is cheaper to burn than coal. The station remains online only as a backup generator for when the region’s natural gas plants can’t meet demand, primarily during winter and summer spikes.

The station is most needed during periods of peak demand, and New England’s peak electricity demand comes in… August. Last year’s heaviest day of electricity use was August 29. Activists demanded the closure of New Hampshire’s most important backup power plant right when it is most needed to prevent blackouts. Genius.

Environmental activists demand that the coal plant be shuttered and replaced with renewable energy. But wind and solar cannot fill this spot need because they are not on-demand power sources. They generate power when nature dictates, not when humans flip a switch.

Ironically, coal remains a go-to backup power source in large part because activists have succeeded in restricting New England’s supply of the cleaner, cheaper fuel that has nearly displaced coal entirely: natural gas.

Huge supplies of cheap natural gas produced by fracking dramatically dropped the price of electricity in New England in the last decade, dropping coal to just 1 percent of the region’s energy generation.

“The high efficiency of natural-gas-fired generators and the generally low cost of nearby domestic shale gas (which emerged as a resource in 2008) are largely responsible for a 46% decrease in the average annual price of New England’s wholesale electricity over the past 10 years,” ISO New England, the region’s non-profit electric grid operator, wrote in this year’s Annual Energy Outlook. “Lower wholesale prices translate into lower power-supply charges for consumers.”

Abundant, cheap natural gas was the single biggest factor in the almost complete collapse of coal use in New England.

“Since 2000, electricity generation from coal has declined and the contribution from natural gas has increased markedly, primarily because two large natural gas-fired power plants came online in 2002 and 2003,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration has concluded. “However, as increasing amounts of natural gas are used to generate electricity, in New Hampshire and in New England as a whole, assurance of natural gas supply has become a critical energy issue for the region.28“

Critically, the EIA notes that after years of decline, coal use in New Hampshire has been trending upward as natural gas use has fallen.

“New Hampshire’s natural gas-fired generation has declined in the past three years and now is at its lowest level since 2002. The decrease has been compensated for primarily by increases in coal-fired generation and hydroelectric power.29”

In other words, we were on the verge of eliminating coal as a fuel source when a decline in natural gas generation caused a turn back to coal to fill the gaps.

Much of the credit for this goes to climate activists who have helped to block natural gas pipeline and import terminal construction. By slowing the construction of new natural gas infrastructure, activists from the Climate Disobedience Center and other groups forced electricity generators to turn to coal to meet demand on peak days.

Climate Disobedience Center activists have boasted about protesting, among others, the expansion of the Algonquin Pipeline, which would bring additional natural gas supplies into New England, further reducing the region’s dependence on dirtier-burning coal and fuel oil.

A few years ago, ISO New England commissioned a study of natural gas capacity. It projected that inadequate pipeline capacity would lead to gas shortages on 24-34 days per winter by the winter of 2019-20.

Days like those are when Merrimack Station is fired up.

The quickest way to close Merrimack Station is not to protest its operation. The quickest way is to stop blocking the pipelines that would supply New England with enough natural gas to replace coal permanently.

(Photo credit: Si Wilson, Flickr)

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Our legislators must be scientific super geniuses

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For years, legislators have been on a relentless quest to raise electricity rates for Granite Staters. Because unlike the rest of us, they are geniuses. 

None of us knows exactly what New Hampshire’s energy mix should be. None of us could say precisely how much of the state’s energy should come from solar or biomass. 

But they know.  

In the continental United States, only three states (Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island) have higher electricity rates than New Hampshire. There are lots of reasons why our rates are so high. One is that we don’t have enough pipelines to deliver natural gas to the state. Another is that we have multiple state mandates that raise rates by requiring utilities to pay higher prices for the type of power legislators prefer — instead of the type of power consumers prefer. 

Because they know. 

This week they issued their latest genius decree. Senate Bill 168 would amend the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) to require that at least 5.4 percent of New Hampshire’s electricity is generated from solar sources by 2025.

The Renewable Portfolio Standards, imposed in 2007, force utilities to buy certain percentages of power from renewable sources such as thermal, new solar, biomass and small-scale hydro. Utilities must buy 25.2 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2025, with that 25.2 percent broken down into specific classes.

The current standards require that 0.6 percent of power comes from new (opened after 2005) solar generation. Bumping that to 5.4 percent in six years, as SB 168 does, is a huge increase. An ignoramus might ask: why 5.4 percent?

Why not 5 percent? Or between 5-10 percent? Why exactly 5.4 percent? 

That’s amazing precision. 

How do legislators know that 5.4 percent is precisely the right percentage of solar for New Hampshire to have? 

