Black Hills Energy | Kansas | Voluntary Purchase Program
Black Hills Energy administered a survey to determine customer interest in programs or initiatives that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Survey results showed that customers were generally interested in emissions reduction initiatives, prompting Black Hills to introduce a RNG program in which residential or small commercial retail customers can choose to buy “blocks” of RNG to counterbalance the carbon dioxide emissions of an average customer’s natural gas consumption. Under this scheme, Black Hills acquires the environmental attributes associated with the RNG, as well as the carbon offset credits. This program is voluntary and customers must opt in. Customers also have the flexibility to determine how many blocks they wish to buy each month and can stop participating before the next billing cycle. In this instance, Black Hills has not self-developed an RNG production facility. Instead, it is giving customers the opportunity to buy environmental attributes from the market, to mitigate the impact of their own emissions.
NW Natural | Oregon | Rate Increase
In 2019, Oregon enacted a law that sets voluntary targets for RNG adoption at natural gas utilities. In this law, approximately 30% of the gas flowing through the state’s pipeline network should be RNG by 2050. NW Natural soon purchased environmental attributes from an anaerobic digester facility located in Wisconsin and an RNG facility situated at a wastewater treatment plant in New York. In 2021, NW Natural created a unregulated subsidiary, NW Natural Renewables, to produce RNG with environmental attributes that can be purchased on national markets outside of its operating territory. Additionally, NW Natural provided funding for RNG production facilities to be located at two landfills and construction began in 2022. To pay for the RNG production facilities, as well as the environmental attributes purchased from out-of-state RNG producers, NW Natural increased customers rates.
Summit Utilities | Maine | Voluntary Purchase Program and Sales of Environmental Attributes
In 2019, Summit Utilities, the parent company of Summit Natural Gas, started its RNG initiative with three specific steps. Summit Utilities’ first step was matching 5% of residential gas demand for one year by purchasing RNG attributes without imposing additional costs on consumers. The second step Summit Utilities took was providing customers with a voluntary choice to contribute toward the acquisition of RNG attributes, giving customers the opportunity to actively reduce their carbon footprint. Summit Utilities’ third step focused on creating RNG locally through partnerships with dairy farms. In 2021, Summit Utilities secured a $4.9 million grant from the Department of Energy to support this partnership and local RNG production. The firm started construction on its first RNG dairy digester under its newly formed unregulated entity Peaks Renewables in 2022 with the intent to sell renewable energy credits to third parties seeking to fulfill their own decarbonization requirements.