You might be shocked if you happen to peruse the mission statement of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. It speaks of the board’s duty to provide “safe, adequate, and proper utility services” and of the need to ensure rates are reasonable and nondiscriminatory. The statement goes on to say that the board has a responsibility to develop and regulate a “competitive, economically cost-effective energy policy that promotes responsible growth and clean energy sources.”
You can read it several times and you still will not find the part that says the BPU is to act as staff to the governor, fast-tracking and approving any of his initiatives regardless of whether or not those policies violate fundamental principles of its mission.
In short, the mission statement makes it seem that the BPU works for the people of New Jersey. That is sometimes hard to see in the actions of the board.
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To all appearances, the BPU has gone rogue.
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The problem to date is that the board’s sole focus has been on furthering Gov. Phil Murphy’s agenda for fighting climate change. One does not have to be against the governor’s vision to see that the board is not playing its proper role in the checks and balances that should contextualize Murphy’s initiatives.
Perhaps the best example has been the resistance of the BPU to force discussions of costs and ratepayer exposure. The New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel has appeared before the board on numerous occasions objecting to the lack of financial analysis that should be informing the board’s decisions. The BPU has been too busy speeding along Murphy’s agenda to heed any call for how things will be paid for and what the risk is to the ratepayers, a process that should be its focus.
Required public comment periods were held on various issues so that boxes could be checked off with little regard for actually listening to the public. Time and again the decisions the board would make were clear and evident at the start of the process.
Offshore wind was deemed critical to the governor’s agenda so the job of the BPU appeared to be to clear a path for wind farm developers. Did anyone seriously think the board was engaged in evidence-based deliberations on the route that should be taken for transmission cables from Ocean Wind 1 to Beesley’s Point? What Orsted wanted, Orsted was going to get. How did that work out?
The BPU, a five-member appointed board, took on the task of pushing through whatever Murphy wanted them to do. The fact that the governor appoints the board members, with the consent of the Senate, should not mean that he has the ability to control how they go about their job.
The harm being done is serious and long-lasting. The governor acts without the elected Legislature and dictates the terms of home decarbonization, electric vehicle transportation and the acceptable sources for the generation of electric power. He then looks to a five-member, all-appointed board to implement his decisions regardless of the arguments concerning that board’s legal authority to do so.
The BPU, which is charged with an overriding concern for economically cost-effective policy, jettisons its proper role and ignores calls for analysis on the potential costs to ratepayers. The Herald tried to question them on how they calculated that the average home would only pay a little more than a dollar per month to cover the cost of the offshore wind project; repeated attempts to receive an answer were unsuccessful.
We have done, and continue to do, damage to our democratic processes and have almost nothing to show for it. The Danish wind farm developer Orsted walked away from its responsibilities because the company could not see a pathway to more massive public funding of its private venture.
We also have Murphy accelerating the targets for electrification of the state’s energy sectors with no viable plan for how the state will generate the required electrical power from non-fossil fuel sources.
Only zero-emission new cars can be sold in New Jersey by 2035. Over 400,000 homes will be electrified by 2035. One-hundred percent of the electricity sold in the state will be from clean energy sources by 2035.
2035 is 11 years from now. In a matter of weeks, it will be 2024. Yet we will achieve this transition in a little over a decade. We will do so smoothly and with little harm and with a great concern for social justice. We will reinvent our infrastructure to support an electrified world. While this happens, we will open the gates to a green economy with many new, well-paying jobs. Who actually believes that this is how the next 11 years will go?
We are led to believe that the dislocations in the resulting economic transformation will be as inconsequential as the dislocations in the desired energy transformation.
It’s a mess masquerading as a plan.
The place to start bringing some sense into the process is with the BPU, a board that needs to take its rightful role seriously. The BPU is a regulatory body and not a staff arm of the state executive.
A transformation of sorts is going to happen. Things are not going to remain as they now are. Our task is to bring some sense to that process.
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From the Bible: There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. Luke 12:2
