As policymakers and clean energy advocates work to protect their communities against skyrocketing energy costs, understanding how to communicate the counterintuitive link between additional grid investments and affordability is essential when bills are rising. We convened a panel to discuss translating the complexities of the grid’s impact on energy bills ​into accessible stories, from experts on clean energy, transmission, load growth, and consumer advocacy to demonstrate how different solutions can address affordability from multiple angles. 

Our expert panel included: 

• Abby Watson, Co-Founder and President of The Groundwire Group
• Alisa Fox, Director of Grid Campaigns at ACORE
• Abe Silverman, Assistant Research Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Sustainable Energy Institute
• Annie Levenson-Falk, Executive Director of the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota

Learn more by watching the webinar at 04:33

Abby Watson from the Groundwire Group kicked off the panel with a presentation on how to communicate with the public about the affordability benefits of clean energy and grid investments. This presentation pulled from lessons learned during the creation of the Macro Grid Initiative’s “Anatomy of a Bill Increase” resources, which aimed to break down the drivers of rising energy bills in Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, Delaware, and New Jersey.

• The key message to deliver to policymakers and the public is that the solution to energy affordability is smart investment, which is difficult in the face of already-high energy bills.
• The storyline to deliver this message can include a few key components. Every claim should be backed with evidence, and visuals can help convey the technical story.
  • The background: What’s shaping the energy landscape today?
    • E.g. New York is hungry for energy and isn’t bringing renewables online fast enough.
  • The problem: So, why is my bill increasing?
    • E.g. New York is hungry for energy and isn’t bringing renewables online fast enough, causing residents to pay more on their energy bills and remain exposed to volatile fossil fuel costs.
  • The solution: How can ratepayers save money?
    • E.g. New York is hungry for energy and isn’t bringing renewables online fast enough, causing residents to pay more on their energy bills and remain exposed to volatile fossil fuel costs. Getting more renewables online would save New Yorkers millions.

Learn more by watching the webinar at 14:54

The three other experts on the call come from a variety of backgrounds spanning transmission, energy markets, and ratepayer protections. They each provided short introductions for themselves and their areas of expertise.

• Alisa Fox, ACORE: advanced transmission technologies (ATTs)
  • As transmission portions of residential bills increase, maximizing the capacity of the existing grid is essential. 
  • ATTs include high performance conductors (HPCs), which can replace existing transmission lines to increase the carrying capacity by over 50 percent, and grid enhancing technologies (GETs), which include multiple software and hardware tools that make the grid run more efficiently. 
  • While deploying new transmission lines is essential to meet rising energy demand, ATTs can be deployed much more quickly to improve access to the lowest-cost electricity available, add new low-cost renewable power generation to the grid, and improve grid efficiency to bring transmission costs down.
• Abe Silverman, Johns Hopkins Sustainable Energy Institute: transmission and load growth
  • Decarbonizing, while addressing rising energy demand and electricity bills, requires new transmission lines to connect different regions of the country.
  • Communicating about load growth, a key component of energy affordability, requires using metaphors and comparisons. For example, PJM, the regional transmission organization serving states from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest, needs to connect six gigawatts (GW) of new load to the system; six GW is roughly the same amount of energy needed to power the city of Baltimore every year, or the equivalent of five new nuclear reactors — so we’re trying to add a Baltimore’s worth, or five nuclear reactors’ worth, of electricity consumption to the grid, every year through 2030. 
  • Utilizing case studies are key to convey the successes of deploying clean energy that also brings down energy costs.
• Annie Levenson-Falk, Citizens Utility Board (CUB) of Minnesota: ratepayer protections
  • Advocacy for ratepayer protections at Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs) are essential, especially during utility rate cases, where utility companies seek approval from the PUC for rate adjustments. 
  • The top issue at play with energy affordability is utilities’ return on equity (ROE), which is the rate that utilities can earn profit on their investments.
  • Other key issues include maximizing energy efficiency, deploying low-cost renewables, avoiding over-investment in the gas system, and supporting low-income weatherization, electrification, and other measures for energy- burdened households.

