High Utiliity Rates -- May 6, 2022

ISO NE: link here. 

New energy regulations will only make things worse: New Hampshire Journal, May 4, 2022.

The White House’s latest policy pronouncement has American energy producers struggling with the question, “What does Joe want?”

After weeks of pushing for more oil and gas production to fight higher gas prices and push back on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration has announced it is reinstating National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations, a move virtually guaranteed to make it harder to produce more energy.“The administration’s NEPA rewrite adds more bureaucratic red tape into the permitting process, not only for natural gas and oil but for hydrogen, CCUS, wind, and solar,” said American Petroleum Institute (API) Senior Vice President of Policy, Economics and Regulatory Affairs Frank Macchiarola.

“So much for sticking it to Putin,” added Sterling Burnett, Director of Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute.

Instead, energy insiders say, it is “sticking it” to northeastern states like New Hampshire, where a lack of pipelines and other energy infrastructure are costing ratepayers real money. Toby Rice, CEO of the natural gas giant EQT Corp., told The Wall Street Journal three large pipelines capable of transporting enough gas from Appalachia to serve more than 10 million households in the Northeast have been blocked. The result is imported LNG from abroad, higher prices, and more people still heating their homes by burning oil.

In the Granite State, more than 43 percent of households use heating oil. “It boggles my mind,” Rice said, also noting that natural-gas prices one weekend in January were eight times as high in New England as in Appalachia.

The New Hampshire Electric Cooperative (NHEC) recently announced the “Co-op Power portion of members’ bills will decrease from the current winter rate of 9.8 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to 9.6 cents per kWh for the summer” that began May 1. That decrease is smaller than usual.

Much more at the link. 

And then this: New England and the South shoulder the nation's highest energy costs -- WalletHub, link here. 

• At $411 a month, Connecticut has the highest total energy costs for consumers of any state in the country, according to a new survey by WalletHub, which factors in the cost of electricity, natural gas, motor fuel and home heating oil. 
• Massachusetts, Georgia and Alabama also made it into the top five. 
• Alabama has the highest residential electric bills, averaging $181 a month, followed by South Carolina at $176, and Connecticut at $166, the report finds. 
• Connecticut also has some of the most expensive home heating costs (No. 4) and natural gas costs (No. 11) in the country as well, boosting its overall ranking. 
•  The survey provides a warning shot for utilities in states with the most expensive electricity and energy costs, as residential and corporate customers look increasingly at distributed resource solutions like rooftop solar to reduce their monthly bills, according to Mike O’Boyle, director of electricity policy at Energy Innovation, a climate and energy policy think-tank. 

Rooftop solar in New Hampshire? Okay. More crazy talk.