On Thursday, September 19, State Senator Tony Hwang, State Representative Mitch Bolinsky, and State Representative Marty Foncello hosted a Legislative Town Hall at the Newtown Community Center to address rising electric costs and the unaffordability of the country’s third smallest state.

The meeting was moderately attended, with about 20 residents in attendance. Hwang felt it was due to rescheduling the event twice, and not being able to properly get the word out. Hwang, Bolinsky, and Foncello started the meeting by describing the four “buckets” on the electric bill, leaving the public benefits charge last as it has caused the most “ire and frustration,” as Hwang said.

Thanks to a new regulation PURA passed in June 2023, electric bills were redesigned to give ratepayers more transparency on their bills and where their money is going. There are four sections of the Eversource bill: generation/supply, transmission, local delivery, and public benefits.

Generation and supply is “the cost to purchase electricity that you use. If you have a standard service rate, your utility doesn’t make a profit from it. It is a straight pass-through,” Hwang said. Ratepayers, however, have a choice of electric supply. “One of the things we did legislatively in the past number of years was to create a choice of people to choose your electric supply. Under energizect.com, you can actually reevaluate your rate cost. Every single week if you need to,” Hwang explained.

It’s important for ratepayers to understand their rights and options. One of Hwang’s goals of the town hall meeting was to educate his constituents on their options, and the reality of the situation, rather than allow people to fall into the traps of misinformation.

Bolinsky then discussed transmission. Transmission is the cost to deliver “power from its source into the electrical grid, which in Connecticut is almost exclusively above-ground wires,” Bolinsky explained. He also mentioned that “in some cases, the infrastructure could be as old as 80 or 100 years.”

The issue with the aging infrastructure here in Connecticut is that it will not be able to support the “attempted mandating of a hard switch over to electric vehicles. We simply don’t have the capacity to carry that load on our current transmission lines,” Bolinsky said. “We don’t have the wires to carry the juice to handle all the electric vehicles.”

Foncello discussed local delivery briefly, or “the boring part of it,” as he joked. He described the local delivery as being the part “you’re most familiar with. The poles, the wires that go to your house, of course, the juice coming in.”

Local delivery is the largest portion of the bill, comprising 31.2% of it. Foncello said, “You know how it is. Whenever there’s a storm, a tree falls down, karate chops your power line, somebody’s got to go out and fix it.”

Then the three of them moved to discuss the big-ticket item: public benefits charge. The public benefits charge encompasses many charges on Eversource bills including the systems benefits charge, which covers assistance programs; conservation and load management charge, which covers energy efficiency programs; and the renewable charge, which promotes growth, development, and sale of renewable energy.

People have many issues with the public benefits section of their bill, especially due to the sharp increase ratepayers saw starting July 1. This sharp increase, projected to last 10 months, is due to the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority voting to pay back Eversource the moratorium debt due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The electric moratorium in Connecticut lasted four years — all other states had a two-year moratorium.

The moratorium was meant to assist those who could not pay their bills during the pandemic so they didn’t have to choose between “having meat in their diet this week or pay Eversource,” Bolinsky said.

The vote passed through PURA 2-1, with Marissa Gillett, the chairwoman of PURA, being the one that voted against the hike. She proposed to roll the hike out over ten years, but the other two commissioners decided “we need to get them paid,” as Hwang remarked.

“That’s important because just as recently as a month and a half ago, less than a month ago, at the urging of the legislative leaders, we asked PURA to consider re-opening that docket to extend to a ten-year period. The same two individuals rejected opening up that,” Hwang explained.

Hwang then moved to briefly discuss the Millstone agreement, which is a major component to this story. The Millstone agreement is an agreement between the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant, Eversource and United Illuminating that states that between the two electric distribution companies, they must purchase 50% of the plant’s output for 10 years.

This agreement went into effect in 2019, a few months before legislators put a moratorium in place for COVID relief.

Hwang explained that when the Russia-Ukraine conflict occurred, the rates for natural gas “spiked,” and the Millstone agreement was saving customers money. Nuclear power was cheaper than natural gas at the time.

“Now, the natural gas prices have dipped down, that cost where the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant has risen and is a big part of the cost that you’re seeing in public benefit,” Hwang noted.

