Clean Heat Standard Exploding on the Launch Pad

A perfect storm of legislative incompetence and bureaucratic bumbling

The Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is the state entity charged with writing the rules for and overseeing the Clean Heat Standard (S.5/Act 18). Their first main task in this role was to create a registry of all fuel dealers in Vermont, collecting data on exactly how much fossil fuel is used in the thermal sector, where it comes from, and where it ends up. The deadline for fuel dealers to register with the PUC was set in law as January 31, 2024.

Problem #1: The PUC, which had six months to develop the registry, didn’t make it available until January 17, 2024, giving dealers -- whom the PUC also has no way of notifying that they have to comply because the PUC doesn’t know who they are -- two weeks to gather twelve months’ worth of minute data on their businesses. At, not for nothing, the absolute busiest time of the year for heating fuel suppliers.

As one fuel dealer, identified on the call as Casey C., put it, “You’re essentially giving us two weeks to fill everything out for all of 2023. Which, of course this is coming out at a time where we’re also at deadlines with the state for tax filings, monthly, quarterly, annual reports, and, it happens to be the busiest time for the industry in taking care of our customers and keeping people warm when it’s cold out. So, I’m just wondering a two-week notice? Is there any way to file for an extension if we can’t get all that information in that short period of time?”

That would be no. There is no provision in the law legally allowing for an extension (although the PUC did, in the end, jury-rig a compromise by getting the Attorney General to agree not to prosecute anyone who filed after January 31 and before February 29, 2024 because, ya know, February is so much less busy for people who deliver heating fuels in Vermont.)

But remember, this little helping of pure meanness is not a bug in the law, but a feature. When fuel dealers explained to legislators the complications a January deadline would cause and asked for a July deadline instead, Senator Dick McCormack (D-Windsor) infamously quipped, “They want to be making deliveries to their customers during their peak season. We want less dependence on fossil fuels. Make it so they can’t deliver. That’s a dirty trick!” (See the video.) Yes, it is dirty. And still the unworkable – for everybody, including the PUC – dirty January deadline went into the final law.

Problem #2: The information the fuel dealers are required by law to provide is, admitted Tom Knauer, an attorney for the PUC, “unknowable.” He sheepishly explained, “We are implementing that statute and collecting the information required by the statute.”

As Judy Taranovich of Proctor Gas explained, “You want us to register thermal gallons. I have homes that have heating, hot water, cooking stoves, generators, dryers all on the same system. There is no possible way – it is a question that cannot be answered how much goes to just the thermal sector versus a cook stove, a generator. When the generator comes on, what portion of that is going to the thermal sector versus the cooking sector or a dryer? How many people in the house? How long were they out of power? You are asking us an impossible question. We can’t possibly be fair to either side to answer that question…. I don’t know how we can fill this out and be honest or fair either to myself as the gas company or the customer.”

But if the fuel dealers don’t supply “unknowable” information, they can be held legally liable. It’s a Catch 22. Thank you, incompetent lawmakers.

Problem #3. The PUC is itself clueless about how to accurately gather this information and can offer no advice to dealers on how to comply with the law they are charged with overseeing the compliance thereof. (Really, it would be funny at this point if the consequences of this insanity were not so dire.)

Lisa Shaddok of Proctor Gas followed up on Taranovich’s observation about unknowable information by asking, “How can we be accurate when you don’t have a formula that we can use? I can make up my own formula but are you going to come and tell me it’s wrong? Because it’s a guestimate….  I can come up with a guestimate, but are you going to tell me it’s wrong because you don’t agree? Is there going to be a formula in place to help us do this correctly? 

After a long, awkward pause, one of the PUC experts chirped, “We don’t have a formula at this time.”

Taranovich pressed, “So what do we put down?” Which only elicited another long awkward pause followed by another useless response of, “I see your frustration.” No answer. Clueless.

Over and over again the PUC team stated that they could not offer “legal advice” on how to comply with the law. But fuel dealers can’t get private council — if they could afford it in the first place — because the legal rules governing the CHS have not yet been written for a lawyer to read. If this is a joke, it’s a cruel one.

Problem #4: The PUC has no way of knowing/validating if the information provided by the fuel dealers is correct – or even who provided the information!

Casey C. asked, once the form is submitted, “How do you validate the legitimacy of it? I ask out of the security concern that right now the forms are open to anybody, and anybody can fill them out and claim to be anyone. So, I’m just wondering about how you validate the forms once they’re submitted that the person who submitted them actually has authorization to submit them on behalf of the company.”

Another one of those long awkward pauses.

One of the PUC spokespeople responded, “I believe that the department [of public service] is going to be helping us do that validation. And I would add that the attestation on that signature page is kind of certifying that the information that’s being put in there is true and correct.”

“Yeah, but it’s not really a signature,” Casey C. points out. “I mean, you can draw whatever. It’s not really a signature that can you can validate as someone’s real signature.”

Awkward pause… “We are not at this time asking for anything other than the attestation.” So, I guess the Public Service Department is NOT going to help the PUC do that validation. Just no validation.

Which begs the question, how is the PUC, which can’t even validate the information its requesting from potentially a couple hundred fuel dealers, going to ultimately validate the information regarding literally hundreds of thousands of “clean heat measures” – the actions such as installing heat pumps and weatherizing homes etc. that generate valuable “clean heat credits” base on the real, calculated amount of CO2 such actions remove from the atmosphere — happening all over the state? Are they just going to accept some “signature” from any unverified anyone as attestation to the validity of a clean heat measure and its value? And pay that unverified anyone in credits just for filling out a form? Because, folks, that is a guaranteed recipe for massive fraud.

This total clusterbleep is the fault of incompetent legislators signing onto a law that they did not understand – didn’t even bother to try to understand – and a bumbling bureaucracy that lied on its resume when they testified multiple times that they would be able to implement a law of this magnitude, filled with so much minutia, and so many contradictory and “unknowable” mandates. And, this is only just beginning.

• Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.

---

Click that ♡ button, please. And don’t forget to subscribe and share. I’m grateful for your help with growing the BTL audience! Thanks.

---

Media Note: In case you missed my appearance on the Morning Drive last Thursday, you can hear the recording HERE. It was a fun one for sure!