In 2001 Governor Jeanne Shaheen caved into Public Service Company, sticking ratepayers with the $1.9 billion dollar tab for its bad investments in worthless power plants. If you are a ratepayer, you are still paying Jeanne Shaheen's PSNH bailout, which you can see every month on your electric bill as a "stranded cost" charge.
From my time in the state senate, I learned more about stranded costs than anyone wants to know when I worked with ratepayers, competitive power generators, and environmentalists to block this sneaky new form of corporate welfare.
Now, PSNH wants to stick ratepayers with another $430 million to cover its worthless investment in a scrubber it built to keep its 50-year old Merrimack Station coal plant running. PSNH electric rates are once again far above market, customers are fleeing in droves to competitive suppliers with lower rates, and PSNH is trapped in a "death spiral" of its own making, with fewer and fewer customers paying higher and higher electric rates. A recent study done for the Public Utilities Commission to evaluate PSNH's prospects found:
"[T]he situation looks to worsen, as continuing migration from PSNH's default service by customers causes an upward rate trend. We find no supportable basis for optimism that future market conditions will reverse this unsustainable trend ... To the contrary, the PSNH fossil units face uncertainties that combine to create a risk of further, potentially substantial increases in costs."
Working families are already under serious economic pressure from five years of weak job markets and cannot afford another bailout for this grossly mismanaged company.
Stop the $430 million PSNH bailout
PSNH must prove in its ongoing rate case that the scrubber investment was prudent and in the interest of ratepayers at the time made and that the plant is used and useful today. It's not news that Merrimack Station is barely used and economically useless because its power is so far above market rates. And it is also easy to prove that PSNH knew at the time construction began in 2009 that the scrubber investment was not in ratepayers' best interest.
Once again in 2009, I stood with ratepayers, competitive power generators, and environmentalists. We fought PSNH to persuade the legislature to pass a bill to study whether ratepayers would be better off if the company simply shut down Merrimack Station and purchased lower-cost, cleaner, and abundant power available on the wholesale market. We presented voluminous evidence showing that the scrubber would cause a rate spike and exactly the PSNH death spiral we are now seeing.
Why did PSNH oppose even a study? Under regulated rates, PSNH earns a nine percent return on any amount of investment, no matter how bad, that it can get the Public Utilities Commission to include in its "rate base." It gets no such return for power purchased on the wholesale market - even if that power is cleaner and less costly. PSNH knows this, but did not want the public to know. So, PSNH wheeled out a massive public relations and lobbying campaign and successfully killed the study bill.
Now, PSNH wants ratepayers to pay the price for its arrogance.
Stand with me and with economically-pressured families and New Hampshire businesses. Demand that the PUC order PSNH to write off its bad investments and NOT stick families and businesses with the costs of more corporate welfare like Jeanne Shaheen did.
Hear me speak
Wednesday (8/14), 5:30-8:00, Belknap County GOP meeting & dinner, Top of the Town Restaurant, 88 Ladd Hill Road, Belmont. RSVP alan.glassman@gmail.com
