NJBIA Deputy Chief Government Affairs Officer Ray Cantor joined Jeanette Hoffman on Energy Matters on ONNJ to discuss NJBIA’s ‘Rethink RGGI’ awareness campaign to change New Jersey’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, while still improving the state’s air quality and reducing energy costs for consumers.
RGGI is a cooperative effort among 11 Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states that use a “cap-and-trade” system to limit CO₂ emissions through the purchase of allowances.
But while New Jersey operates some of the most efficient, lower emitting power plants in the region, they now find themselves with a drastic competitive disadvantage to non-RGGI participating states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
As a result, those states continue to rely on higher-emitting coal-fired generation. Simultaneously, New Jersey’s CO₂ emissions are going up because they’re downwind of these non-RGGI states, and are the state’s energy costs are increasing for being in the program to begin with.
NJBIA’s ‘Rethink RGGI’ campaign offers a win-win solution.
The current price for the RGGI allowance auction is now around $40 per ton and climbing. If New Jersey suspends its involvement in the RGGI auctions and replaces it with a flat, $7-per-ton fee on all generators in the state, New Jersey could get the following results in just one year according to one study:
- Direct consumer savings of $279 million on New Jersey energy bills annually
- 5 million fewer tons of CO₂ emissions annually
- And the state would still get $135 million in allowance revenue annually for clean energy and environmental programs.
In his interview, which can be found at the 14:43 mark here, Cantor told Hoffman he is encouraged that legislators from both sides of the aisle are interested the concept and anticipates a bill in the fall.
“We’ve introduced this campaign in an educational manner in inform the public, but really to inform legislators,” Cantor said. “And we’ve gotten very positive feedback from a number of legislators who really understand the energy markets, but didn’t really understand the facts of how RGGI is actually operating.
“Once they became aware of the fact that we are paying more and polluting more as a result of our participation in RGGI, we’ve gotten more positive feedback about (NJBIA’s RGGI proposal).”
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