… we’ll be back to for it. In the meantime, Charlotte-area residents should budget for the 7.2 percent increase already approved that will be coming in February, USA Today reports.
No, Duke didn’t say publicly that they’d be back for the full 17% increase they requested but didn’t get, but trust me, they’ll eventually get it. There’s just no way the state could agree to it all at once without massive backlash in this economy. So look for your energy bills to go through the roof over the next few years, blasting past inflation and all common sense.
Want to know why prices are going up? Because Obama’s EPA decided to implement regulations that will likely take up to 20 percent of the nation’s coal fired energy plants offline, which is causing rates to “necessarily skyrocket.” USA Today hedges around the reason for this, but eventually explains it kind of:
Prices are climbing, too, hitting a record 11.8 cents per residential kilowatt hour so far this year, reports the Energy Information Administration. The increase reflects higher fuel prices and the expense of replacing old power plants, including heavily polluting — but cheap to operate — coal plants that don’t meet federal clean air requirements.
“Higher bills are a huge problem for low income families,” says Chris Estes, executive director of the North Carolina Housing Coalition, which opposes a proposed rate hike in its state by Duke Energy. “Utilities are what people’s budgets start with.”
Duke Energy says the rate increase is needed to pay for replacing old power plants and making the transmission system more reliable. The Charlotte-based utility has reached a tentative agreement with North Carolina to raise rates 7.2% in February, lower than its original 17% request.
It’s a process that began under President Bush that has been put on steroids and accelerated under Obama. The plan? Shut down about a fifth of the nation’s coal plants over the next 18 months. The plants will shut down because of insanely stringent new EPA rules that make it too expensive for utilities to continue to run them.
And no, as USA Today misled readers, most of them weren’t “heavily polluting.” They had been updated again and again to comply with increasingly more stringent EPA rules over the last two decades. Our air is now cleaner than it has been at any time during the last century. What happened is that the latest set of rules regulating pollution were so stringent that they couldn’t be met at all without billions in costs to utilities. Again, our air is actually dramatically cleaner than it was a decade ago, so much cleaner that the EPA had to lower air pollution standards to justify its existence.
Here’s the easiest to understand summary I could find of what has happened up to this point:
As the stagnant U.S. economy continues to plague the country, and as regulations increase, opposition from industry leaders has sprung up. The American Legislative Exchange Council and the Edison Electric Institute, the latter an industry representative for investor-owned utilities, have tagged the developing regulations “EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck,” as they claim the new rules will cost utilities up to $129 billion and eliminate one-fifth of America’s coal capacity. The Edison Electric Institute also noted that the U.S. government’s regulatory war on coal could retire up to 90,000 megawatts of coal-fired electricity generation.
Another concern is further damage to the very issue President Obama is so determined to reverse — the unemployment rate. According to a Commerce Department analysis, the regulations would cost up to 60,000 jobs, a much higher figure than the agency originally forecast.
The EPA’s new rules have also drawn criticism from House Republicans and some centrist Democrats, and many are fighting to block or delay the rules. While stumping on the campaign trail, Minnesota Representative and GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann promised to have the EPA’s doors “locked and lights turned off.” GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich went further, calling for the agency to be shut down entirely. The EPA is “hostile to all new technology, hostile to local community control, hostile to the business community, [and] hostile to the marketplace,” Gingrich asserted.
Even the Washington Post has admitted, in a piece called “Getting ready for a wave of coal-plant shutdowns” that these news regs would lead to massive plant shutdowns, but like most of the rest of the liberal media, they brushed off the issue of what this would cost consumers in their energy bills.
So what is this likly to cost you over the next few years as Duke and other utilities recoup their costs? Guarantee it will be more than 17%. Consider the case of American Electric Power, as detailed in The Hill in June.
Utility giant American Electric Power said Thursday that it will shut down five coal-fired power plants and spend billions of dollars to comply with a series of pending Environmental Protection Agency regulations …
In a statement outlining its plan to comply with EPA’s regulations, AEP said it would need to retire 6,000 megawatts of coal-fired power generation in the coming years.
The company, one of the country’s largest electric utilities, estimated that it will cost between $6 billion and $8 billion in capital investments over the next decade to comply with the regulations in their current form.
The costs of complying with the regulations will result in an increase in electricity prices of 10 to 35 percent and cost 600 jobs, AEP said.
I wonder what it will ultimatly add up to here. Obama likes to talk about the vanishing middle class. He would know. He’s done more than anyone in a remarkably short period of time to erode it, one dollar at a time.