Learn more by watching the webinar at 29:51

Q: What lessons, good and bad, have you learned in communicating about the tools and policies that can bolster energy affordability? What are the things that state audiences often misunderstand?

Abby Watson: I think a few things that I have found to be effective are turning some of these discussions into analogies and decision points that more folks can relate to in their day to day lives. One I like to use often is a car repair example. Have you ever waited to replace your car, and made more and more repairs every year, thinking you were going to save money, and then you end up spending more money in the long run, because the price of a new car has gone up? That happened to me personally in the last year, it is a scenario a lot of people can relate to. So, you can outline a scenario like that and say, well, our grid is in exactly the same condition. You know, we’ve under invested in it for decades, and now we’re in a position where we’re kind of keeping it limping along, hoping that it’s someday going to be cheaper to replace and upgrade all of this, when the reality is, that that probably won’t be the case. The sooner we make these investments, the better. So, those types of analogies, or putting things in a “would you rather” kind of position. Would you rather replace 50 year old equipment with the exact same equipment? Or would you rather upgrade the grid and make the best use of all of the technology that we have today? Ways where you can really center a person who’s not in our energy issues every day, and center them in the discussion in a way that they can relate to is extremely helpful. So that’s one thing I found that works. And I would say one thing that does not work, that I see happen a lot, especially in the advocacy community, and I’ve been guilty of it myself — when we’re preparing materials like this, we will begin criticizing ourselves and saying, “Oh, but somebody might point out this,” and, “Well, if we say this and don’t mention why, then someone’s going to attack us for that.” I say, okay! Let them tell the complicated story. I think a lot of times we tend to pre-criticize ourselves, and we try to pile on as many points and nuances and data points as possible, to try to cover all the bases, and then we end up telling an 80-point story instead of a three-point story.

Annie Levenson-Falk: I think on this topic, and particularly right now, working in energy, we’re so used to trying to explain really complicated topics, and you think that people might feel like they don’t know enough to weigh in, or you might feel like you need to teach people. And this is absolutely not the case on this topic [energy affordability], and it’s more so than anything else that I’ve ever come across in my time working in energy. People actually already know what the issue is, and they have a pretty good sense of who to blame for it, and what the problems are. So, you can just lean into that, you’re right about that. So like Abby said, you’re talking about needing to have a simple story, and don’t say, “It’s not just renewables that are driving up your rates.” Once you say “it’s not renewables,” you’re already losing, because you’re just repeating that incorrect talking point, which we fight against. I also mentioned in my opening about utilities’ return on equity. Usually when a utility comes in for a rate case, one of the largest factors in that rate case, if not the largest factor, is their request to increase their return. We have a rate case right now where a quarter to a third of their entire request is just that increase on their return, and they’re already making a healthy return. They’re making billions of dollars in profits every year. So this is something people actually already know and are already quite upset about. Without us doing any work, there were thousands of public comments in this rate case, 15 times as many comments as there were in the rate case that came three years prior to this, by the same utility. So something has changed. Half of those comments cited corporate profits or return on equity as a concern, and then another 20 percent looked at executive compensation. So there’s something in the air right now that I think we can lean into a little bit. I’m not saying you need to villainize the utilities, because they are doing a lot of good things as well, but there’s money to be saved there. So if we’re looking at affordability, that’s an opportunity where we can maybe reduce those returns to a little bit without a cost to the public interest, and without a real cost to the companies that would be unfair. But I think as far as communicating, it’s just about leaning into what people already know to be true.

