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Fresh legal challenge for Rhode Island offshore wind

Rhode Island's Attorney General Patrick Lynch said the Block Island offshore wind contract was "overpriced"

Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick Lynch has filed an appeal in the Supreme Court against state’s first offshore wind power contract.

The Block Island Offshore Wind Project had its 20-year power purchase agreement approved by Rhode Island’s Public Utilities Commission earlier this month (see this BrighterEnergy.org story).

But filing along with environmental lobbyists at the Conservative Law Foundation and chemical firms Toray Plastics and Polytop Corporation, the state’s Attorney General described it as an “outrageously bad sweetheart deal”.

Developer Deepwater Wind is aiming to build an eight-turbine demonstration offshore wind farm that would open the door to a much larger facility being established later on.

Under the contract agreed by the state regulators, utility National Grid would buy power from the project at 23.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, rising at 3.5% a year from 2013.

This month’s approval by the Public Utilities Commission – green lit by two votes to one – came following an initial decision to reject a similar contract for being “commercially unreasonable”.

Rhode Island lawmakers had to pass a new law especially to overturn the regulators’ initial verdict on the deal.

Although the state’s Economic Development Corporation has suggested the 28.4MW development would bring an overall $100 million benefit to Rhode Island, the Attorney General has now claimed the project is “anticompetitive”.

He said: “In appealing the PUC’s decision to approve this outrageously bad sweetheart deal for Rhode Island, we appeal to the court of last resort to correct the result of a distorted process during which only one PUC commissioner, Mary Bray, displayed wisdom and courage in voting to block a deal that will line the pockets of Deepwater Wind at the expense of hardworking Rhode Islanders, our state’s business community and sustainable economic development.

“As I’ve repeated said, I’m all for green energy. But in this case, green energy translates into greenbacks for the developers of an anti-competitive project with a limited scope that will force us to buy overpriced electricity for the next 20 years in order to subsidize one company, rather than jobs that are so deperately needed. It now falls upon a Court that values the Constitution to sort through this tangled web,” added the Rhode Island Attorney General.