They must be super geniuses. Like Wile E. Coyote. 

That has to be it. 

We respect our legislators too much to believe that this whole RPS scheme is like kids dressing up for Career Day at school. “We get to play electric company executive today! Yay!”

Because legislators mandate specific rates for specific classes of renewable energy instead of, say, encouraging utilities to reach an overall target (with no penalties), they must know everything there is to know about energy. 

They must have knowledge that we little people cannot understand with our little minds and parochial concerns, like what will we spend less on this year so we can afford to pay the electric bill? 

Such knowledge is a gift.   

As we noted in April, University of Chicago researchers have found that RPS laws raise energy prices by 17 percent within 12 years after passage. 

We shared that study with legislators. They ignored it. The University of Chicago researchers must be imbeciles too. 

Business executives and ratepayer advocates have explained to legislators over the years that mandates such as these raise New Hampshire’s cost of living, discouraging business investment and making it harder for families and employers to make ends meet. 

But legislators keep passing more mandates. Their vision is beyond that of mere retirees and employers, with their petty concerns about grocery bills and survival in a competitive market.

As electric rates continue to rise, we common folk should resist the urge to get angry. 

Just consider the higher rates a genius tax. They’re the price we pay for living under the benevolent guidance of brilliant elites who know best how to spend the money we earn.   

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Study: Renewable Portfolio Standards raise electricity prices substantially

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Renewable Portfolio Standards increase electricity costs more than was previously believed, a comprehensive study by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute has found. Moreover, the study concluded that the costs outweigh the benefits of whatever carbon reduction RPS laws can be credited with producing. 

Measuring both direct and indirect costs, the EPI study concluded that “electricity prices increase substantially after RPS adoption.”

RPS mandates cause electricity rates to rise by 11 percent within seven years and by 17 percent within 12 years, the study concluded. And the largest burden of RPS laws falls on residential ratepayers.

“The estimated increases are largest in the residential sector, but there are economically significant price increases in the commercial and industrial sectors too.” 

Studies of RPS impacts have failed to capture the full cost because they tend to measure only the direct cost of new renewable generation, the authors of the EPI study wrote. Their review included a comprehensive examination of indirect impacts such as transmission and stranded costs.

“A particularly striking finding is that the indirect costs of RPS programs, which have not been possible to comprehensively measure to date, appear to account for the majority of RPS program costs,” the study found.

When all costs are included, the study found that RPS laws are an extremely expensive and inefficient way to reduce carbon emissions.

When the carbon reduction attributable to RPS laws is tallied, “the cost per metric ton of CO2 abated exceeds $130 in all specifications and can range up to $460, making it at least several times larger than conventional estimates of the social cost of carbon,” the study concluded. 

“This study joins a growing body of evidence that demonstrates that when climate policies favor particular technologies or target something other than the real enemy—carbon emissions—the result is less effective and more expensive than is necessary. In contrast, the global experiences from carbon markets and taxes make clear that much less expensive ways to reduce CO2 are available right now,” study co-author Michael Greenstone, director of the Energy Policy Institute and former chief economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, said in a statement.

In New Hampshire, Senate Bill 124 would raise the state’s RPS from 25% to 60% by 2040. The study suggests that this would produce significant electricity rate increases because rates have been shown to rise along with the percentage of renewable energy utilities are required to use.

“RPS program passage leads to substantial increases in electricity prices that mirror the program’s increasing stringency over time,” the study found.

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A solar subsidy double whammy

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Technological innovation has brought solar power to the brink of market competitiveness. It will never be as reliable as a gas or nuclear plant that can run 24/7, but as a supplement it doesn’t have to be. When its price is truly market competitive, individuals and businesses will rush to build their own facilities so they can lower their bills and make money selling power back to the grid. 

We appear to be on the verge of such a transformation, as the price of producing solar power has fallen dramatically in the last half century. By at least some measures, solar generation is already price competitive. And yet the Legislature appears set to pass two simultaneous subsidies that would raise New Hampshire’s already astronomically high electricity rates for the express purpose of creating huge new subsidies for the solar industry (and hydro too).

The first subsidy was passed by the Senate last week. The amended version of House Bill 365 would expand the state’s existing net metering subsidy. Under net metering, utilities are forced by law to pay above-market rates for electricity purchased from small-scale, consumer-owned renewable power generators (think rooftop solar). 

The Senate’s version of HB 365 would allow this net metering “tariff” (read: subsidy) to apply to generators who produce up to 5 megawatts of power. (The current limit is 1 MW.) A 5 MW generator is not a home solar array. That’s large enough to power thousands of homes. Here’s a newly opened 5 MW solar plant in Egypt.)