Abe Silverman: I think one of the things is that there is no free lunch, and I think we all need to recognize that. It’s all about trade offs, right, one of the things that is so fundamental to the way electricity prices are set. When we have a clean energy resource, we’re basically buying all the fuel that facility will ever need on day one. Because the sun and the wind are free, right? When you’re building a fossil facility, you are continuing to have to buy the thing that you’re burning in perpetuity, and it’s generally got more moving parts. It’s just harder to maintain and more expensive. I think the same thing about transmission — one of the most important things that we can do to get clean energy on the grid faster, to reduce costs, is to make it easier to connect to the grid. I mean, it is baffling to me that, when we have AI cats dancing, and Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting on AI, we can’t somehow manage to get interconnection studies done in less than five years. So, that takes capital, and I think part of what we need to do is be really smart about how we’re deploying that capital, because it is making an investment, right? Abby went with a car analogy. I’ll go with another one. Say, we’re going to lease a car that we’re going to be using for the next five to ten years, or buy one. We can buy an EV or a hybrid or a gas guzzler, and you may pay incrementally more these days — I feel like it’s not even true anymore — you can pay incrementally more for a more fuel efficient car, but you’re saving money over the long term. This is really fundamental. It works exactly the same way when we’re talking about making smart investments on the grid. I’ll say one thing that doesn’t work. I found a lot of times, advocates would come to me, particularly when I was in government, and try to convince me of something I already believed. What I really needed was advice on how, and so as we go in, making sure that you have a real game plan when you’re trying to go in and talk to people, whether it be about affordability or clean energy or anything else. Even if the regulator doesn’t necessarily feel like they can say it, they’re often with you. They’re maybe 100% with you, but the thing that limits their ability to follow your advice is how much this has been socialized with the people who are going to oppose it. Can you come in and do some of that work for us, ahead of time, where you’re bringing coalitions to the table who have worked out all the details? Can you cite to another state that’s already done this, or you know, near and dear to my heart, provide regulatory or statutory text that does what you think needs to happen? Anything we can do to do that is great. And the time, I can’t tell you how many government people just spend every day from nine to five going to meetings with really well intentioned people. That’s great, and it’s really important in political coalitions and political support. I love it. But we also need to make sure that we’re being smart about how we’re approaching people, and then use them as a force multiplier, and just come in with as much of that pre-baked as you can.

Alisa Fox: I feel like transmission is probably one of the one of the most complicated topics. When you start to think you know it, then you learn more, and you’re like, “Oh, I know nothing.” I think that it’s pretty easy to say we need more transmission and we need it to be more efficient. It’s a lot more difficult to say how we’re going to do that, and map that out. I think we need to figure out when you need to bring in more expert voices, and at what time is that really key? I’ve brought in expert voices too early, where they’re just going so wonky, and the person isn’t able to engage yet at that level. But I think we’ve also seen some state legislation where it probably would have been good to engage some extra expert voices, so that we would have a policy with a little more teeth, or a little bit more expertise there. So, think about when to bring in the expert — that’s when you’re starting to think about what the PUCs are going to do, or what the utilities are going to do, that’s when you want the people that really, really know their stuff, that have their PhDs and transmission all that.

Q: Are there any good energy affordability case studies or examples that would be good to point to? Where is the research? 

Abe Silverman:  I think one that is near and dear to my heart is when New Jersey wanted to connect offshore wind. We looked at it and said, well, this is expensive, yes, but we actually can save a ton of money if we get the grid ready first. So, we came in and identified a large number, and it’s easy to get scared when you hear a large number. So we spent $2 billion, I think, on getting the grid ready, and that’s a really big number. But you know what, we saved $3 billion now. Of course, it’s a very tragic tale about what’s happened since then, about offshore wind, and it gives a good example of how these things can run afoul even when they’re really good ideas. But that concept, I think, is a really powerful one. It is very easy to get sidetracked by the cost side of the equation, but you always need to follow it in with the benefits. If you’re just talking about costs without considering benefits, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. And the same thing is true, you know, you shouldn’t be talking about benefits without talking about costs either. I think there’s a lot of examples. And Alisa, I think your work is a perfect example of this. Okay, so we’re going to replace a power line. We can replace it with the same thing, or we can replace it with a high performance conductor that sends 50 percent more power over the line with 10 percent more cost. I mean, that is such a classic example of a smart investment. I mean, honestly, it’s a lot of stuff that you deal with in your everyday life as you think about, what’s the cost benefit of going to college? Well, that’s a big number, you know, law school right here, paid for it for years, but it was a really good investment. And, of course, that’s exactly the kind of mentality we need to bring to the electric grid.

