In an opinion piece for The Baltimore Sun, United's Shawn Kelly discusses the urgent need for Maryland to shift away from natural gas pipelines towards clean energy solutions to combat the utility rate spiral and align with the state's climate goals.
With every passing year, status quo spending on natural gas pipelines does nothing to fight sky-high gas bills for Marylanders and openly contradicts the state’s climate goals. Collectively, the state’s largest gas utilities, Baltimore Gas & Electric, Washington Gas Light and Columbia Gas of Maryland, are planning $20 billion of fossil fuel infrastructure investments between 2024 and 2045. That’s billions of dollars spent to put pipes in the ground for at least the next 50 years, paid for on the monthly bills of Maryland ratepayers. But as customers install electric appliances using federal rebate and tax credit programs and under new clean heat and appliance standards and incentive programs in Maryland, the number of gas customers, and many remaining customers’ gas use, will decline.
This is an unsustainable and financially irresponsible path. The Maryland Public Service Commission’s upcoming public comment hearing in Baltimore on Thursday is an opportunity for stakeholders to share their concerns about the state’s current trajectory concerning its natural gas use. On behalf of the national business association Advanced Energy United, I look forward to speaking in support of the petition from the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, filed in February 2023, asking the commission to establish long-term planning for gas utilities and identify near-term actions to address unchecked spending and rising gas bills. This petition makes the case for eliminating subsidies to hook up new customers to fossil fuels and finding lower-cost ways to serve customers with affordable, reliable clean heat.
The primary problem facing Maryland is that growing costs to maintain the pipeline system are spread over fewer units of gas and fewer customers, sending gas bills spiraling upward, with future rates expected to more than double by 2035 and be up to eight times higher by 2050. These skyrocketing bills will hit our most vulnerable community members — renters, low-income homeowners and fixed-income seniors — the hardest because they can’t afford to switch to high-efficiency, high-performing electric equivalents on their own.
Proactive planning processes can ensure that the state has a plan to support vulnerable customers with energy efficiency and weatherization upgrades, energy management tools, electrification and bill support, but until the commission acts on the Office of People’s Counsel petition, they remain at risk.
And for all other Marylanders, long-term gas plans can serve as a platform to conduct two processes that will save everyone money over the near and long term. The first process concerns non-pipeline alternative analyses, which ask the utility to study whether there are other options, like energy efficiency, gas demand response and targeted electrification, that both meet system needs and reduce costs. Without this process, we can only guess whether gas utilities are serving their customers at the lowest possible cost.
The second process is coordinated planning between gas and electric utilities, which will allow for more comprehensive system-wide energy infrastructure and resource optimization — making sure that we aren’t over-investing, under-investing or wasting dollars building duplicative systems.
Overall, long-term gas planning offers Maryland significant benefits, including cost and risk mitigation for all gas customers, transparency, equivalent oversight of the state’s electric utilities and compliance with climate goals. It can also help a gas utility maintain its financial solvency as the business undergoes rapid market- and policy-driven change.
It should come as no surprise that the lobbying arm of the natural gas industry, the American Gas Association, is opposed to this long-term planning proceeding as they are the very same organization that profits from our sustained reliance on fossil fuels and the multibillion-dollar gas infrastructure replacement programs to sustain that reliance across the country. Time and time again, they have opposed climate and consumer-focused efforts to make our homes cleaner, healthier and lower-cost.
Despite their efforts, states as politically diverse as Colorado, Nevada, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon and New York have begun new gas-planning processes because they’ve determined that it’s necessary to protect their residents and businesses from unaffordable gas bills. We hope that Maryland will be next, and that the Public Service Commission takes swift and decisive action on long-term gas planning and the Office of People’s Counsel petition at this hearing.
Read the full article here.