How To Figure Out Where Your School’s Electricity Comes From

By Mike Ewall, Ener­gy Jus­tice Network
[Print­able PDF]

Is your school is pub­lic or pri­vate? Have elec­tric util­i­ties in your state been dereg­u­lat­ed? The answers to these ques­tions have a lot to do with whether you have a right to know the infor­ma­tion you’re seeking.

Your right to get information

If the school is pub­lic, you have a right to receive copies of infor­ma­tion you’re seek­ing (ener­gy con­tracts or elec­tric bills). If the school is pri­vate, you have no right to obtain this information.

Near­ly all pub­lic schools are sub­ject to state Open Records laws (some­times called the Sun­shine Act). These laws vary from state-to-state. There are very few fed­er­al pub­lic schools (these are all mil­i­tary acad­e­mies). These fed­er­al schools will be sub­ject to the nation­al Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act (FOIA) rather than state laws.

Figuring out whether your school is public or private:

For a high school or oth­er grade school, it should be pret­ty obvi­ous whether it’s pub­lic or pri­vate. Just ask around. If there is an elect­ed (or, in some cas­es, appoint­ed) gov­ern­men­tal school board that over­sees the school’s func­tion­ing, it’s most like­ly pub­lic. The line between pub­lic and pri­vate schools has been blurred in recent years, as more qua­si-pub­lic char­ter schools are cre­at­ed. You’ll need to find out if state open records laws apply to the type of school you’re researching.

For col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, most are also obvi­ous, but some can be con­fus­ing. For the most part, you can tell if a uni­ver­si­ty is pub­lic if it’s list­ed on one of the fol­low­ing webpages:
dir.yahoo.com/Education/Higher_Education/Colleges_and_Universities/United_States/Public/
www.aascu.org/members/

How­ev­er, not all pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties are list­ed there and not all uni­ver­si­ties list­ed there are pub­lic. For exam­ple, some, like the four “state-relat­ed” uni­ver­si­ties in Penn­syl­va­nia (Penn State, U Pitt, Tem­ple U. and Lin­coln U.), receive state fund­ing but are exempt­ed from state open records laws. Also, the direc­to­ries above don’t list com­mu­ni­ty col­leges, which are often pub­lic insti­tu­tions oper­at­ed by city or coun­ty gov­ern­ments. State-lev­el open records laws apply to city and coun­ty-run schools.

Know your rights

When research­ing a pub­lic school, it’s good to know your rights before you try using them. If school offi­cials try to make things dif­fi­cult for you, it’s good be cer­tain that the doc­u­ments you seek are pub­lic doc­u­ments, that you have a right to obtain them with­in a cer­tain num­ber of days and that they can’t charge you more than a cer­tain amount for copies. If you want to obtain infor­ma­tion that may be avail­able on a com­put­er, you should see if you have a right to request infor­ma­tion in elec­tron­ic formats.

The best resource on state open records laws is the “Tap­ping Offi­cials’ Secrets” web­site by the Reporters Com­mit­tee for Free­dom of the Press:www.rcfp.org/tapping/
Click on “browse,” choose your state and pay atten­tion to things like which “bod­ies” the law applies to, fees for records, access to elec­tron­ic records and how long you must wait (often addressed in sec­tions about appeal­ing a denial).

Some states (like PA ) have passed updat­ed open records laws since rcfp.org was last updat­ed in 2001. Oth­er (also some­what out­dat­ed) web­sites with resources on state open records laws are: www.nfoic.org/web/ and http://foi.missouri.edu/citelist.html

If you need to put a request in writ­ing (which you should do right away if you can’t eas­i­ly get what you want by ask­ing the prop­er per­son nice­ly), a mod­el request let­ter can be found on the Stu­dent Press Law Cen­ter web­site: www.splc.org/foiletter.asp If you start a paper trail by putting a request in writ­ing, make sure that you sign and date it and ask the sec­re­tary to make you a copy of it, so that you have proof. Bet­ter yet, see if you can get them to sign and date the let­ter acknowl­edg­ing that it was received (and ask for a pho­to­copy of that copy).

Who do you ask?

The mat­ter of who you want to ask and what you’re ask­ing for depends a lot on whether your state’s elec­tric util­i­ty indus­try is “dereg­u­lat­ed” or not.

