This is another in a series of posts on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). The program includes periodic reviews to consider program successes, impacts, and design elements. In the current program review process one of the big issues is whether to set new lower caps after 2020. Ultimately however ratepayers will have to bear the costs of further reductions. This post compares the proposed costs relative to recent rate requests and approved rate increases by New York State (NYS) electric utilities.
I have been involved in the RGGI program process since its inception. In the final years before my retirement I analyzed air quality regulations that could affect electric generating company operations. The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone. I am motivated to write these posts on RGGI because the majority of the stakeholder opinions expressed at meetings and in submitted comments are, in my opinion, overly optimistic about the potential value of continued RGGI reductions and ignore the potential for serious consequences if things don’t work out as planned. I am particularly disappointed that a bunch of government bureaucrats can simply decree additional costs to ratepayers without any substantive scrutiny by the respective State public service organizations or public knowledge.
Ratepayers in New York State have electricity bills made up of delivery and supply charges. The delivery charge is what is paid to transport electricity to the customer over power lines. The supply charge is what is paid for the electricity used. In order for the local electric utility to change the rates paid to transport the electricity delivered they have to go through a rate request process with the New York State Department of Public Service. On the other hand the price paid for electricity used is not directly regulated.
I think it is instructive to compare the indirect allowance costs with recent rate case costs for the delivery charge. I was unable to find a single summary of the most recent requested and granted rate case values for the delivery charge component of ratepayer bills. I searched for numbers and using a combination of news reports and rate case documents came up with an estimate. The NY total for the most recent rate requests for electric delivery for the investor owner utilities and LIPA is $1,282 million (Table 1, NYS Electric Delivery Rate Cases).
The cost of allowances eventually and indirectly works its way back to ratepayers. RGGI is a “Cap and Auction” program that caps electric generating unit emissions and then auctions permits to emit CO2 or allowances. The proceeds from the auctions are supposed to be invested in “strategic energy and consumer programs” but on two occasions New York Governors have raided the RGGI proceeds for other uses. The allowance costs are buried in the supply charge.
The RGGI states use the production cost model Integrated Planning Model (IPM) to analyze the impacts of air quality policies including emissions and allowance costs. This is a massive model that purports to estimate how the entire United States utility sector will react to changes in air quality regulations. In order to do that they have to model not only generator operations, fuel costs and control equipment strategies, but also the transmission system. I think there are problems with the IPM results that will be addressed in another post but for this analysis I will just accept the numbers the RGGI states are using.
In the current program review analysis there are three draft policy scenarios for possible changes to the RGGI program after 2020. As it stands now there are no further reductions promulgated for the RGGI cap after 2020 but the RGGI states are considering and have evaluated three reduction scenarios: continuing the 2.5% reduction in place up to 2020 until 2030, a 3% reduction and a 3.5% reduction. The IPM model results for the scenarios are compared to a reference case so the results are consistent. In order to cover the full range of outcomes sensitivities are run for each scenario. In the high sensitivity cases assumptions are made for plausible reasons why emissions could be higher than the reference base case and in the low sensitivity the emissions are lower. In addition, sensitivity cases with and without a national program were run. As a result there were a total of nine policy case runs.
On the RGGI website in the 2016 program review documents the model output for each of the policy runs (June 27, 2017 Meeting Materials) and the reference cases (April 20, 2017 Meeting Materials) are listed in spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet lists the model estimates of capacity additions (what electric generating capacity the model and what the states tell the model to include because of regulations); generation (how much the existing and projected units will produce); prices (including firm power prices, energy prices, capacity prices, allowance prices, natural gas prices, and renewable energy credit prices); total CO2 emissions; fuel consumption for different fuel types; and transmission flows into and out of the RGGI power grids. Those results are presented by region and each state. Note that the model output does not include projections for every year. For the 14 years 2017-2030 there is model output for six years.
For this analysis I extracted and consolidated the projected emissions and allowance prices. I estimated annual emissions and prices by interpolating between model projections. The ultimate cost to the ratepayer should be equal to the total revenue at the auctions which equals emissions times the allowance prices. Table 2, IPM 2017 modeling of annual CO2 credit price, CO2 emissions and CO2 allowance auction, lists the results from 2017 to 2030 for all the reference case scenarios and all the policy case scenarios. The Key to the 14 different modeling runs lists the assumptions made for each run. RGGI compares the reference case to the IPM modeling results. The difference between the reference case, no national program and each of the policy scenarios is shown in Table 3. Depending on the changes made to the program, consumer costs for allowance revenues are projected to increase between $134 and $604 million in 2021 to between $254 million and $1,011 million in 2030 for the nine RGGI states. For each scenario the relative share of New York emissions is listed for 2030 along with the cost for just New York. The New York share of those costs ranges from $108 million to $391 million. Table 3 also compares the RGGI allowance costs to total electric delivery costs ($1,282 million).
My point is that completely outside of any DPS review and the glare of ratepayer advocacy scrutiny, government bureaucrats are contemplating additional costs of between 8% and 31% of the most recent rate requests. I think that it would be in the best interests of the State that there was more recognition of this process.
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York 