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N.H. PUC Adopts Disclosure Label for Electric Suppliers
September 7, 2011
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The New Hampshire PUC adopted a standard form environmental disclosure statement which electric suppliers and utilities will be required to provide to customers (DE 10-226).
The label shall be provided to all customers no less than once a year and may be provided as a bill insert, as part of a newsletter, or as a stand-alone mailing. Additionally for customers with electronic billing, electric service providers may provide the label as an electronic document sent with the e-bill or via an electronic link on the e-bill.
Electric service providers shall provide new customers with the disclosure label at the time they become a customer.
One area on which there was not consensus was regarding whether all renewable energy attributes displayed on the label must tie back to the renewable energy certificates (RECs) owned by the distribution company or competitive electric power supplier. Pursuant to RSA 374-F:3, V(f)(7), reasonable efforts should be made to assure that the renewable energy source (RES) component of an RES option is not separately advertised, claimed, or sold as part of any other electricity service or transaction. There was disagreement as to how this statutory provision interacts with the requirement to disclose energy sources and environmental characteristics found in RSA 378:49.
Staff and the majority of parties argued that RECs can only be claimed by a utility for purposes of a disclosure label if they have not been otherwise sold, claimed, or transferred to another entity. In contrast, PSNH stated that it generates and purchases power from renewable sources that predate RECs and that RSA 378:49 requires it to show the renewable attributes of its energy sources regardless of whether it has purchased RECs, provided the power supplier has not reserved the RECs to its own GIS account and provided PSNH has not sold the RECs produced by its owned generation resources.
The PUC agreed that RSA 378:49 does not limit the presentation of environmental characteristics to renewable energy sources, and said that PSNH is in a unique situation because it generates and purchases power from renewable sources that predate RECs. "As a result, if PSNH can comply with RSA 374-F:3, V(7) and RSA 378:49, and can disclose the environmental characteristics of its energy sources used to generate electricity in a manner that does not claim a renewable energy source that is otherwise separately advertised, claimed, or sold as part of any other electricity service or transaction then we will allow PSNH to include those energy sources on its disclosure label," the PUC said.
"We also observe that, according to PSNH's sample disclosure label, it intends to note that its contract mix includes REC transactions. We find that this notation of the interplay with RECs is sufficient, especially given that PSNH intends only to disclose the attributes of its energy sources under the proviso that the power supplier has not reserved the RECs to its own GIS account and that PSNH has not sold the RECs produced by its own generation resources," the PUC said.
The label will disclose the provider's resource mix broken down by: biomass, coal, hydro, imported power, landfill gas, municipal trash, natural gas, nuclear, oil, other renewable, solar, and wind. This information shall be compared to the New England regional average and be displayed in either a tabular or graphical format.
The label will also include information regarding sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and carbon dioxide (CO2), and a comparison to the NEPOOL average.
Data from the NEPOOL GIS website's public reports section will be used for the regional resource mix and emissions comparisons.
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