Supporters say the bill would encourage the creation of new solar facilities. But that isn’t necessary given recent advances in solar technology. That also doesn’t explain why the bill contains a provision to allow existing power plants to convert from wholesale generators to net-metered generators in what can only be a blatant consumer rip-off. 

Most New Hampshire hydropower plants already qualify for net metering under the current 1 MW cap. But some, notably four of the hydro plants Eversource sold to Hull Street Energy last year, generate between 1 and 5 MW. The amended version of HB 365 would allow those facilities to legally reclassify themselves as net-metered generators after they fulfill their existing wholesale contracts. 

Once these hydro plants are reclassified, utilities by law would have to pay them at the default energy rate rather than the wholesale rate. The default rate — about 9 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) — is roughly twice the wholesale rate — about 4 cents per kWh. Consumers would be forced by their own elected representatives to pay twice the wholesale price for hydropower generated by existing hydro plants. 

The New England Ratepayers Association estimates that the subsidies in this bill will cost consumers about $10 million a year. But legislators have still another plan to compound the subsidy. 

Senate Bill 124 increases the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standards. The bill would mandate that 18.9 percent of New Hampshire’s power come from new solar generation by 2040. That’s up from 0.5 percent this year. 

The double whammy, then, would work like this: The state by law forces utilities to pay twice the wholesale rate for net-metered solar power, then compels utilities to buy 38 times more solar power. 

Just like that, legislators would create a huge transfer of wealth from Granite State residents and businesses to a politically favored industry. 

Legislators considering these bills should take note of a study published this week by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. It concludes that Renewable Portfolio Standards increase the cost of electricity far beyond the benefit of the carbon reductions they cause. The “cost per metric ton of CO2 abated exceeds $130 in all specifications and ranges up to $460, making it at least several times larger than conventional estimates of the social cost of carbon,” the study concluded.

With a retail electricity rate 60% higher than the national average, New Hampshire should be doing all it can to lower electricity rates. Instead, legislators continue pushing laws designed to raise rates even further.  

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Needless solar subsidies in HB 365 would push up electricity rates

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House Bill 365, scheduled for a Thursday vote in the state Senate, would require utility companies to pay above-market rates for solar power, thus forcing consumers to pay higher costs than necessary for electricity, the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy cautions in a statement released today.
Such anti-consumer subsidies for a specific industry are not necessary for New Hampshire to encourage the development of alternative energy production. Solar technologies are approaching cost parity with more traditional forms of energy production and are increasingly able to compete without subsidies.
For example, Connecticut announced in December that it had entered into contracts with nine solar energy providers (including two based in New Hampshire) for an average cost of 4.9 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), “which is approaching parity with the market price of energy,” the state’s Department of Energy & Environmental Protection pointed out.
HB 365 ignores this trend and would force utilities to buy net-metered solar energy at the default energy rate, which is about 9 cents per kWh. That is more than double the market price of about 4 cents per kWh.
Why would New Hampshire force its own citizens to pay more for solar power than the state of Connecticut is willing to pay?
This forced subsidy runs against the bill’s opening statement, which declares that “New Hampshire’s electricity consumers, including municipalities, manufacturers, commercial businesses, and other large users, strongly support more competitive retail options to lower their energy costs.”
Rather than encouraging alternative energy production that would compete on price, thus lowering energy costs, HB 365 would push prices higher by compelling consumers to buy solar power at above-market rates.
HB 365 represents a wealth transfer from all electricity consumers to net-metered solar energy producers. New Hampshire’s electricity rates are already among the highest in the nation. This bill would make the situation worse, not better — at a time when solar costs are falling and the case for subsidies is falling along with them.
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Winter is coming (and it’s going to be expensive)

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The election is 25 days away and the nation’s greatest political minds are dutifully disgorging rivers of commentary on the two most important topics of 2018: A couple of dudes named Kanye and Beto.

Weeks before the election, America’s Great Explainers think that what the country really needs are 2,000-word think pieces and cable TV arguments about a rapper’s deep emotional reasons for choosing a particular piece of headwear and the fundraising prowess and THS (Total Hipness Score) of a U.S. Senate candidate who still isn’t polling above his rival despite having been in a rock band when a younger lad.

This is why it’s always better to spend October in the hills and mountains of New Hampshire. This year, the colors are spectacular and they could hang on through Election Day. But don’t let the dazzling oranges, reds and yellows distract you from the need to pile up firewood and collect dragonglass. For winter is coming. And when it gets here it’s is going to punch you in the face.

Not all of you, though. Just those who heat with oil.

