The nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute has launched a new tracking tool exposing up to $2.4 million in spending on advertising by 14 utility front groups over the past four years on social media advertisements, many of which include targeted messaging to mislead customers on critical climate and energy concerns, including the impact of power plant retirements, the reasons behind high utility bills, and the viability of “renewable natural gas” and hydrogen.

Using data from the Meta Ad Library and existing code developed by Brown University, the Energy and Policy Institute’s tracking tool shows the specific regions that the gas and electric utility groups are targeting with the advertisements.

The following commentary originally appeared in The Washington Times.

By Todd Snitchler

This September, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) issued flex alerts for over a week, requesting residents to severely limit their electricity use which included imposing limits on electric vehicle charging, recommending thermostat settings be set at 78 degrees or higher, and limiting the use of appliances and lighting. On September 6, the California Office of Emergency Services sent an alert to approximately 27 million cellphones throughout the state, warning “Power interruptions may occur unless you take action.” One has to ask how is the grid teetering this close to the edge in a country with the resources we have in the United States? Policy decisions at the state and federal level that are not based in reality, that’s how.

Competitive electricity markets have continuously proven their ability to deliver reliable power, while also providing that energy in a cost-effective and increasingly clean way. Advancing this market model throughout the energy transition will be key to continued economic growth and improved environmental outcomes. To maintain reliability, policymakers must level the playing field for all energy solutions and should embrace competition to drive the innovation needed to achieve government-mandated, net-zero goals.

Solar company Sunnova wants to give new homeowners an alternative to electric utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric, cracking open the door to competition with a combination of solar and batteries in a “microgrid.” The proposal would end nearly a century of guaranteed monopoly for California utilities by letting other companies not just sell power but use an alternative delivery system to the utility’s platform. Regulators shouldn’t just let them through this opening, they should take the door off its hinges.

Numerous companies and homeowners are proving the upside of broadening grid access. OhmConnect, Tesla, and other companies are providing hundreds of megawatts of electricity capacity, forestalling rolling blackouts in California. Community solar developers in Minnesota have installed over 800 megawatts of solar projects that are reducing energy bills for over 12,000 households and hundreds of businesses. More than 1 in 4 Hawaiian households have spent their own money to add electricity capacity, reducing the island state’s reliance on imported fuel oil.

Everywhere these entrepreneurs turn, however, they’re being blocked by the incumbent utility that wields its monopoly platform as a weapon. Allowing this abuse of power threatens grid reliability, affordable electricity and our democracy.

For more than a century, governments have offered electric utilities a monopoly on selling power to homes and businesses so long as they agreed to serve everybody and subject themselves to regulation.

But as homeowners have begun installing solar panels and batteries, that simple arrangement has become more complicated. That has led to fierce battles between utility companies and relatively young solar businesses that sell and install rooftop systems for use by homes and businesses.

On Thursday, one of the nation’s largest rooftop solar companies, Sunnova Energy, asked the California Public Utilities Commission to let it directly compete with investor-owned utilities to provide electricity to homes in new residential developments as a private “micro-utility” — a business model that is illegal in much of the United States.

The latest BloombergNEF analysis expects U.S. households will install a record amount of solar this year to help slash electricity bills, according to a report by Bloomberg.

Residential solar installations will increase by about 5.6 gigawatts in 2022, led by Florida, Texas, the Midwest and California, according to a BNEF report released Monday.

Higher electricity prices and tax credit extensions in the Inflation Reduction Act are fueling the rebound in residential solar adoption. Consumers are taking ownership of their own power supplies in pursuit of cleaner energy and to reduce their reliance on grids that are becoming more vulnerable to blackouts caused by extreme weather, wildfires and drought.

“Despite supply chain challenges and higher costs, 2022 will be an absolute record year for residential solar in the US,” BNEF analyst Pol Lezcano wrote.

Households will add three times more solar this year than commercial customers and will continue to take the lead through 2030, BNEF data show.

In recent years, it has become increasingly challenging to build transmission projects for various reasons, including permitting challenges, NIMBYism, disincentives to build projects between utility territories, and a lack of coordination between states. As a result, there is now more proposed generation capacity and associated projects in the interconnection queues of independent system operators than ever before. The vast majority of those are wind and solar projects, but part of the reason for the delay is insufficient transmission capacity in the areas where those projects are being proposed

Ari Peskoe, Director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law, offers two suggestions to resolve these issues. One is to give states more authority over transmission planning and promote greater competition in transmission rather than continue to let incumbent utilities build it themselves. The second is to establish a minimum set of benefits for transmission projects to be approved rather than just a single reason. Those benefits could include reliability, emission reductions, resiliency, and greater grid flexibility.

The spiraling energy crisis prompted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine provides further evidence that energy is as much a geopolitical issue as it is an environmental and economic one.

Many countries have banned Russian energy imports, squeezing available supply and exacerbating volatility in oil and natural gas markets, resulting in higher costs on customers' energy bills.

It has also put energy security front and center of the public energy debate. At least in the developed world, a place typically occupied by environmental and climate concerns.

The response from policymakers has been either to call for the production of more traditional energy resources or to accelerate the transition to electrifying everything. There's probably a reasonable middle ground between those two positions, but it's anyone's guess whether policymakers can find it.

The situation further incentivizes consumers to generate their energy at home by installing rooftop solar panels and battery storage, smart meters, and other advanced energy technologies that allow them to reduce their dependency on the grid.