What is deregulation?

Dereg­u­la­tion is often described in terms of “let­ting peo­ple choose where their elec­tric­i­ty comes from.” His­tor­i­cal­ly, elec­tric­i­ty sup­pli­ers were reg­u­lat­ed monop­o­lies that owned the gen­er­a­tion (pow­er plants) as well as the trans­mis­sion (big pow­er lines) and dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works (the small local wires that go to the end users). Dereg­u­la­tion is a scheme that was advanced nation­al­ly by Enron to sep­a­rate these func­tions so that dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies could offer their gen­er­a­tion mix of elec­tric­i­ty (from var­i­ous pow­er plants) to end users. When this hap­pens, the same trans­mis­sion and dis­tri­b­u­tion wires are used, but you can choose who will be sell­ing you the pow­er – sort of like how long dis­tance com­pa­nies can offer dif­fer­ent ser­vices over the same tele­phone lines. In the process, the com­pa­nies involved in trans­mis­sion and dis­tri­b­u­tion are split apart from those that own the pow­er plants.

Cal­i­for­nia was the first to dereg­u­late in the mid-1990s, fol­lowed soon by PA, IL and sev­er­al oth­er states. Dereg­u­la­tion has many neg­a­tive con­se­quences, the most obvi­ous being what became known as the Cal­i­for­nia elec­tric­i­ty cri­sis – a scan­dal where com­pa­nies like Enron and Reliant delib­er­ate­ly kept pow­er plants off-line, with­hold­ing pow­er in order to increase prices, which led to black­outs and bil­lions of dol­lars being sucked out of Cal­i­for­nia res­i­dents into the pock­ets of a few Texas-based pow­er com­pa­nies. The mas­sive black­out in the mid-west and north­east in 2003 was also a con­se­quence of dereg­u­la­tion, not a lack of avail­able power.

Dereg­u­la­tion is both bad for con­sumers and bad for the envi­ron­ment. It allows pow­er com­pa­nies to build pow­er plants with­out state util­i­ty com­mis­sion approval (most­ly ben­e­fit­ing fos­sil fuel pow­er plants). It allows ener­gy com­pa­nies to merge (so that we ulti­mate­ly end up with big­ger, more pow­er­ful com­pa­nies). It does­n’t end up pro­vid­ing real choic­es for con­sumers, since small­er com­pa­nies get forced out of the mar­ket. It also allows pow­er gen­er­a­tion com­pa­nies to increase elec­tric­i­ty prices with­out state agen­cies mak­ing sure that the prices are fair for con­sumers. More infor­ma­tion on the prob­lems with dereg­u­la­tion can be found here: www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/electricity/deregulation/ (see “fact sheets” and “reports” sec­tions on side­bar) and www.democracyandregulation.com

Why does this matter?

If your state is not dereg­u­lat­ed, your school has only one choice where it can buy its pow­er – the util­i­ty com­pa­ny that serves your area of the state. [Note: in a reg­u­lat­ed state, a school can still buy Renew­able Ener­gy Cer­tifi­cates (RECs), like the wind pow­er cer­tifi­cates sold by var­i­ous green ener­gy mar­keters.] In reg­u­lat­ed states, your school just pays an elec­tric bill to the util­i­ty, just like home­own­ers would. There may not be any “con­tract” involved.

In a dereg­u­lat­ed state, your school will like­ly have a con­tract with one of mul­ti­ple com­pa­nies that offer to sell elec­tric­i­ty in the area. You’ll need to fig­ure out which cor­po­ra­tion your school con­tracts with.

In a reg­u­lat­ed state, a state agency (often called a “pub­lic util­i­ty” or “pub­lic ser­vice” com­mis­sion, see www.naruc.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=15) can tell you where a util­i­ty gets its pow­er (which will usu­al­ly be a col­lec­tion of pow­er plants in their ter­ri­to­ry). It’s a mat­ter of pub­lic record. In a dereg­u­lat­ed state, this infor­ma­tion isn’t pub­lic. You may still be able to find out where a com­pa­ny gets its pow­er, but it’s not as easy and it may change more often.

How do I know if my state is deregulated?

