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; the Department of Taxes collects distributor-level fuel tax returns and can share counts of dealers; and transportation and grant records (including VTrans and grant-funded EV charging projects) offer additional location and infrastructure detail. Rebecca Zamrock, deputy commissioner at the Department of Taxes, said the department is already authorized to provide the names of businesses newly selling or no longer selling heating fuel and can share aggregate counts, subject to tax confidentiality rules.

Committee members heard that practical obstacles would complicate a comprehensive registry. Department of Public Service staff told the committee that early reporting would be "imperfect" and that building a complete heating-dealer registry requires staff time, follow-up and potentially enforcement steps to obtain reliable responses. The staff witness said past efforts to assemble comparable data under the state’s clean heat work were “very difficult to get,” and warned that creating high-quality, geo‑coded datasets (for example, precise delivery areas or truck routing) may require cross‑agency triangulation and additional resources.

Witnesses discussed specific technical and legal constraints. The Agency of Natural Resources’ greenhouse-gas inventory reports statewide fuel volumes but not dealer locations and is intended for emissions accounting rather than service‑delivery mapping. The Department of Taxes suggested that if a report would reveal fewer than 10 dealers in a given category, confidentiality rules could limit publication of identifiers; the department recommended codifying any statutory reference to tax data with an explicit citation to the department’s confidentiality statute to ensure recipients are bound by the same limits.

Committee members and witnesses flagged a mix of data types that the bill would need to address, including: counts of heating‑fuel dealers and changes year to year; electric-vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) installed through grants or utilities; utility filings and rate riders that affect EV adoption; and developer filings for solar and other distributed resources. Department of Public Service staff noted that many solar projects appear as project‑specific LLCs, which complicates efforts to identify parent developers without additional registration requirements.

Several members supported a staged approach. Representative Kathleen James and others said they favored a two-step timeline: pass a relatively concise bill asking agencies to assemble an initial report and return to the Legislature with a plan for refining the dataset. "If we can pull this off... seeing the combination of environmental and economic factors might allow us to spot emerging energy deserts, which could be a really helpful policy tool," James said. The committee discussed asking agencies to produce a preliminary report by next November and to recommend improvements and resource needs at that time.

No formal vote or rule change was taken during the hearing. Committee staff and witnesses identified likely follow-up steps: convening related agencies (suggested participants included the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, VTrans, Department of Public Health and the Office of Aging), clarifying how tax and licensing data would be shared and protected, and producing a rough cost estimate for the staffing and IT work needed to make the registry reliable.

The committee left the hearing with plans to seek additional input and to request a short, staged reporting timeline from agencies rather than a single all‑encompassing mandate. The committee also signaled interest in JFO (Joint Fiscal Office) cost estimates and in bringing additional stakeholders—fuel dealers, municipal associations and small‑town service providers—into future testimony.