Press Release: 08/12/2010
Contact:  Jack Colby (401)884-0788

Last spring the Public Utility Commission (PUC) voted to reject National Grid's (NG) proposal to buy energy from Deepwater Wind (DW). DW had been granted the authority by NG to petition the PUC to build an eight turbine wind farm off of Block Island. The sweetheart deal between NG and DW did not provide any opportunity for other companies in the wind-to-energy business to submit more cost competitive energy plans. Without any competitive incentive, DW submitted a plan to sell Rhode Islanders NG energy at 24.4 cents a kilowatt hour, increasing each year by 3.5% over a 20 year contract period. Comparing that rate to the current cost of electricity paid by NG to buy electricity from current sources, 9.2 cents per kilowatt hour, the PUC, wisely, rejected the DW proposal. By rejecting the NG and DW incestuous plan, the PUC lived-up to its responsibility to protect utility customers from powerful monopolies that, when unregulated, can strangle electric customers with high utility bills.

The PUC's unanimous decision to reject the NG/DW plan did not sit well with our governor who does not take well to democratic processes that frustrate his Napoleonic model of governance. Casting aside any pretence of the PUC's policy-setting prerogative, the Governor Carcieri declared that the PUC was just a “rate setting body” that could be forced back to the table to “reconsider” the NG/DW proposal. Determined to make the PUC get it right this time, Governor Carcieri teamed up with two unlikely allies to box-in the PUC by limiting the criteria the commissioners could use to re-evaluate DW's wind-farm proposal.

Seemingly star-struck by Mr. Carcieri's sidling-up to them, House Speaker Gordon Fox and Senate President Teresa Paiva-Weed, helped to pass legislation that hand-cuffed the three PUC commissioners' deliberations. The emergency legislation flew through the legislature in just one week. While it often takes years to pass progressive legislation that protects consumers (On this point, the George Wiley Center was been working for seven years to get the General Assembly leadership to pass legislation that would lower gas and electricity rates for Rhode Islanders who qualify for federal heating assistance), the Carcieri-Fox-Paiva-Weed initiative created a fast-track for legislation that assisted the special-interests of two monopolistic companies. That initiative will increase those company's profits while aggravating Rhode Island's energy crisis affecting struggling families, the elderly, and children: last year 31,500 Rhode Island households had their gas or electricity shut-off by NG. Many of those shut-offs resulted when families, strapped for cash in this extreme recession, lost the capacity to pay their ever increasing utility bills. National Grid, a British company, has managed to recolonize New England with its company-store economics.

Constrained in their deliberations by the legislation that limited the criteria they could use for reconsidering the DW wind plan, on August 12, 2010, the PUC -- in a 2-1 vote -- caved into the Carcieri-General Assembly-NG/DW cabal and approved the DW plan which just months earlier they had unanimously rejected. Ignoring the testimony of RI business leaders and energy analysts that DW-generated energy will hurt businesses and individual consumers, the PUC fed the voracious corporate machine abetted by our so-called business governor and the general assembly leadership.

Looking on the bright side, consumers can take solace in the role played by Rhode Island's Attorney general, Patrick Lynch, and the Conservation Law Foundation. The AG and the CLF fought to protect consumers and small businesses during this sordid process. More importantly going forward, both the AG and the CLF have vowed to go to court to stop the DW project. Both the AG and CLF have argued that the reconsideration of the NG/DW proposal was unconstitutional on the grounds that, once heard by the PUC, the NG/DW proposal is not permitted reconsidered. We will all have to wait to see how the courts rule on this matter under a precedent called res judicata, a legal term that means, “the matter has been settled.”

Members of the George Wiley Center lead a public education and organizing effort to stop the NG/DW proposal based on the economics of the plan. Knowing as we do that the cost of energy, monopolistically controlled by National Grid in RI, is strangling consumers, we have argued that the DW-generated energy was excessively costly. We were troubled as too by the process initiated by Governor Carcieri that stripped the PUC of its regulatory independence.

The Wiley Center's state-wide collaborative will continue to oppose the DW project. While we support the development of renewable energy initiatives in Rhode Island, we insist that those initiatives be established in an open and competitive way and benefit consumers as well as the energy providers. That is to say, in a way that differs dramatically from the secretive and costly NG/DW proposal. We would also like to thank Commissioner Mary Bray for her courageous vote to oppose the plan.