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Lawmakers review H.125: agencies, nonprofits urge focus on forward‑looking indicators and note data gaps
Summary
Public Service Department and Energy Action Network officials told the Natural Resources & Energy Committee that much of H.125's requested information exists but recommended the bill focus on forward‑looking indicators and identify the resources needed to collect them.
The committee heard from the Public Service Department and Energy Action Network on bill H.125, which would require periodic statewide reporting on energy prices, distributed generation, fuel sales and related indicators.
TJ Ford, Director of Regulated Utility Planning at the Public Service Department, told the committee that many of the requested data points already appear in the department's annual energy report, and that duplicative reporting could be a poor use of resources. "The last section of the report, which asked ... for analysis of the data and recommendations ... is really the most valuable piece of this legislation," Ford said, arguing that the state would get the most value from a one‑time analysis that identifies forward‑looking indicators and the resources needed to collect them on an ongoing basis.
Ford noted some specific gaps and burdens: tracking active Certificates of Public Good (CPGs) for distributed generation is labor‑intensive because CPG filings are not available in a readily machine‑parseable database; forecasting EV rate adoption and disaggregating charging revenues by customer type are additional areas requiring more work. He recommended that the committee focus the bill on identifying the leading indicators that will be most useful for policymakers and then fund data collection accordingly.
Jared DuVall, executive director of Energy Action Network (EAN), presented EAN's existing data tools and said EAN's public dashboards already provide county‑ and town‑level tracking for many measures (weatherization completions, residential heat pump installations, EV registrations). DuVall also presented an economic snapshot: "Total energy spending in Vermont [is] estimated to be about a little over $3,000,000,000," with more than $2 billion a year spent on fossil fuels during each of the last three years, figures he said underscore Vermont's exposure to global commodity price swings.
DuVall and others flagged additional gaps and constraints: employment data for the thermal trades are not collected with the same detail as renewable trade counts; EAN's clean energy industry report is federally funded and its future depends on grant support; some fuel prices (wood chips, cordwood) are hard to obtain consistently. Committee members responded that they wanted usable forward indicators (for example, utility‑level EV adoption forecasts, CPG application trends, and counts of weatherized homes by income cohort) and asked agencies and partners to propose a prioritized set of data elements and the resources required to maintain them.
What happens next: Department staff said they would coordinate with ANR and other agencies, and with external partners such as EAN, to identify which items can be provided now, which require modest additional resources and which would need new data systems. The committee indicated it prefers a focused, forward‑looking analysis that recommends how to measure progress going forward rather than duplicating already published lagging indicators.
Votes at a glance: No formal motions or votes were recorded. The committee asked agencies to return with recommendations and cost estimates for collecting forward‑looking indicators.