Before the Cal­i­for­nia black­outs, about half of the U.S. states were dereg­u­lat­ed and the oth­er half were mov­ing in that direc­tion. Thanks to the aware­ness and abuse that the cri­sis brought to light, Cal­i­for­nia and many oth­er states reversed or halt­ed their dereg­u­la­tion plans. Cur­rent­ly, only 16 states and DC are dereg­u­lat­ed. They are: CT, DC, DE, IL, MA, MD, ME, MI, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, TX and VA.

A map and detailed infor­ma­tion on the sta­tus of dereg­u­la­tion in each state can be found here:
www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/chg_str/restructure.pdf

OK, now whom do I ask?

You’ll need to ask around until you find the right per­son. If you’re in a reg­u­lat­ed state, you’ll be look­ing for the per­son who “pays the elec­tric bill.” If you’re in a dereg­u­lat­ed state, it’ll be more com­pli­cat­ed, but you’re look­ing for who­ev­er can get you infor­ma­tion on the school’s “elec­tric­i­ty con­tract.” Where you can start depends on what type of school you’re researching:

• pub­lic grade schools: start with the school dis­trict admin­is­tra­tion building
• pri­vate grade schools and char­ter schools: start with the prin­ci­pal’s office or any staff peo­ple who might deal with utilities
• pri­vate colleges/universities: start with facil­i­ties man­age­ment, “phys­i­cal plant” or any­one in the admin­is­tra­tion build­ing. This might be dealt with through an office of pur­chas­ing or procurement
• pub­lic colleges/universities: start at the same places as pri­vate col­leges, but don’t be sur­prised if you soon get passed along to a state-lev­el office. If the school is part of a sys­tem with mul­ti­ple cam­pus­es, these oth­er cam­pus­es could fall in dif­fer­ent ser­vice ter­ri­to­ries, so there could be mul­ti­ple answers. When you get an answer, make sure you know what loca­tions it applies to. Larg­er schools can have affil­i­at­ed research insti­tu­tions or hos­pi­tals as well as oth­er cam­pus­es, so make sure you know what facil­i­ties are cov­ered and whether these oth­er facil­i­ties are get­ting pow­er from dif­fer­ent companies.

At state-run pub­lic col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, a state-lev­el office in your state cap­i­tal is often respon­si­ble for pur­chas­ing elec­tric­i­ty and oth­er goods. This might be via a cen­tral office that runs pur­chas­ing issues for the state uni­ver­si­ties. Alter­na­tive­ly, the elec­tric­i­ty pur­chase may be through a more gen­er­al office that buys elec­tric­i­ty for all state gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions. If so, the elec­tric­i­ty con­tract would be in a Depart­ment of Gen­er­al Ser­vices or some sim­i­lar­ly named agency. First, ask peo­ple at your school and if they pass you to a state office, see if they can save you time by giv­ing you the name and num­ber of who to speak with at the state level.

Any­one who can’t answer your ques­tion will prob­a­bly have some idea who else to ask. Ask for sug­ges­tions on whom to ask. If you’re sent to anoth­er depart­ment or agency, ask for names of spe­cif­ic peo­ple you should talk to. It’s usu­al­ly easy to have a staff per­son pro­vide you with the name, title, phone num­ber and office loca­tion of the per­son they’re pass­ing you on to. You may get passed from one per­son to anoth­er sev­er­al times until you reach the right per­son. Don’t hes­i­tate to drop names. When­ev­er one per­son refers you to anoth­er, intro­duce your­self by say­ing “____ in the ____ office referred me and tells me that you’re the per­son to speak with about where the school’s elec­tric­i­ty comes from.” This should get them to take you more seri­ous­ly, even if they don’t know the name you’re drop­ping. Don’t let your­self get stuck by non-respon­sive peo­ple. If you feel you’re run­ning into dead ends, ask oth­er peo­ple and seek out oth­er ways to get to the information.

How to ask for information

Take notes! – Write down the names and titles of every­one you speak to, along with the date/time you spoke with them and notes on what they said.

If you’re ask­ing a pri­vate insti­tu­tion, you have no rights to infor­ma­tion and you have to appear non-threat­en­ing and rely on your inno­cent, smil­ing face.

