PROVIDENCE — In a report released Oct. 31, the Public Utilities Commission recommended against counting voluntary renewable energy purchases toward the state’s Renewable Energy Standard targets.

The Renewable Energy Standard (RES) requires that 100% of the state’s electricity come from renewable resources by 2033.

Currently, energy suppliers can only count “PUC-certified Renewable Energy Resources” toward their statutory renewable energy minimums, which in 2024 is set at 30%.

The General Assembly asked the PUC to examine the feasibility of including the voluntary purchases in its count toward that goal and create the report, which was sent to the governor, speaker of the House, and the Senate president.

Suppliers can and often do offer a higher percentage of renewable energy than they are required to, but beyond the statutory minimum, those sources don’t need a renewable energy certificate (REC).

Energy producers have to apply to the PUC to be eligible for RECs, which signify that the energy they account for met state standards for renewable energy and are only being counted toward that supplier’s renewable energy quota and not any others’.

If voluntary purchases were counted, the PUC report said it’s possible that the same sources might be counted twice, thus leading to an overestimate of the percentage of energy coming from renewables.

The report noted that allowing the voluntary purchases to count would “erode the market confidence” in RECs, and “therefore should not be done.”

Written testimony from the attorney general’s office, the city of Providence, and Green Energy Consumers Alliance cited similar concerns.

Although the Renewable Energy Standard regulations do result in higher costs, the AG’s office noted in its letter, “we cannot sacrifice environmental gains that will aid Rhode Islanders for generations for the benefit of easier and cheaper methods of technical compliance in the immediate.”

Providence already voluntarily purchases more energy than it is required to “with the intent that doing so would accelerate the growth of renewable energy in our region, above and beyond the growth required to meet the State’s RES,” according to its letter in opposition to allowing those voluntary purchases to count.

“This concept is referred to as ‘additionality’ — that the actions of the City will cause more change than would have occurred otherwise,” Sheila Dormody, Providence’s chief of policy and resiliency, wrote. “Simply put, if the State allowed voluntary renewable energy from our program to be counted toward the RES, it would undermine the additionality of the program.”

“Imagine that a school district’s budget includes funds for a field trip at a particular school. Then that school runs a bake sale to fundraise for a second field trip,” Green Energy Consumer Alliance’s Amanda Barker wrote to the PUC. “Would it be appropriate for the school district to withdraw its commitment to the first field trip and utilize the funds from the bake sale? The answer is obviously no.”