Public Service Department outlines comprehensive energy plan, links it to H.289 at committee hearing

BURLINGTON, March 19 — At a House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee hearing, TJ Poore, director of regulated utility planning at the Vermont Public Service Department, presented an overview of the state’s Comprehensive Energy Plan and explained how the plan’s analyses and recommendations relate to pending legislation in H.289.

The plan, Poore said, is grounded in state statute (Title 30 §202b) and is produced on a multi‑year cycle to guide administration priorities. “It is the administration that does this plan,” Poore said, adding that the plan must reconcile competing priorities including affordability, economic vitality, reliability and greenhouse gas reductions.

Poore told lawmakers the plan uses the Low Emissions Analysis Platform, or LEAP, a transparent input‑output modeling framework developed and supported by the Stockholm Environment Institute, to test scenarios for energy demand, technology deployment and emissions. “All these models are wrong. Right? And some of the models are useful,” Poore said, arguing the model’s transparency and ability to capture interactive effects (for example, weatherization plus a heat pump in the same home) make it suitable for planning.

Why it matters: the Comprehensive Energy Plan sets the analytic basis the administration uses to recommend energy policy and to prioritize actions in areas from utility regulation to weatherization and transportation electrification. Poore said H.289 gives the administration an opportunity to translate plan recommendations into an implementation plan that explicitly evaluates Vermont and societal impacts — “including cost” — and to prioritize measures across…