At pub­lic insti­tu­tions, even if you’re not a stu­dent, it’s a mat­ter of pub­lic record and you can be as stri­dent as nec­es­sary in order to obtain infor­ma­tion. If they argue that it’s not pub­lic infor­ma­tion, put a request in writ­ing, cit­ing the state open records law and demand a response in writ­ing, spelling out exact­ly why they feel that the infor­ma­tion is exempt from the state law. It’s good to send a copy to the pres­i­den­t’s office as well, so that the school’s lawyers can get you a bet­ter answer than unco­op­er­a­tive low­er-lev­el staff people.

What do I ask for?

• The name of the com­pa­ny the school cur­rent­ly buys elec­tric­i­ty from.
• Whether there are oth­er sources of elec­tric­i­ty for the school (the school might make some of its own or may buy from mul­ti­ple sources). Most cam­pus pow­er plants pro­duce steam for heat­ing, but can also be used to make electricity.
• How much elec­tric­i­ty the school is buy­ing (get month­ly and year­ly aver­ages for the amount of kilo­watt-hours the school uses) and at what price (usu­al­ly in cents per kilo­watt-hour for the gen­er­a­tion por­tion, plus oth­er fees).
• If the school buys any renew­able ener­gy on top of its nor­mal elec­tric­i­ty pur­chas­es. (Note: the per­son you’d be ask­ing about the elec­tric bill/contract might not know, since this could be han­dled by oth­ers at the school.)

To be pre­pared when ask­ing who sup­plies elec­tric­i­ty to the school, it helps to under­stand the options, which depends entire­ly on whether you’re in a dereg­u­lat­ed state…

In reg­u­lat­ed states…
If you’re in a reg­u­lat­ed state, there will be only one pow­er com­pa­ny that sup­plies elec­tric­i­ty to cus­tomers in the ser­vice ter­ri­to­ry. Most peo­ple who pay their own elec­tric bills in the area can tell you. You can also find out quick­ly by plug­ging the school’s zip code into EPA’s Pow­er Pro­fil­er web­site: www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-and-you/how-clean.html

In dereg­u­lat­ed states…
If you’re in a dereg­u­lat­ed state, schools can buy their pow­er from more than one elec­tric gen­er­a­tion sup­pli­er and – unless the school is pub­lic – you don’t have a right to know which cor­po­ra­tion they’ve con­tract­ed with. Even once you know which sup­pli­er the school buys their elec­tric­i­ty from, you don’t have any right to know which pow­er plants that cor­po­ra­tion is sell­ing ener­gy from. Not cool, eh?

A good first step is to know which cor­po­ra­tions sell elec­tric­i­ty to com­mer­cial cus­tomers in your area. This will make sure that you get the cor­rect answer. Also, if you go into the process know­ing how con­tracts work, you could come away with more information.

Figuring out who sells electricity in your area

In dereg­u­lat­ed states, the num­ber of cor­po­ra­tions sell­ing elec­tric­i­ty can vary per ser­vice ter­ri­to­ry. There are 3 class­es of cus­tomers: res­i­den­tial, com­mer­cial and indus­tri­al. Each sec­tor rep­re­sents about 1/3rd of elec­tric­i­ty demand. Schools are con­sid­ered com­mer­cial. While res­i­den­tial cus­tomers may not have many choic­es of elec­tric­i­ty sup­pli­ers to choose from, com­mer­cial and indus­tri­al cus­tomers usu­al­ly have more options. One of the con­se­quences of dereg­u­la­tion is that the “choic­es” avail­able to con­sumers are most­ly for the busi­ness sec­tor, where larg­er users of elec­tric­i­ty are reward­ed with low­er rates – mean­ing that res­i­den­tial users end up pay­ing the high­est rates, sub­si­diz­ing big cor­po­rate elec­tric­i­ty users. Any list of elec­tric­i­ty sup­pli­ers avail­able to res­i­den­tial cus­tomers is prob­a­bly not the com­plete list of those avail­able to com­mer­cial cus­tomers. Get a full list of retail elec­tric­i­ty sup­pli­ers through your state pub­lic util­i­ty commission.

Understanding contracts

Most like­ly, your school actu­al­ly has a con­tract with the elec­tric­i­ty sup­pli­er. This is going to be sim­i­lar to how your school obtains oth­er good and ser­vices, like buy­ing paper. Con­tracts spell out cer­tain things that are use­ful to know, such as the con­tract dura­tion, the price of the prod­uct and more.

