House committee weighs H.125 reporting requirement to track Vermont’s energy transition

The Vermont House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee on Feb. 20 took testimony on H.125, a proposal to direct state agencies to collect and report data intended to track Vermont’s energy transition and identify potential “energy deserts.” Committee members, a representative of the Public Utility Commission and officials from the Department of Taxes and the Department of Public Service discussed what data exist, what would be hard to collect and how quickly a useful report could be assembled.

Committee members and witnesses said the data requested by H.125 could help spot places where traditional fuel service is thinning out as electric vehicles and other technologies change demand. "I just wanna make clear that this data that you're thinking about collecting, it has it's not just environmental in nature and there's other factors that influence it," said Ted McNamara, chair of the Public Utility Commission, urging the committee to treat economic and geographic drivers as well as greenhouse-gas measures.

Lawmakers and agency witnesses described several sources that could contribute to a report and the limits of each. The Agency of Natural Resources maintains an annual greenhouse-gas inventory, but that dataset has a two- to three-year lag;…