Hope Creek nuclear plant
The Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal by the New Jersey Rate Counsel and others over a 2019 decision to award nearly $1 billion in subsidies from ratepayers to avert the closing of the state’s three nuclear power plants.
Without comment, the state’s high court on Friday denied certification of an appeal of the Board of Public Utilities award of surcharges on customers’ gas and electric bills. The subsidies, amounting to roughly $300 million a year, were upheld by a state appeals court in March.
The case involves one of the Murphy administration’s most contested decisions in the energy sector. The state supported Public Service Enterprise Group and Exelon, the co-owners of two of the three plants, to secure subsidies they said were needed to keep the units open, not just two years ago, but again to continue the subsidies this past March.
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The Murphy administration’s draft plan to revamp the way solar projects are funded in New Jersey needs to be modified to avoid unnecessarily large rate increases for ratepayers, according to the state Division of Rate Counsel.
Rate Counsel Director Stefanie Brand urged the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities on Friday to focus and place a stronger emphasis on minimizing the rate impact through the still-developing solar successor program.
The proposal is the latest aimed at advancing Gov. Phil Murphy’s clean-energy goals, a policy running into increasing concerns over the costs at a time when up to 1 million customers are in arrears in making payments on their utility bills because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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With customers now owing as much as $600 million in unpaid gas and electric bills, advocates said the state needs to extend a moratorium on utility shutoffs while a program to help them is developed.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has peeled hundreds of thousands of jobs from the economy, the number of residential and commercial customers who have fallen behind in paying their bills has soared, according to utility executives and the state Board of Public Utilities.
Just how big a problem it is remains uncertain. The BPU declined to detail the total amount owed by customers, saying those numbers would be released soon. Others, who spoke at an initial stakeholder meeting on the issue Monday, also mostly avoided talking about specifics.