There are two basic ways that your school can end up with a con­tract – with or with­out a com­pet­i­tive bid­ding process. A com­pet­i­tive bid­ding process is usu­al­ly required of pub­lic schools for major pur­chas­es, like an elec­tric­i­ty con­tract. Pri­vate insti­tu­tions might avoid such a process and just select a com­pa­ny to con­tract with.

A com­pet­i­tive bid­ding process works in three basic steps: a request for goods/services, bids and the contract:

• Request for goods/services: This is often known as a request for pro­pos­als (RFP) or a request for quote (RFQ). This is the doc­u­ment that your school puts out telling com­pa­nies that the school wants to buy some­thing. It could spec­i­fy any­thing from “we want to buy elec­tric­i­ty for the com­ing year” to “we want to buy elec­tric­i­ty for the com­ing year, but 50% must come from wind and solar pow­er with­in the tri-state area.”
• Bids: After the RFP/RFQ is sent out, com­pa­nies that can sup­ply the goods/services request­ed will sub­mit writ­ten bids which pro­vide their pro­pos­al (or some­times just a price quote). Even at pub­lic schools, bids are not con­sid­ered pub­lic doc­u­ments, until per­haps after the bid­ding process is over. A bid will include the price that the com­pa­ny is offer­ing. Since uni­ver­si­ties are large users of elec­tric­i­ty, com­pa­nies will com­pete to offer low­er prices than are avail­able to res­i­den­tial cus­tomers. It’s pos­si­ble that the bid doc­u­ment will tell you more back­ground on the com­pa­ny and what they’re offering.
• Con­tracts: After the bid­ding peri­od is over, the school will eval­u­ate the bids accord­ing to price and per­haps oth­er cri­te­ria. The win­ning bid­der will get a con­tract, which is a bind­ing legal agree­ment between the com­pa­ny and the school. Unless the con­tract terms are bro­ken, the school can’t break a con­tract and start buy­ing pow­er from some­where else. You must wait until the con­tract expires. Elec­tric­i­ty con­tracts may be year­ly or may be good for a few years. Many con­tracts (not nec­es­sar­i­ly elec­tric­i­ty con­tracts) are designed with 1–2 “renew­al” peri­ods, mean­ing that the con­tract can be extend­ed at the school’s dis­cre­tion. A con­tract might have an ini­tial one-year term with two renew­al peri­ods of one year each. This means that the school could end the con­tract after the first year or decide to stick with it for 2–3 years. Lead­ing up to the time when a con­tract expires or comes up for renew­al, you’ll have a chance to influ­ence the process for the upcom­ing contract.

Influencing a contract

When ask­ing about ener­gy con­tracts, find out when the con­tract expires and if there are renew­al options (how many, for how long each). If you want to get into more details, you can ask for con­tract-relat­ed doc­u­ments, includ­ing a copy of the cur­rent con­tract. You can ask if the con­tract was the result of a com­pet­i­tive bid­ding process. If so, ask which com­pa­nies sub­mit­ted bids and ask to see the bid eval­u­a­tion as well as past or upcom­ing RFPs / RFQs. See if they’re work­ing on a new RFP or RFQ. If they are, and if – after research­ing things – you decide that it’s worth get­ting the school to revise what they ask for, you can ask lat­er about how you might have input into the process for devel­op­ing the next RFP. In that process, you can add in require­ments that some of the pow­er come from wind and solar and that the win­ning bid­der must help the school max­i­mize con­ser­va­tion and effi­cien­cy efforts. A good mod­el for this is the Per­for­mance Based Ser­vice Con­tract, where it the ener­gy com­pa­ny could be made respon­si­ble to help the school con­serve ener­gy (Rut­gers U. in New Jer­sey has used these effectively).

You might get the wrong answer

Be care­ful not to walk away with only the name of a com­pa­ny, with­out con­firm­ing that they’re a com­pet­i­tive elec­tric sup­pli­er in the area. Since dereg­u­la­tion is a rel­a­tive­ly new thing to adults who may have dealt with buy­ing elec­tric­i­ty for decades, they may be con­fused about the dif­fer­ence between the tra­di­tion­al util­i­ties who still man­age the trans­mis­sion and dis­tri­b­u­tion “poles and wires” and the com­pa­nies who sell the pow­er to the school over those wires. These com­pa­nies can have very sim­i­lar names like PPL vs. PP&L or FPL vs. FPL Energy.

