Committee hears administration, data groups on H.125 reporting on Vermont's energy transition

Montpelier, Vt. — The House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee heard testimony Feb. 18 on H.125, a bill directing state reporting on how Vermont's energy transition is affecting residents and businesses. Secretary Julie Moore of the Agency of Natural Resources told the committee ANR can contribute existing datasets but urged the group to pair those with analysis that produces leading indicators rather than only lagging metrics.

"I wanna start by honoring what I anticipate or intuit to be the intention of the bill, which is to look at indicators of how the energy transition is actually landing with Vermonters," said Julie Moore, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources. "I think when we get down into the specifics, ANR has some potentially relevant datasets to this work."

The bill asks for inventory and reporting about sellers of fuels, fuel volumes, and related economic impacts. Jared Duvall, executive director of the nonprofit Energy Action Network and a member of the Vermont Climate Council, demonstrated EAN's Vermont Energy Dashboard and said several key datasets already exist and can be combined to provide a comprehensive picture of the transition.

"We act as an independent nonpartisan data tracker and analyst," Duvall said. He showed the committee interactive tracking for four technologies the Climate Action Plan highlights: weatherization, cold-climate heat pumps, heat-pump water heaters and electric vehicles. EAN's data shows nearly 60,000 cold-climate heat pumps installed as of 2023 and more than 15,000 electric vehicles registered by summer 2024.

Both Moore and Duvall cautioned that many important metrics are lagging'they reflect changes after they occur rather than warning of imminent service loss. Moore proposed a phased approach: an initial inventory of available datasets and recommended analyses, followed by a second-year report with refined, action-oriented indicators. "It seems to me these are really lagging indicators," Moore said. "I think there's an opportunity to...recommend a set of indicators that we would propose to track."

Committee members raised specific consumer and rural-access concerns. Representative Clapham asked what would happen if distributors stopped delivering heating oil to remote homes; Moore said she had not heard of a household being left without service and noted fuel delivery businesses are largely unregulated but tracked through tax filings and the clean heat reporting regime. Representative Kloepner and others framed the bill as a detection tool'to surface risks such as areas with declining numbers of fuel dealers, reduced competition, or increasing costs for remaining customers.

Duvall described additional data sources EAN uses: Department of Taxes records of gallons sold by fuel type, utilities'upstream rebate and incentive data for heat pumps and weatherization, vehicle registration data through Drive Electric Vermont for EV counts, and Public Service Department price surveys for heating fuels and gasoline. He also identified gaps, most notably the absence of recent statewide wood-fuel price data (cordwood, wood chips, pellets), which limits holistic "all-fuels" consumer cost comparisons.

On implementation and next steps, committee members and witnesses discussed timing. Moore offered to help convene agencies to assemble an inventory and suggested a two-stage deliverable: an initial December report with available data and proposed leading indicators, followed by a fuller analysis the next year. Committee members asked for a short near-term draft of a proposed report structure; members discussed aiming to have a working proposal to the committee within roughly a week to support floor timing and crossover deadlines.

The committee did not take formal action on H.125 during the session. Lawmakers and witnesses agreed to continue developing a scope that combines available tax-department fuel-sales volumes, utility rebate records, underground storage-tank inspection records and other sources into analyses that can better identify areas at risk of losing service or experiencing price and access problems.

The session included discussion of several existing programs tied to the question of access and transition. Moore described ANR's red-tagged home heating tank program, in which substandard home tanks were identified and homeowners could receive grants (announced examples included $2,500 grants) for replacement; the administration has piloted offering funds to support clean-energy conversions in lieu of direct fossil-fuel tank replacement, with mixed uptake. Committee members and witnesses also referenced the governor's tariff task team, the resilience implementation strategy and the Clean Heat Standard as related policy work.

The committee scheduled further work and asked the agencies and data providers to brief members again after they compile an initial inventory and recommended indicators.