On Wednesday the U.S. Energy Information Agency released its annual Winter Fuels Outlook. If you heat with propane or natural gas, you’ll be fine. If you heat with oil, you probably should buy more blankets. Or an alpaca.

The EIA predicted average price changes this winter of -1 percent for propane, 3 percent for electricity, 5 percent for natural gas and 20 percent for home heating oil.

Now would be a good time to switch from oil to natural gas. Alas, you can’t just go down to the general store and pick up some Mountain Dew, a couple of pumpkin whoopie pies and a month’s supply of natural gas. You need to have it piped directly to your home. (The gas, not the Mountain Dew, although Pepsi should really get on that.)

But you might not be able to switch to natural gas because most of New Hampshire lacks the infrastructure for home natural gas service even though demand for natural gas is extremely high.

Gas utilities say they’d love to build lines to more homes. One, Liberty Utilities, has proposed doing that for communities along Route 101 from Portsmouth to Manchester. But to bring that residential service, utilities say they need more access to supply, which means more pipelines.

Although some new pipelines have been built or are under construction in New England, many large projects in recent years have been killed by anti-pipeline activists.

Liberty Utilities projects that its Granite Bridge project along Route 101 would save customers $950 million over 20 years. But, of course, activists are trying to prevent its construction. There must be no new pipelines of any kind anywhere anytime.

If that anti-consumer, anti-progress mindset continues to prevail in New England, it will condemn Granite Staters and other New Englanders to harder, more expensive winters for decades to come. Wind and solar cannot heat your home during a long, cold winter. Natural gas burns more cleanly, more efficiently, and less expensively than wood or oil. Yet if you live outside of Keene, Berlin, the Portsmouth area or the I-93 corridor up to Gilford, the activists are working hard to prevent you from having this home heating option.

For families, the financial impact of this obstructionism is huge. The EIA projects an average cost this winter of $595 to heat a home with natural gas vs. $1,646 to heat with oil. Restricting the supply of natural gas in New England by blocking pipeline construction has a direct and large negative impact on Granite Staters.

In “Game of Thrones,” winter is always coming, and that’s always bad. For low-income New England families who heat with oil, winter can bring the same foreboding. States should stop preventing them from accessing a more affordable, cleaner-burning fuel.

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Burning money

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Every time you pay your electricity or heating bill, you’re lighting your money on fire. That is, you’re trading money for the energy released by burning some combustible material — natural gas, home heating oil, wood pellets, etc. So in effect, you’re burning your money.

That’s OK, it’s how a market economy works. You don’t make your own clothes or slaughter your own food or build your own home by hand, you pay other people to do those things. (Excepting some of you in the North Country.) When you trade money for energy, you’re basically burning money. The priority, then, is to burn as little of it as possible.

In New Hampshire, politicians keep preventing you from doing that. In fact, they continue to force you to burn more money for electricity than you would otherwise choose to burn.

On Thursday, legislators overrode Gov. Chris Sununu’s veto of Senate Bill 365. The bill forces electric utility companies to buy power at above-market rates from the state’s six biomass power plants and municipal solid waste incinerators.

The bill’s own fiscal note projected that it would cause electricity rates to rise by between $15 million and $20 million a year. So legislators knew exactly what they were doing. They knowingly voted to make you burn more of your money than necessary when buying electricity.

They’re very practiced at this. Over the years, legislators have passed one law after another to prohibit electric utilities from buying power at the lowest available price.

All of these costs add up. Here are just two examples.

A 2015 study by the Beacon Hill Institute found that New Hampshire’s Renewable Portfolio Standards would raise electricity prices by 3.7 percent by 2025, for a total impact of $70 million.

A previous biomass subsidy bill passed just last year, SB 129, also forced utilities to buy additional power from biomass plants. Its costs were estimated at around $75 million to $100 million.

To understand how these mandates make electricity more expensive, imagine you’re a cave man who needs to build a fire. Og is willing to offer you a bundle of wood he chopped himself for one rabbit pelt. Unk is offering you a bundle of organic, cured, and deodorized buffalo chips for one rabbit pelt and a handful of arrow heads.

You just need a fire. You’ve got a fresh squirrel in your deer-skin sack, you’re hungry, and you’ve got to make a new spear to replace the one you lost when that mammoth ran off with it dangling from its side. (WHY WON”T THOSE THINGS JUST DIE??) So you turn to Og.

At that moment, the clan’s code enforcement officer strides up to remind you of the clan leader’s decree that everyone has to use organic buffalo chips as a fuel source once a week. (Unk is the clan leader’s cousin.) You used wood every day this week. You’ve got to buy the dung.