OK, I have a company name, but which power plants are used to make their electricity?

In reg­u­lat­ed states, it’s a mat­ter of pub­lic record and you should be able to find out from the state pub­lic util­i­ty com­mis­sion if not also from the com­pa­ny them­selves. In dereg­u­lat­ed states, the state pub­lic util­i­ty com­mis­sion no longer tracks this infor­ma­tion and the com­pa­ny does­n’t have to tell you (but they might make the info avail­able anyway).

First, try the com­pa­ny web­site. Google the com­pa­ny name and make sure that you land on the prop­er web­site. Due to dereg­u­la­tion, the new unreg­u­lat­ed com­pa­nies can have many com­pa­nies with sim­i­lar names (like FPL vs. FPL Ener­gy vs. FPL Group). You need to find the one that deals with pow­er gen­er­a­tion. They may even have the word “gen­er­a­tion” or “sup­ply” in their name. Many gen­er­a­tion com­pa­nies list their pow­er plants on their web­site. Many also now list some degree of infor­ma­tion about pro­pos­als for new pow­er plants they’re try­ing to build (for exam­ple, Flori­da Pow­er and Light’s web­site men­tions spe­cif­ic plans for new coal and nat­ur­al gas pow­er plants) .

If the com­pa­ny is pub­licly-held (their stock is trad­ed in the stock mar­ket), they’ll also have files pub­licly avail­able at the U.S. Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion (SEC). The SEC runs a search­able data­base called EDGAR. Vis­it www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/srch-edgar and type in the com­pa­ny name (less is more when search­ing). Go through the results until you find the com­pa­ny (they may come up with their name men­tioned in oth­er com­pa­ny’s fil­ings, so skip past these until you get to the com­pa­ny you searched for (it’ll be in alpha­bet­ic order). When you’ve found the com­pa­ny you want, locate their most recent “10‑K” fil­ing and open it up. It’ll be large. Scan through that for a list­ing of pow­er plants. They’ll most like­ly list the pow­er plants they own. A 10‑K fil­ing could be hun­dreds of pages, so if you know the name of any one of their pow­er plants, search for it to find where they’re all listed.

If the infor­ma­tion isn’t avail­able from the com­pa­ny web­site, you can also try call­ing them, but find­ing a phone num­ber to reach the right per­son with­out spend­ing for­ev­er in a cus­tomer ser­vice phone direc­to­ry can be a chal­lenge. If you spend more than 30 min­utes surf­ing a pow­er com­pa­ny web­site and EDGAR and can’t find their pow­er plants, call Mike at Ener­gy Jus­tice for help at 215–743-4884.

State util­i­ty com­mis­sions: If the com­pa­ny won’t release the infor­ma­tion and if you’re in a reg­u­lat­ed state, you can call the state pub­lic util­i­ty com­mis­sion. State util­i­ty agen­cies can be found here: www.naruc.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=15

In some states – most­ly dereg­u­lat­ed ones – state util­i­ty com­mis­sions require that com­pa­nies dis­close their mix (often described as a pow­er con­tent label). This does­n’t dis­close spe­cif­ic pow­er plants, but gives an over­all mix by fuel types (i.e. 50% coal, 20% nuclear, 25% nat­ur­al gas, 5% hydro­elec­tric). This is inad­e­quate if you want to locate the affect­ed com­mu­ni­ties or be able to tell exact­ly how pol­lut­ing the mix is. For exam­ple, most dis­clo­sure for non-fos­sil com­bus­tion sources are described as “bio­mass” and can mean any­thing from trash incin­er­a­tion to burn­ing tox­ic land­fill gas­es, with a wide vari­ety of fuels and wastes that can be burned with­in that cat­e­go­ry. To see what if any pow­er dis­clo­sure rules exist in your state, vis­it: www.eere.energy.gov/greenpower/markets/disclosure.shtml

