Activists are calling on electric customers in New Hampshire and New England to stop paying their utility bills on Sept. 1, in a strike that aims to put pressure on the regional energy system to address climate change.
No Coal, No Gas campaign volunteer Jeff Gang says the goal is to have a thousand people signed up to strike ahead of time.
“What we’re asking people to do is something where you’re withdrawing consent from a system that’s working in a really exploitative and oppressive way,” Gang says.
The strike focuses on what are known as forward capacity payments, which fossil fuel-fired power plants and others receive in the amount of millions of dollars, in exchange for promising the regional grid manager, ISO-New England, that they’ll provide electricity a few years into the future.
Gang argues this helps keep coal and gas plants afloat artificially, at ratepayers’ expense. The strike will call for an end to that practice.
“We’re calling on the people who are experts, who work at ISO, the people who run utility companies – just start taking climate change seriously,” Gang says. “Because right now, the way the system works is – it’s taking extra money from people and it’s putting it toward a system that’s sort of mortgaging everyone’s future.”
He says they want the ISO to rebate these capacity payments to customers in the short term, and reinvest them in cleaner forms of energy in the long term.
Organizers say people who can afford to should donate what they don’t pay in their utility bills to groups in their communities that are responding to COVID-19 or working on racial justice issues.
The strike will also involve what Gang calls the Coal Bucket Challenge. Organizers will mail participants small packets of coal, allegedly stolen last year from the region’s largest coal-fired power plant -- Merrimack Station in Bow.
Gang says people can mail this coal to the ISO headquarters in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and to their utilities. He says it’s another way to take direct action while obeying public health guidelines during the pandemic.
“Most of what we’re asking people to do is just, like, stay at home and withdraw consent from the system,” Gang says. “But it’s also exciting to be able to, you know, send the decision-makers a token reminding them of where their subsidies are going.”
He says organizers recognize that people participating in the strike could risk having their power shut off later in the fall. That’s when most New England states plan to start to lift their pandemic-related bans on service disconnections.
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August 12, 2020 at 05:02PM
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Climate Activists Will Launch Utility Bill Strike In New England Sept. 1 - New Hampshire Public Radio
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