Honestly, I think there is no excuse for Sen Needleman to be so uninformed in this area. He’s the chair of the Energy Committee. Nothing he said was wrong, but I expect someone in his position to know the subject thoroughly, to know all the problems with the ISO, to have at least a clue, through informed sources, what the generating plants are paying for fuel, who owns them and whether they are or are not subsidiaries with arms length relationships with supply and pipelines and whether they are gouging. He should know all of that. He should have big ideas rather than talking about pennies per kWh, he should be up on the Eversource sale of wind assets and should have been talking about it now for at least two months! (No one from the state has even mentioned it - it’s truly incredible!) And he should not be naive about infrastructure investment by Eversource - it’s a cash cow for utilities. ( Utilities can pass capital costs on to ratepayers but not operating costs, and it’s lucrative, so they are motivated always to propose grid improvements. Legislators have to have independent experts to tell them what’s bogus and what’s not) He serves as First selectman jn Essex too- is he spread too thin? I don’t know - I do know he’s not bringing much to the table on energy matters.

There should be subpoenas to the suppliers and Eversource for testimony and all documents related to price negotiations, including emails, receipts from lunch meetings, phone logs, all of it. If they meet for lunch, I want to know what they ate, where they ate, how long they were parked there, who was there and what was said. I want to know every step of their process, how they do it and how chummy or arms length it is. I want to know what, if any, consequences the price ends up having on gas company profits for both utilities’ gas subsidiaries - Avangrid and Eversource also own gas cos. Why hasn’t the legislature been on top of if?