Stranded costs / nuclear bail-out charges

If you’re in a dereg­u­lat­ed state – espe­cial­ly if there are nuclear reac­tors in the ser­vice ter­ri­to­ry where the school is – there’s a good chance that the school is also pay­ing for nuclear pow­er, whether it choos­es to or not. As part of every dereg­u­la­tion law that passed in the U.S., many exist­ing pow­er util­i­ties were grant­ed spe­cial sub­si­dies, allow­ing them to com­pete unfair­ly with new pow­er com­pa­nies. When state-based dereg­u­la­tion laws were being passed in the late 1990s, many of the exist­ing pow­er util­i­ties still had debts from build­ing pow­er plants (pri­mar­i­ly for build­ing very expen­sive nuclear reactors).

These util­i­ties expect­ed to have a cap­tive mar­ket of cus­tomers who would have no choice but to pay off those debts. They felt it would be unfair if their share­hold­ers had to swal­low those mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar (most­ly nuclear) debts in order to be able to com­pete with any new pow­er com­pa­nies. These util­i­ty cor­po­ra­tions con­vinced state leg­is­la­tors to allow them to “recov­er” their “strand­ed costs.” This meant that if you’re in the ser­vice ter­ri­to­ry of a com­pa­ny that owned nuclear reac­tors before dereg­u­la­tion, you get to help the com­pa­ny pay off that nuclear debt even if you switch to anoth­er com­pa­ny to buy your power!

This shows up on the elec­tric bills of all cus­tomers in that ser­vice ter­ri­to­ry as a “com­pet­i­tive tran­si­tion charge” (or some sim­i­lar name), regard­less of which ener­gy provider these cus­tomers select. Until the charge expires (once the debt is paid off), the only way to avoid pay­ing these charges is to reduce the amount of elec­tric­i­ty con­sumed, so that the amount paid for these nuclear bailouts (“strand­ed costs”) is reduced some­what. Strand­ed costs are like the evil twin of adopt-a-wind­mill: forced adopt-a-nuke! Pay a manda­to­ry sub­sidy of a nuclear reac­tor, in addi­tion to your actu­al elec­tric­i­ty usage, regard­less of whether you are get­ting elec­tric­i­ty from those nukes. When describ­ing the pow­er plants that are being sup­port­ed by the school’s elec­tric­i­ty pur­chas­es, strand­ed-cost-sup­port­ed facil­i­ties should be con­sid­ered part of the mix. For exam­ple, “our school is sup­port­ing coal and gas plants (stan­dard grid pow­er), wind tur­bines (clean ener­gy pur­chase) and a nuclear reac­tor (strand­ed costs).”

The quick and easy way to get some general information

If you’re in a reg­u­lat­ed state and you only want the most basic infor­ma­tion about the fuel mix of the com­pa­ny, you can use the EPA Pow­er Pro­fil­er web­site (www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/powpro/screen1.html) to get a gen­er­al idea of where your pow­er comes from. It pro­vides the fuel mix (per­cent­ages of types of pow­er) and some gener­ic infor­ma­tion on three of the pol­lu­tants released from the fos­sil fuel pow­er plants in your ser­vice ter­ri­to­ry. This web­site won’t tell you about emis­sions from oth­er types of facil­i­ties or about oth­er emis­sions from fos­sil fuel plants. It also won’t name the spe­cif­ic pow­er plants that are in the mix. While it pro­vides results from dereg­u­lat­ed states, it’s not accu­rate­ly rep­re­sent­ing the fuel mix of any com­pa­ny in that ter­ri­to­ry (it’s pro­vid­ing info for the ter­ri­to­ry as a whole, not the mix of pow­er plants sup­port­ed by pow­er con­tracts at your school).

