A reader wrote in with a sharp, three-part question about Efficiency Vermont: Has the utility ever stated how much less electricity the state uses because of its work? Would that number hold up if you normalized for businesses that have left Vermont? And doesn't cutting electricity use actually push rates up, since the grid's fixed costs don't go away when sales fall?

All three are fair. Here's what the public record shows — and where it goes quiet.

What Efficiency Vermont is, and what it costs you

Created in 2000, Efficiency Vermont is the nation's first statewide "efficiency utility." It doesn't sell power; it's paid to reduce demand by subsidizing better equipment — LED lighting, heat pumps, insulation, efficient industrial motors. It's funded mainly through the Energy Efficiency Charge, a line item on your electric bill collected from nearly every ratepayer in the state; the charge was worth about $39.8 million in 2023. In 2024 the program spent roughly $38.9 million on electric efficiency, plus about $32.7 million in costs paid directly by participating customers. Divided across the state's total electric sales, the charge works out to very roughly seven-tenths of a cent per kilowatt-hour — on the order of $40 to $50 a year for a typical household — though the exact rate is reset annually by the Public Utility Commission.

Has it stated the savings? Yes — with a caveat

Efficiency Vermont publishes annual electric savings every year in its annual report and a Department of Public Service–verified Savings Claim Summary. For 2024 it claimed 57,355 megawatt-hours of new electric savings, about 60 percent of it from existing business facilities. That's roughly one percent of the 5.46 million megawatt-hours Vermont actually sold that year. Stacked up over two decades, the program's managing director told legislators in early 2025 that accumulated efficiency now meets about 15 percent of the state's annual electric needs — power Vermont would otherwise have to buy or generate.

Here's the caveat, and it goes to the reader's second question. Those savings are engineering estimates, built from the bottom up: take each rebated device, calculate the kilowatt-hours it should save versus the standard model, and add them together. It is not a top-down measurement of Vermont's meter readings falling. That distinction matters.

The "businesses that left" problem

Because the savings are counted per installed measure, they don't shrink when a business downsizes or leaves. If a company that once ran EV-subsidized efficient equipment closes its doors, the claimed savings stay on the books even though the actual load — and the actual saving — walked out with it. And Vermont's industrial base is concentrated: the Essex Junction semiconductor plant now owned by GlobalFoundries (formerly IBM) was, as of 2021, using around 400,000 megawatt-hours a year — then about 8 percent of the state's electricity, more than the entire city of Burlington. When a single customer that large contracts, or any slice of Vermont manufacturing leaves, statewide power use falls for reasons that have nothing to do with efficiency programs. No public document cleanly separates how much of Vermont's flat-to-declining load is Efficiency Vermont's doing versus a smaller industrial economy — and the program's bottom-up accounting isn't designed to answer that. So the reader's instinct is correct: the headline savings figure is not normalized for a shrinking customer base, and reconciling it against actual statewide consumption is genuinely hard.

The fixed-cost point is real, too

The reader's third argument is a well-known feature of utility economics, sometimes called the "lost revenue" problem. Poles, wires, substations and much generation are fixed costs that don't fall when you sell fewer kilowatt-hours. Sell less, and the price per kilowatt-hour has to rise to recover those same fixed costs. Vermont manages this through rate cases and "decoupling," which deliberately separates a utility's revenue from how much electricity it sells. The practical result is that efficiency can lower your bill (you buy fewer units) while nudging the rate (the price of each unit) upward — and that higher rate is spread across everyone, including neighbors who never took a rebate.

Efficiency Vermont's answer

The program's case is that avoided cost still comes out ahead. It says it saves electricity at about 5.8 cents per kilowatt-hour versus 6.9 cents to supply it, and describes efficiency as delivered at 79 percent of the cost of buying new power — while also letting Vermont avoid building expensive new infrastructure like transmission upgrades and generation capacity. It puts cumulative customer savings since 2000 at over $3.3 billion. If those avoided future costs exceed the program's cost plus the rate shift, ratepayers come out ahead in aggregate even as the per-unit rate ticks up. That claim rests entirely on the avoided-cost assumptions baked into its models — estimates, not measured outcomes.

The bottom line

Efficiency Vermont does state its savings, and independent state reviewers verify the claim. But the reader has put a finger on two soft spots worth pressing: the savings are modeled rather than metered against Vermont's real, and falling, load, and the friendly "we saved you money" framing blurs the difference between a lower bill and a higher rate. Both are fair questions to put directly to the program — and neither has a tidy published answer.