The House Energy & Technology Committee took up H.289 this week, a bill to ratchet up our current Renewable Energy Standard (RES) mandates – the amount of electricity utilities have to buy from so-called “renewable” sources – from 75 percent by 2032 to 100 percent by 2030.
This, according to the Department of Public Service, will cost Vermonters an additional $500 to $800 million in higher electricity costs over ten years, which translates into a 5-6 percent overall increase that will be reflected in your electric bills.
This, of course, is on top of the additional burden the current RES regulations cost us and doesn’t include the additional cost of transmission infrastructure upgrades that will be necessary to handle that newly mandated “renewable” energy, nor does it account for any inflationary cost increases due to rising demand for electricity as these same legislators mandate our transition (at metaphorical gunpoint) to electric vehicles, electric heat, electric cooking, etc.
Testifying before the committee on January 24, T.J. Poor of the Department of Public Service made sure to clarify that this $800 million is, “Costs above the benefits. So, net costs to Vermont ratepayers…. The costs and benefits that hit Vermonters’ pocketbooks.” Because Vermont’s efforts to lower our carbon footprint will have no appreciable positive impact on future climate trends or effect on extreme weather events, there is really no benefit at all to this policy. Unless, of course, you’re in the renewable energy business, which, coincidentally, a lot of big dollar donors to the VT Democrat Party just happen to be. So, hmmm.
Poor went on to warn that these estimates do not include “Costs to the transmission and distribution system necessary to create ‘headroom’ for this other generation.” And that “there are some emerging information and data showing that there are significant transmission costs to getting the amount of solar likely to be cited [as required by these mandates].”
Poor put these numbers in some perspective by illustrating that $500 million over ten years could weatherize 50,000 homes at $10,000 per home or provide $5000 subsidies for 100,000 electric vehicle purchasers. Even better, just let Vermonters keep our money and spend it on things that we think will improve our lives or bring us joy as we see fit.
These financially illiterate lawmakers keep telling us that they’re just “asking us to pay a little more”; it’s no big deal. But these things cost real people real money over time. To use this one of the thousands of fiscal cuts inflicted upon us by these people as an example, the average Vermonter’s electric bill is $109 a month. A six percent increase to that is about $80 a year. If a 25-year-old Vermonter were to put that $80 a year into an S&P index fund earning the 100-year average return of 9.9%, by the time he or she retired at 65, it would be worth $43,117. (Thank you, Edward Jones, Retirement Calculator.) That’s the opportunity cost they are robbing us of.
It’s not just households suffering under this arbitrary and idiotic energy policy. Bill Driscoll of Associated Industries of Vermont reminded these lawmakers that they are debating this bill amid the backdrop of a 200-year-old Vermont Company, Soundview (a.k.a. Putney Paper), announcing on January 17th that it is shutting down and laying off 127 Vermonters. The reason cited, according to the Brattleboro Reformer: “Over the past decade, the company said it has invested tens of millions of dollars to strengthen the mill, but the rising energy costs are ‘too insurmountable to sustain operations.’ (emphasis added).”
As Driscoll noted in his testimony, “[Vermont businesses] are already in a high-stress environment because we are a high-cost state for electricity…. So, to unnecessarily choose a more expensive path, even if it’s a couple of percentage points, it’s concerning that we would go down that road…. Businesses make long-range plans. They look several years down the road in making their decisions about where they are going to go. If we have – to simplify – two paths toward a clean [energy] portfolio and one is more expensive than the other, and we choose the more expensive path, that’s not a positive signal you’re sending to businesses as to how policy is going to develop in this state and how the costs they are trying to deal with are going to evolve over time.”
This should be obvious — especially for politicians repeatedly telling us they really want to bring good paying jobs to our communities — but a majority of our legislators are either too dim to get it or simply do not care, campaign rhetoric aside.
The Reformer quoted Representative Mike Mrowicki (D-Putney) as saying, “This is terrible news for the employees and families of Soundview/Putney Paper Co.” Yes, and they can thank the energy policies you and your colleagues worked so hard to put in place for their new status as, as you might put it in the lingo from the cool kids’ table in State House cafeteria, people experiencing unemployment.
If you really want us to believe you care about the plight of working Vermonters and folks struggling to make ends meet and plan for the future, we’ll be watching to see how you vote on H.289. And we’ll be watching what happens with our increasingly unaffordable electric bills.