Researching the impacts of power plants

There is much more to know about pow­er plants than the three pol­lu­tants cov­ered by Pow­er Pro­fil­er. The source for the Pow­er Pro­fil­er is an EPA data­base called “eGRID.” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, you can’t search it online, but must down­load and run it from your com­put­er. It has emis­sions data for four pol­lu­tants released from fos­sil fuel pow­er plants (car­bon diox­ide, sul­fur diox­ide, nitro­gen oxides and mer­cury). Much of the data is esti­mat­ed and isn’t real, and some of the data is high­ly inac­cu­rate because of this. Nev­er­the­less many big envi­ron­men­tal groups rely heav­i­ly on this data. You can find it at www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/egrid/

Anoth­er use­ful data­base is EPA’s Tox­ic Release Inven­to­ry (TRI). This data­base tracks tox­ic releas­es of 600-some chem­i­cals from cer­tain indus­tries. Coal and oil burn­ing pow­er plants were required to start report­ing to this data­base in 1998. The most recent TRI data avail­able is usu­al­ly about 2 years old. The best site to use to search TRI data is the Right-to-Know Net­work’s web­site: www.rtk.net (click on “data­bas­es” then choose TRI). You can look things up by facil­i­ty if you want to find a spe­cif­ic coal or oil-fired pow­er plant or you can look up the entire elec­tric util­i­ty indus­try in a cer­tain area. If using the indus­try search, set the SIC code box to 4911 Elec­tric Util­i­ties (that burn coal or oil). Keep in mind that this data­base does­n’t include nat­ur­al gas pow­er plants, incin­er­a­tors, nuclear reac­tors or oth­er types of pow­er plants. How­ev­er, it’s much more com­pre­hen­sive than eGRID in the range of pol­lu­tants tracked. It tracks air, water and sol­id waste emis­sions (rather than just air) and includes tox­ic met­als, acid gas­es and oth­er pol­lu­tants. Like eGRID, the TRI data­base is based on data that is self-report­ed by indus­try and which is esti­mat­ed (near­ly all of the data is from emis­sions mod­els, not from actu­al testing).

Nuclear reac­tors also have tox­ic emis­sions, but are hard­er to learn about. In their nor­mal oper­a­tion, nuclear reac­tors release radioac­tive pol­lu­tion into the air and water (in addi­tion to gen­er­at­ing radioac­tive sol­id wastes). Learn more about these rou­tine radioac­tive releas­es at the fol­low­ing web­sites: www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/routinereleases/rrrhome.htm and www.radiation.org

Digging deeper

If you’d like to research a spe­cif­ic pow­er plant in far more detail than you can find online, there is a wealth of infor­ma­tion in your state envi­ron­men­tal agen­cy’s files. You can find these paper files by sched­ul­ing to vis­it the appro­pri­ate region­al office of the agency. You have a right to review these files, which can tell you about vio­la­tions, mishaps, plans for expan­sions, cit­i­zens who have com­plained and much more. It’s a tricky process, so if you’d like to learn how to inves­ti­gate a facil­i­ty this way, con­tact Mike at Ener­gy Jus­tice for advice at 215–743-4884.

Finding community contacts

There are grass­roots com­mu­ni­ty groups all over the place, strug­gling against exist­ing and pro­posed pol­lut­ing indus­tries. These groups are often hard to find and it’s pos­si­ble that no watch­dog groups exist for a pow­er plant you’d be inter­est­ed in – espe­cial­ly if it’s a pow­er plant that has exist­ed for a long time (more groups tend to form and be active when pol­lut­ing facil­i­ties are first pro­posed). If you’d like help locat­ing com­mu­ni­ty groups in the areas impact­ed by cer­tain pow­er plants, con­tact Mike at Ener­gy Jus­tice at 215–743-4884.

What do we do now?

You have sev­er­al choic­es of what to do with the infor­ma­tion you’ll have gath­ered if you apply what you’ve read so far:

1. Use the infor­ma­tion to cam­paign to get your school to invest in con­ser­va­tion and effi­cien­cy (which can include effi­cien­cy stan­dards for new build­ings and renovations).
2. Use the infor­ma­tion to cam­paign to get your school to pay for wind or solar renew­able ener­gy cer­tifi­cates (RECs), or – even bet­ter – get them to install solar pow­er on cam­pus and to com­mit to mak­ing it a part of all new buildings.
3. Net­work with orga­nized com­mu­ni­ties affect­ed by your school’s pow­er pur­chas­es and find ways to help them.
4. Locate com­mu­ni­ty groups that are fight­ing pro­posed dirty pow­er plants planned by the school’s ener­gy sup­pli­er. Find ways to help them stop the pow­er plant, includ­ing get­ting the school to put pres­sure on (pos­si­bly by chang­ing elec­tric sup­pli­ers, if that’s an option).