The third aspect of the public benefits charge Hwang explained is the home efficiency audits. These are awareness programs that promote using energy efficient light bulbs and other technology that helps keep energy costs low.

Hwang said, “These are things that the legislative body has authorized, but put in as a hidden tax to ratepayers … We have also proposed that these kinds of costs, if you made a conscious decision to think that these services are relevant and important to the consumers and the ratepayers and the users of energy in the state of Connecticut, I’ve said this to the governor again: put it into the budget.”

Hwang then discussed the lobbying costs that were passed through onto ratepayers that Gillett fixed. PURA passed regulation to put a stop to that behavior and make jet costs, marketing costs, and other business costs the sole responsibility of the company, which made an almost $2.4 billion profit last year.

Following this discussion of the bills, the three hosts of the meeting moved to public participation. A few people went to the podium and asked the hosts about the next steps.

Chris Thornberg addressed the crowd and asked if Connecticut’s prices are on par with what other states are paying.

“One of the challenges [in Connecticut] is that we deregulated a number of years back. So, none of our utilities own power generation. That is why we have it as a straight pass-through. Number two, Connecticut, uniquely positioned in having the Sound and enough woods and the great beauty,” Hwang trailed off for a moment, “[we are] an energy desert. We don’t generate energy sufficiently.”

Resident Deborra Zukowski was next to ask a question. She asked, “Do electric companies have an incentive to have a fragile local delivery service? Meaning, do the companies make more money fixing systems than hardening them? And if so, what can PURA do about it?”

“To answer your question, PURA is an integral part and they regulate the local delivery. And it is important for us to hold them accountable, and for them in the quasi-judicial process to demand accountability and transparency. Hasn’t happened in the past in my opinion,” Hwang noted. “With five commissioners [on PURA] and a balanced ratio, and consideration, I think we can make a difference in local delivery costs.”

Robert Cerraro, an attorney and civil engineer, wanted to know what the state attorney general had to say about these “unknown charges.” Cerraro described the public benefits charge as “larceny.”

Cerraro said, “The lawyer in my head, I did a lot of criminal defense work, and when you take something from somebody, that’s basically known as larceny. And when you take it from them and you trick them into thinking something different, that’s called larceny by trick. So this is a criminal activity that they’ve been engaging in. Now, you know, you can throw your shoulders up and your hands in the air, according to criminal law, that’s what this is, larceny, based on how the senator explained it.”

Hwang responded by citing recent news of Attorney General Tong pushing against Iberdrola’s — the company that owns Avangrid and United Illuminating — desire to purchase the remaining shares of Avangrid. This action would therefore completely privatize United Illuminating, and the legislator would no longer be able to regulate the company’s prices, lobbying costs, and more.

Resident Bryan Atherton then spoke.

He shared, “I don’t mind paying more for a better service. It’s reliable, it’s predictable. You now have more efficient process … When I’m with my other cohorts in Texas or in other parts of the country, we talk about why their businesses aren’t relocating in Connecticut … We pay premiums, and other corporations are saying, ‘you don’t have the reliability. We can’t take the risk to place our business there.’”

Phil Carroll asked, “Did anybody ever think of possibly going back to a lot of these people who did not pay for the last four years and say, ‘we’re putting you on a long-term plan, we want money from you guys, too?’ Because this is unfair to everyone else that is forced to pay for that.”

He also asked about the possibility of using ARPA funds to pay for this surcharge, “so everyone isn’t stuck paying this in their monthly bills.”

Bolinsky, earlier in the meeting, suggested, “You know what? If we can’t get together and speak about this before January, maybe we need a whole new kind of moratorium where people don’t have to pay their public benefits until we come together and figure this out.”

Hwang ended the meeting by saying, “We do have remaining ARPA funds that will expire [at] the end of this year. Again, let’s go to special session and address all possible solutions to give relief to Connecticut ratepayers, and if we can’t make huge incremental changes, we can at least show that we are going to work for you right now … The fact that [the governor has] chosen to do nothing is unacceptable.”

There is a petition online, visit specialsessionct.com for more, that is calling for a special session to help lower electric bills.

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Reporter Sam Cross can be reached at sam@thebee.com.