Abby Watson: Building on something that Abe mentioned before, I’m going to drop a link in the chat to an article that has some of the good data in it, but I think the offshore wind industry is really leaning in on the case study in action that is playing out right now, in terms of offshore wind really demonstrating its value to Northeastern ratepayers, especially during prolonged periods of cold weather like we’ve had recently. So we have this really tangible, timely moment where we can connect a story about how offshore wind helps to reduce demand for natural gas, which drives down everyone’s costs in the Northeast for heating and electricity, because heating and electricity are competing for natural gas. So if you can offset more of that natural gas usage in the electricity mix by bringing in offshore wind, which is absolutely cranking in the winter time, then it saves everybody money and improves grid reliability. So these are case study examples where we can show, this is a good one, and others where you can demonstrate that renewables are being built because they’re the most cost effective option. There’s a reason renewables make up, say, 90 percent of the interconnection queue. It’s because the market has decided that they are the best, most cost effective option, and in a lot of cases, faster to build, all of those things. So I think these are what offshore wind is really leaning into right now is a really solid case study example.

Abe Silverman: I have a few on data centers that you can find. If you search for Hopkins data center playbook, you’ll find it. We have a few on how different states have done different large load tariffs. So there’s quite a bit of work on that piece of it as well.

Alisa Fox: I already linked this resource, but there is a resource here that has 26 different case studies on real ATT deployments, as well as studies that have been done that speak to a bunch of different savings, whether it’s on reliability or energy costs and things like that.

Annie Levenson-Falk: I was having trouble answering, because there’s almost too many things to choose. It’s hard to know where to start. I echo what everybody else has said. A lot of really good examples, but one I would also highlight is heat pumps at the individual building level. I saw a couple of people from Maine in the chat. I’m originally from Maine, so it’s always fun to be with Mainers, but they’re just killing it with heat pump insulation, and particularly because heating costs are so expensive in in Maine, and a lot of people don’t have air conditioning, so you get cheaper heating, and you get air conditioning, and that is lovely. It’s reducing the cost, not in all cases, certainly not in every house in Minnesota, but in a lot of them. I have one in my house, because it’s cost effective to do that, and it’s also getting us off of natural gas, reducing climate emissions and reducing the demand for gas. So it’s good all around. 

Q: The generation portion of the bill is usually less than 40%, with a larger portion of the bill being for transmission and distribution. How do you communicate about the breakdown of the bill?

Abby Watson: This is definitely one of those situations where it’s so state by state. That was why, when we created these one pagers, we did have to drill down into the state level. For the states that we looked at, I don’t think any of them actually had a proportion that was quite that high in terms of what the T&D [transmission and distribution] charges are versus generation. In most of the states we looked at, it was more like three-quarters generation, and a quarter-ish to a third was T&D. But again, it’s super different in every state. You have states like California where you had major costs associated with wildfire and PG&E bankruptcy, and so you really have to identify the dynamics within that individual state, and then identify what is driving those investments. Is it a utility who isn’t appropriately constrained by their regulator? Is it because they had 100 year old wooden poles holding up all of their wires, and it was time to replace all of them? So it isn’t as cut and dry as saying, all utility investment is bad, or all local. It’s a nuanced conversation. However, there are ways, once you drill into those state level trends, to say, within these trends, what are the big drivers we can actually influence? Some of this stuff’s baked in, you’re going to see those costs one way or another, regardless, because that line needed to be replaced for reliability purposes, or whatever the case may be. So drilling in at your individual state level, of, what are the drivers and where is there room? Where is there a lever within those drivers? That is really what’s important to focus on.

