You are hanging out the bait so I will bite. Regulated utilities are very good for stockholders and keep things simple for the consumer but generally it is more costly than competitive power. Its hard to make comparisons of power rates in New England as New England voluntarily adopted the Regional Greenhouse Gas initiative. This raised power rates region wide. Combined with that new cost is also Renewable Portfolio Standards adopted by most New England states. A RPS forces anyone selling power in a particular state to prove that a certain percentage of power sold is renewable and further carves out that a certain percentage must be solar. The utility has a choice, they can put in their own generation or buy it from elsewhere. That's the reason why so many windmills are being built in Me and NH. The power isn't used locally its exported to Mass and other southern New England states where utilities buy the rights to the renewable power. These rights are called SRECs. Each state establishes a "stick" which is very high fee that the utility has to pay if the utility is short on renewable generation. Mass has set their stick quite steep, it varies but was up over $300 a MW hour for solar, NH has set the bar low and our stick is $50. Considering that conventional power sells for less than $10 a MW the utilities want to be reimbursed for the difference in costs and the states have given them permission to charge a surcharge on the transmission and distribution side of the power bill. There is also a big push to increase efficiency in the use of fossil fuels by incentivizing Combined Heat and Power plants where an industrial or institutional customer generates electric power and uses waste heat to heat and cool their facility or run equipment. Those incentives are paid by the utilities upfront to build the plants and ongoing as incentives for exceeding a base line efficiency. That effectively reduces the amount of greenhouse gases but the utility also gets to hand the bill to the ratepayers for those incentives. The combination of all those incentives plus additional costs to move power all over new England and something called capacity payments is where the major increase in costs are, actual wholesale power rates have actually gone down. The utilities were pretty well known for producing expensive power, their labor costs were quite high with great legacy benefits, full pensions generally after 30 years, retiree medical in some cases and premium heath care. Great gig if you can get it but most of us in the real world realize that benefits like these are a thing of the past. They were also rewarded by the public utility commissions to spend money, every dime they spent they were guaranteed a profit. The Bow power plant elected to put in a new to the US emissions control technology on their coal boilers, the original estimate was 200 million and the final cost was reportedly over $400 million, the utility got some flack but were rewarded a fixed profit on the overrun. So called merchant plants survive by reducing costs to the minimum, unlike a regulated utility, they aren't rewarded for wasting money, the result is they can sell power for less than a utility. The regulators have figured this out and came up with deregulation, unfortunately although it worked on the generation portion of the bill, the utilities figured out that generation wasn't the place to be so they switched over to the transmission distribution side which is still regulated. Politicians want to keep their constituents happy so they passed all sorts of green laws and handed the billing to the utilities. I have heard estimates that the T&D portion of Mass bills will go up 30% in the next 5 years which is directly related to efficiency initiatives that have been passed in the state. The firm I work for is involved to an extent in this market and we tell customers they have choice either pay to install solar panels or pay for their neighbors to put them up.
To tie it back into NH transmission lines, up until recently, Canadian hydro was regarded as "brown" hydro that didn't count toward renewables generation. Hydro Quebec has offered to sell as much power as New England will buy at a price that is speculated at around $100 a MW. Compared to solar it is cheap renewable and more importantly they can turn it on and off 24/7. There are some serious environmental effects associated with this but they occur far away in northern quebec so most politicians conveniently ignore this so it becomes a international Nimby. VT was desperate to shut down VT Yankee so they were the first to cave and declare HQ green and Mass is on the cusp, with CT soon to follow. The problem is getting the power to Mass, and NH is the shortest route plus Eversource owns rights from north to south so they in theory could build the lowest cost line. Their strategy was use long term political connections to build a quick and dirty route but they had unexpected opposition which has cost them to date a couple of years. The Champlain express project was permitted proactively in VT and spent time and a lot of money buying support. The NG project is using mostly existing corridors so the impact is far less. They also have Citizens Energy (Joe Kennedys employer) as minority partner for PR.
The EPAs approach for the Paris climate accords were the Clean Power Plan that is now off the table. Under the CPP New England had substantially met the requirements, other parts of the country with dirty power and no incentives for renewables and efficiency were looking at major economic costs which would have raised their power rates to above New England rates. They tended to vote for the current administration. its pretty simple now in New England to reduce power costs, roll back all the green rules and the price of power will go down eventually although all the incentives are long term so it will take awhile to get rid of the costs unless the states retroactively change the rules. Run several DC power lines up to Northern Quebec and let HQ wipe out a few more watersheds the size of New England for new dams and we will be all set.
) but I can simply skip the threads if I get a popsicle headache and come back to it down the road when I'm interested in an update, much like any other topic. The high level of detail and thoroughness that topics of all types get on this forum is outstanding and a huge benefit. Seems like there are experts able and willing to contribute on virtually every topic discussed. Wouldn't want that to get "muzzled".
