The Business and Industry Association – New Hampshire’s statewide chamber of commerce and leading business advocate – recognizes the need for balanced energy solutions, including energy conservation, efficiency, and renewables, to address New Hampshire’s electrical energy crisis. Nevertheless, policy leaders can’t ignore the well-established need for additional electric transmission and gas pipeline infrastructure.
While neither BIA nor its EnergizeNH campaign have taken positions for or against specific energy projects, both are working to raise awareness about the urgent need for energy solutions, including increased natural gas and electric transmission capacity.
The high price New Englanders pay for electricity is a matter of supply and demand on a regional scale. The fact is the price of electricity in New Hampshire and New England is over 58 percent higher than the price of electricity in the rest of the United States. Energy costs are driven higher by constrained supply into the grid. New laws and regulations that create hurdles to energy supply entering the New England market are counterproductive and delay much-needed rate relief.
It’s important to note that manufacturers like New Hampshire Ball Bearings, EMD Millipore, Markem-Imaje, Monadnock Paper Mills, Graphicast, Keeney Manufacturing, and dozens of others drive New Hampshire’s economy in a way no other sector does – number of jobs, wages, exports, contributions to Gross State Product, and more. These companies, providing employment for 68,000 people throughout the state, are most sensitive to the cost of electrical energy.
Up to now, BIA worried about lost job growth and economic activity as advanced manufacturers like these, and other large energy users, expanded operations elsewhere. Given current energy prices, we now face a bleaker scenario: manufacturers and other large energy consumers moving existing jobs in New Hampshire to lower-cost places around the country or world. Some already have.
New England governors, Independent System Operator New England (the region’s electric grid operator), and New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission staff agree that New England needs to accommodate expanded natural gas pipeline capacity and increased electrical transmission into the region.
This will require education, outreach and most important, action by policy leaders to move beyond the rhetoric of those who claim there is no electrical energy crisis. To further delay making difficult siting decisions compounds our challenge, and puts the state’s economic future further at risk.
There are processes in place for evaluating and determining whether proposed energy infrastructure projects are in the best interests of New Hampshire’s utility customers.
The site evaluation process, led by the state’s Site Evaluation Committee, was significantly revised last year to increase transparency and opportunities for public input, offer more protection for property owners, and add more stringent criteria for energy project review and approval. In addition, the PUC and its staff are tasked with determining whether or not long-term contracts being proposed to increase natural gas capacity in New Hampshire are legal, fit within the state’s electric restructuring plans, and that projected savings to utility customers will be in excess of costs accrued during construction and fulfillment of contract obligations.
The only way New Hampshire and the region will be able to successfully address the electrical energy crisis we are currently facing is to encourage policy leaders, charged with examining solutions to the crisis, to fulfill their obligations without delay.
Jim Roche is president of the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire.