PORTLAND, Maine — The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen has said a federal plan to limit carbon emissions could drop home power bills by as much as 12.5 percent in 15 years, based on a projected cut in power use.
The group used national data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to estimate how the proposed Clean Power Plan would affect individual electricity customers, fighting the cries of opponents that the plan will increase the cost of power.
“Detractors often argue that the EPA rule will raise electricity rates — a claim that is technically correct but focuses on the wrong question from a consumer standpoint,” the report states.
The EPA avoided a legal battle on the details of the plan Tuesday, when a judge with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia declined to hear a challenge to the proposed rules from coal companies and 14 coal-producing states because the rules have not been made final.
The New York Times reported the proposed rules are expected to face numerous legal challenges, as it stands to close hundreds of coal plants and drop domestic demand for coal.
New England has few coal plants and a regional cap-and-trade greenhouse gas reduction program hailed as a model for states to comply with the proposed emissions-reduction plan. The plan would call for Maine to reduce emissions from power plants by 13.5 percent from 2005 levels, by 2030.
The group’s analysis of EPA figures found that the cost of complying with those new rules would initially raise annual power bills in Maine by about $39 to $52 in 2020 but would then decline to save between $117 and $129 by 2030.
While the investments to comply with the plan would cause the price of power to rise, the group found that energy efficiency measures would back off power use enough to save customers money.
The savings in Maine are based on an EPA estimate that states will reduce power use by about 1.5 percent annually and could lower total power consumption by 2,116 gigawatt hours per year by 2030.
David Arkush, managing director of Public Citizen’s climate program, said in a conference call Wednesday that Maine is the first state for which the group has unveiled such an analysis, which it also plans to do in New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and maybe others.
Arkush said the group has chosen to highlight states where there was “a valuable message to be sent about potential success stories or where state decisions could make a big difference or where there were recent controversies with representatives to the federal government.”
Energy efficiency programs have been the subject of controversy in Maine recently, with utilities regulators interpreting a 2013 law as setting a cap on efficiency spending that many lawmakers said the Legislature did not intend.
Michael Stoddard, executive director of the Efficiency Maine Trust, said that the lower cap could put the trust’s home and business heating efficiency programs in jeopardy, as it is first required to spend on possible electricity efficiency savings.
The Public Citizen analysis makes the argument that customer bills could be lowered with continued energy efficiency savings, though it does not contemplate how electricity billing might change between now and 2030.
Maine and other states such as New York are considering new schemes for compensating electricity customers who generate their own power as well as other ways to bill based on time-of-day use and other factors.
The left-leaning Maine People’s Alliance helped Public Citizen with the Maine analysis.
Jesse Graham, the Maine People’s Alliance’s executive director, echoed statements from EPA officials that the current regional greenhouse gas auction for power producers puts Maine “at a competitive advantage” for complying with the EPA emissions reduction plan.