As energy bills across the country rise and utility companies warn of shortages during peak demand times this summer,

High summer temperatures and drought could cause electricity shortages and blackouts across an increasing number of states this summer, according to NERC’s Summer Reliability Assessment.

NERC expects much of the United States will have adequate resources and electricity on hand this summer, but several markets are at risk of energy emergencies, with the Upper Midwest and mid-South along the Mississippi River at the highest risk.

New England’s energy demand dropped to its lowest point ever earlier this month thanks to good weather and the continued adoption of rooftop solar on homes and businesses, according to a report by Patrick Skahill of Connecticut Public Radio.

ISO New England said energy demand fell to just 7,580 megawatts on May 1. That is the lowest recorded demand since ISO New England began operating the six-state electrical grid in 1997.

And while Sundays typically see lower electricity demand compared to other days of the week, the May 1 record was recorded during the afternoon, when electricity usage is traditionally higher.

Traditionally, grid demand falls off at night, but the rise of “behind-the-meter” rooftop solar panels on homes and businesses has pushed the region into so-called “duck-curve” days, when energy demand is actually its lowest in the afternoon and not overnight.

The past year was a mixed one for climate change policy. While global leaders at the UN climate summit (COP26) in Scotland renewed pledges to reduce their national carbon emissions, Congress fumbled in its attempts to advance sweeping energy transition legislation that largely depended on government funding to accelerate renewable energy deployment.

As Congress ponders its next moves on climate change, lawmakers would do well to recall the inherent advantages of America’s free-market system in delivering policy outcomes with broad appeal, which are inclusive, transparent, and efficient. A pro-market approach to climate change stands a good chance of attracting bipartisan support at a time when partisan bickering makes progress on any policy priority a rarity.

WASHINGTON, DC – The Energy Choice Coalition (ECC) on Tuesday joined other members of the Consumer Coalition for Electricity Rate Transparency in supporting Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) efforts to protect consumers by revising rules for how investor-owned utilities account for industry association dues.

Many public utilities charge customers a fee to cover the cost of trade association membership dues while often asking those trade associations to advocate for policies that benefit the utilities, not consumers. In public comments submitted to FERC, the coalition asks federal regulators to increase transparency and clarity in the accounting rules for public utilities regarding political activity and trade association dues.

“Consumers should not pay for trade association dues and the political influence it engenders, just as they shouldn’t pay for anything else that does not directly benefit the quality and reliability of services they receive from utilities,” said Robert Dillon, executive director of the Energy Choice Coalition. “We urge FERC to take proactive steps to increase transparency and accountability in how public utilities record their industry association dues.”

The ECC previously voiced concern over this practice here. The full text of the letter to FERC is below and at Energychoicecoalition.org.

Solar is already the cheapest new source of electricity, which is why the solar industry is booming in Florida, across the nation and around the globe. The economic and social benefits of solar adoption, both direct and indirect, are profound and getting better every year as costs continue to decline and industry learning curves improve. Yet the Florida Legislature is considering bills this session, SB1024 and companion HB741, that we believe are an attack on our state’s solar industry and our rights as consumers to invest in cheaper electricity via rooftop solar. These bills propose changes to net metering — the regulation that compensates solar customers for the excess electricity they send to the power grid — that would dramatically lower the fair market rate solar customers now receive.

In recent years, it has been widely reported that large oil and gas companies like Exxon knew about potential risks of climate change, only to eventually bury the information. A recent report from the Energy and Policy Institute shows that utilities also knew about the threat of climate change as far back as 1968.

With the growing electrification of transportation, heating, and other end uses that have historically relied on fossil fuels, some major oil and gas companies are making plans to transition away from fossil fuels and into renewables and other clean energy technologies like hydrogen geothermal, and carbon capture.

A recent study by two organizations, Environment America Research and Policy Center and the Frontier Group, researched rooftop potential on big box stores to host solar installations throughout the country. Their findings show that rooftop solar on commercial big box store roofs are a substantial opportunity to boost clean energy production.

With over 100,000 big box stores nationwide, accounting for over 7 billion square feet of roof space, the potential to generate clean energy is huge. If all of that roof space was covered with solar panels, it could produce over 84 terawatt-hours of electricity a year. That is comparable to the electricity usage of nearly 8 million homes. Installing rooftop solar would cover half of the electricity demand for most of these stores.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) last month issued a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) to examine the rate recovery, reporting and accounting treatment of industry association dues and political related expenses. The FERC move was in response to a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity over whether ratepayers of investor-owned utilities should be forced to subsidize the costs of trade associations that are deemed ‘anti environment.’ Other organizations like the Citizens’ Utility Board, The Utility Reform Network, Nevada Bureau of Consumer Protection, and Maryland Office of People’s Counsel have come out in support of the petition as well.

Over the holidays, we stumbled across two good conversations on the Suncast podcast that we wanted to share with you. The first one looks at deregulating state electricity markets and the second on empowering consumers with the right to purchase clean energy.

At the Energy Choice Coalition, we believe competition is at the core of our free-market system and that a well-functioning market is driven by consumer choice. Competitive markets produce the most efficient results in our economy, providing lower costs and a greater array of choices for consumers compared to government regulation. We recently released a report that shows competition in electricity markets also leads to reduced carbon emissions.