Standards for Long-term Renewable Energy Contracts

As required by statute, NSTAR enters into long-term renewable energy contracts. NSTAR’s proposed recovery mechanism would have passed on savings from the contract only to its Basic Service customers. The Compact proposed an alternative approach designed to share savings from the contracts with all NSTAR customers. The DPU adopted this approach and continues to use a similar approach with other long-term contracts. For this contract, $111 million in savings was shifted from NSTAR’s basic service customers (which does not include all NSTAR customers) to NSTAR’s distribution customers, which includes all NSTAR customers including Compact customers.