You give Unk your worst arrow heads, naturally, but now you’re out all those arrow heads and will have to make more. You’re no warmer than you were before. The fire didn’t cook your meat any better. It just cost more because someone with power ordered you to support the organic dung industry.

There are other ways politicians and regulators force prices higher. They can even be politicians and regulators in neighboring states.

Across the country, electricity prices have fallen thanks to the natural gas boom. But the prices fall faster and farther in places where politicians don’t block pipeline construction. In New England (and New York), politicians and regulators have made it extremely difficult to build new pipelines.

As ISO New England has pointed out, though natural gas power generation has grown tremendously in in the last 20 years, “the natural gas pipelines that deliver low-cost shale gas into the region have not been expanded at a commensurate pace.”

Public policy is a major reason why New Hampshire has the fifth-highest electric rates in the country.

Politicians could immediately lower those rates by repealing laws and withdrawing regulations that prohibit utilities from buying power at the lowest available market price.

Instead, legislators continue to add new laws that push prices ever higher.

Utilities want to sell us power for less money. They would if they could. But the state forbids it. This needs to stop. We shouldn’t allow our politicians to force us to light our own money on fire.

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Energy and housing’s self-inflicted wounds

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New Hampshire Public Radio reported this week on a study showing that rural New Englanders pay a higher percentage of their income on energy. This isn’t really new information. But it was a slow news week and the report’s recommended solutions seemed written to get NPR listeners to spill their morning coffees from their pledge drive mugs from all the vigorous head nodding.

The study concluded that Americans on average spend 3.3 percent of their income on energy, but for rural households the burden rises to 4.4 percent. In New England, rural households spend 5.1 percent.

The proposed solution? Energy efficiency projects. It’s probably a total coincidence that the report was released by a group called the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

It’s true that making homes more energy efficient reduces energy use, thus reducing bills. ISO New England, the non-profit that runs New England’s energy grid, noted in this year’s Operational Fuel-Security Analysis that New England states have collectively spent more than $1 billion to improve energy efficiency, slightly tapering energy demand.

Since 2005, electricity demand in New England has fallen from a combination of the recession, milder weather, increased adoption of small-scale solar power, and energy efficiency investments, according to ISO New England.

Yet energy remains extremely expensive and the region remains at risk of rolling blackouts during periods of peak demand. Another billion dollars on energy efficiency could help shrink demand a little more, but it’s not going to solve the cost and supply problems.

To ensure enough capacity for peak demand times and to bring down prices for everyone — from low-income rural households to major manufacturers — we need more infrastructure and fewer rate-raising regulations like subsidies for politically favored power producers.

ISO New England projects a 4,600 megawatt reduction in power generation capacity by June of 2021. But states and communities are rejecting the construction the new infrastructure needed to replace those megawatts.

ISO New England figures show that in 2000, coal and oil generated 40% of New England’s electricity, and natural gas just 15%. By 2015, natural gas generated 49% and oil and coal just 3%.

Fracking fueled this change. Since 2009, natural gas has become much cheaper than coal and oil (and it produces fewer emissions). But we can’t tap it from maple trees (unfortunately, because flaming maples would be pretty great on Halloween).

We need pipelines to bring natural gas here. Without more pipelines, we’ll continue seeing high prices and more ships from Russia and other energy exporting countries docking in Boston.

In recent years, pipeline projects have been rejected throughout New England with such animosity that you’d think they were importing emerald ash borers or New York Yankees players. For proposing to bring enough fuel to ensure that Red Sox Nation survives winter, they’ve been run out of town. That’ll show ‘em.

We’ve artificially restricted our energy supply and raised rates by blocking construction and heavily regulating the sector. This has hurt rural and low-income residents.

And by the way, our housing policies have done the same thing.

Rural residents tend to live in older homes, and older homes are less energy efficient. The subsidized winterizing of old homes is always the recommended approach, but it is not going to address the underlying problem, which —like energy generation — is one of artificially restricted supply.

Home construction costs are at record highs because of rising labor costs, land costs, lumber costs, credit costs, and regulations. Every one of these costs is being driven higher by government policies — from immigration to tariffs to zoning to building codes to financial regulations. Regulatory costs account for 24 percent of the price of a new home, according to a National Association of Home Builders study.

If we scaled back housing, labor, land use, trade, and energy regulations, we would see energy and home construction prices rise less quickly or even fall. People of all income levels could better afford to buy, heat, and live in new homes.

But untangling those regulatory webs is difficult. It’s simpler to ask legislators to meddle in the markets by passing laws to shield lower-income residents from the consequences of the legislators’ past meddling.

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