Op-Ed: Washington Gas: Worst Fossil Fuel Company in America? Local Critics Say Yes!
By Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network
I’ve spent 22 years fighting polluters as notorious as ExxonMobil at the national level and good ole Dominion Energy right here in Virginia and Maryland. But I’ve never seen a polluter, in all my years, as ruthless and reckless as what the DC-area utility Washington Gas and Light has recently become.
That’s right, the 175-year-old utility Washington Gas, serving the DC metro area, has seemingly gone rogue. Regulators and critics say the company has in recent years violated wind and solar agreements, falsely advertised fossil fuels as “clean,” neglected the routine repair of leaking pipes, and provided generally poor customer service. All this while boosting the profits of its controversial Canadian parent company AltaGas, itself recently hauled into court by a group of indigenous grandmothers for various treaty violations. Whew!
Until 2018, when AltaGas purchased and merged with Washington Gas, the company had a decent reputation and was mostly reliable and reasonably popular with customers. Since then, the company has become a nightmare for ratepayers while seemingly going out of its way to harm the climate. In DC, the Public Service Commission (PSC) and the Office of the People’s Counsel (OPC) have both been fighting back, but they can barely keep up with the deceptions and outlandishly bad service from the company. Same in Maryland. (The PSC is the government watchdog over gas and electric utilities. The OPC protects ratepayers from unfair practices).
The problems began in 2018 when AltaGas — headquartered in the faraway fossil-fuel hub of Calgary, Canada — bought Washington Gas. Alta agreed as part of the merger to maintain high customer service standards while bringing more carbon-free energy to the region. It has, instead, effectively done the opposite.
The DC PSC is currently threatening Washington Gas with an $8 million penalty for ignoring its merger pledge to bring a full 10 megawatts of wind and solar power to the District. In Maryland, meanwhile, the company has actually tried to market its high-polluting methane gas as a “clean” fuel, misleading its customers, according to the Office of People’s Council
While failing on clean energy, the company since 2018 has gotten worse at stopping leaking pipes, allowing more and more methane to harm the climate every day. This gas, when leaked, is 80 times more powerful at warming the planet than CO2 over a 20-year period. In fact, a full five percent of greenhouse gas pollution worldwide is linked to “fugitive” methane from human activity, much of it from leaking pipes.
According to a recent report by the research firm Synapse Energy Economics, Inc., commissioned by the D.C. attorney general, the company’s controversial “PROJECTpipes” program has resulted in a significant rise in the cost-per-mile of replaced pipes while fewer miles of pipes are actually replaced. The total number of dangerously leaking pipes has skyrocketed in recent years, according to Synapse, while customer calls reporting leaks get less attention from the company. This led the DC OPC in February to demand “urgent action” and an “investigation” of Washington Gas by the DC PSC.
Things are equally bad in Maryland. In 2022, the state’s PSC fined the company more than $1 million for failing to meet customer service commitments post-merger with AltaGas. This was prompted by complaints of long wait times and difficulty reaching customer service representatives, an obvious safety and health concern when gas is leaking.
It’s not hard to see the core problem: AltaGas. The Calgary-based company was formed in 1994 to build pipelines for western Canada’s booming methane gas industry, a wild west for fossil fuels. In 2018 it expanded its empire to a few U.S. utilities, Washington Gas being the largest. In the process it has turned our local utility into a sloppy, consumer-gouging, promise-breaking, mega-polluting embarrassment that has also become, by cutting corners, a cash cow for Alta. In late 2023, Alta reported record profits, stating that “The largest drivers of the fourth quarter year-over-year increase were strong contributions from [Washington Gas’] retail business…” That’s you and me.
And the company wants to keep it that way. At one point last January, according to public records, the company was spending at least $30,000 per month on lobbyists with close ties to the DC mayor and Council. Their goal? To stop the Healthy Homes Act, a bill that passed anyway with tremendous grassroots support to switch up to 30,000 low-income homes in the District to clean-electric heat pumps for space heating and hot water at no cost to customers.
Washington Gas’s take-no-prisoners approach is finally beginning to fail as regulators, consumers, and elected officials across the region learn almost monthly of new outrages and sharpen their focus on overdue reforms. It’s imperative that Alta’s 2018 merger agreement be strictly enforced with financial penalties that outweigh the company’s preferred method of cutting corners for heightened profits.
As bad as AltaGas is, it can change. Just ask the community of Mi’kmaq indigenous grandmothers in Nova Scotia, Canada. In 2014, without consulting the tribe per treaty requirements, AltaGas’s subsidiary Alton Gas built a pipeline and gas export facility on the Shubenacadie River, a sacred waterway and fishing area for the Mi’kmaq. The tribal grandmothers protested, engaged in peaceful disobedience, and ultimately won in a regional Supreme Court decision in 2020 forcing Alta/Alton to decommission the project.
It’s time to do the same in the DC Metro area. We’ve paid enough with our wallets and with our environment. Washington Gas must be punished financially for their continued wrong-doing and forced to stop leaks, protect customers, and, soon, move toward emerging “networked geothermal technology.” This approach, already used in certain towns and campuses as pilot projects across the country, will allow us to heat our homes and water with “ground-source heat pumps.” This would still require underground pipes that Washington Gas would maintain as our local energy utility — not gas utility.
Customers in America’s capital city region deserve better. A coalition of groups — including the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and Sierra Club — are mobilizing citizens, visiting legislators, and filling up regulatory hearing rooms. To learn more and get involved, send an email to naomi@chesapeakeclimate.org.
Our goal — through both persuasion and mandates — is to flip Washington Gas from the worst fossil fuel company in America to the BEST energy company in the country.
Mike Tidwell is executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network