Abe Silverman: I’ll just say, the T&D side of the bill has been trending up, and this is part of what makes this a difficult conversation to have, right? There’s no question T&D are going up. But the problem is, it’s not just T&D going up, it’s T&D going up and generation and capacity skyrocketing. Again, this is a regional story, or even a state by state story, but there’s no question that we are seeing each component of the bill go up, and that’s what’s really scary. We’ve been a little bit lucky in the last 15 years, where T&D has been going up, but generation costs have been going down, largely driven by lower-cost natural gas. So, as we see these trends reversing, now everything’s pointing up. I think one of the things that I really emphasize to people is that the T&D stuff, yes, it’s going up. Yes, there’s a lot of things we can do about it, especially GETs, I mean, really, that is just such a no brainer. I love things that are just like, duh. But the piece that’s been extremely volatile, especially in the last year or two, is that energy and capacity piece, and a lot of my work happens to be in PJM, which is ground zero for data centers. There, almost the entirety of the 20% year over year total bill increase we saw was largely coming as a result of higher capacity prices to serve data centers, and now we’re also seeing higher energy costs. That’s in addition to the slow, gradual rise of the T&D rates. It is a complicated story to tell, and unfortunately, I think ultimately solving some of the stuff, particularly on the data center side, gets extremely complicated, because it’s all about allocating risk appropriately, and making sure that, when Google comes to town, grandma’s bill doesn’t go up. And that’s a really complicated, nuanced story to have to tell. I spent a lot of time working with states, state legislators and executive branch folks, and we spent a lot of time trying to understand, what is actually going on here in the underlying bill? And that’s a complicated multi-part story.

Annie Levenson-Falk: I think another side of the increased spending on transmission and especially distribution system investments is that a lot of that is now going to much more advanced technology, which has so much more potential than we’re used to. For the most part, I think it’s going under utilized. There’s a lot of value that can be squeezed out of advanced meters that is not being taken advantage of, so often they’ll be sold on the promise that we can enable a lot of demand response and load shifting, and it’s going to be super cost effective. So then it’s a matter of going back and making sure that those things are actually realized. I think in most cases, the reality falls short of what we hoped going in. So there’s a lot of potential savings that also come with those. I think from a ratepayer perspective, it’s really important to make sure that people are getting their money’s worth out of those investments, and that means getting some of those less sexy benefits from that distribution investments.

Q: Political will is the main culprit for why things are not advancing, but there are also other barriers like lack of knowledge, lack of hardware, lack of trained installers, or reduced profit margins. Where are the places where political will is the biggest barrier, where communication can make a real difference in this work?

Alisa Fox: I think for ATTs, everything that was mentioned is definitely a barrier. Probably one of the biggest barriers is that utilities tend to make their money through capital projects, and GETs are typically operating expenses, meaning they can’t rate base them. Advanced conductors, you can rate base, but it’s a lower capital expense than if you’re building a new line. Then, I think, the bigger thing is with a lot of these utilities. So one, they’re not necessarily incentivized, and then two, they don’t necessarily have a familiarity with the technologies, so I don’t know that it’s necessarily a political fix. I think it’s actually more of just needing to have more experience, potentially needing to think through ways for the PUC to actually have utilities evaluate ATTs, and have that make the case for why they didn’t choose the ATT, if it is the thing that is most cost effective to customers. I think that we are starting to see some states include that in state legislation, and it’s going to start playing out now, and the big question there is, will the PUC hold the utilities to that, and really ask those questions and push for them putting in good assumptions, so that ATTs are winning out.

Abby Watson: I would say maybe something that is comms and political, and really this comes down to the very, very hyper local level, is that, fundamentally, to solve energy affordability, we need to build things we like. We won’t get there through ATTs alone. We should apply ATTs at every step of the way to reduce costs and make the most out of what we have, but we need to build more things, and it has never been more difficult to build things in this country. And that is a hyper local challenge. It’s absolutely partly a communications challenge, and I think partly also a creation of a co-benefits challenge, and that is not always easy to facilitate, depending on how, if it’s a transmission project, how that’s being paid for. If it’s being paid for by a PJM tariff, for example, then you might not be able to include something like community benefits in your transmission project. So I think it’s a two part element, but I think there’s a big communication piece to help folks get their arms around the idea that, we’re going to need to continue to build things in order to build our way out of this affordability challenge.