Like the idea of government imposing mandates for so-called “renewable” energy sources? Then get out your checkbook.
If environmentalists get their way and force the United States to adopt European Union-style renewable energy policies, consumers will see their monthly electricity bills increase by 29 percent.
That finding comes from a new study by Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which found that countries that adopted stringent renewable-energy policies incurred “dramatically higher energy costs.”
Here in North Carolina, the renewables mandate known as Senate Bill 3 requires utilities to produce a certain amount of their energy from renewable sources. One state legislator, Rep. Mike Hager of Rutherford County, has been trying to scale back the mandate in order to protect taxpayers. But so far, no luck. The mandates have support on both sides of the political aisle. Carolina Journal’s Dan Way reported on Hager’s effort last May.
Hager has criticized what he calls bloated job creation claims by the renewable industry. A peer-reviewed studystudy by economists at the Beacon Hill Institute of Suffolk University in Boston for the John Locke Foundation made the same case.
“There’s a lot of money involved there, a lot of policy” that drove the opposition to H.B. 298, Hager said. Renewable energy companies “don’t want the gravy train to end. They make a lot of money off of this” and stick residential ratepayers and small businesses with the subsidy bill.
“We had people just coming out of the woodwork saying, ‘You’re going to hurt my bottom line,’” and that was effective in persuading some Republicans to peel away from support of his bill, Hager said.
But, he said, most of those testifying against the bill were landowners, manufacturers, and hog and poultry farmers with a vested financial interest in keeping the flow of tax dollars intact.
“Anything where you have a sector of business being propped up by taxpayers is not an ideal situation,” Hager said.
“To do away with that is a very conservative ideal,” he said. “We don’t pick our winners and losers” in a free-market economy.
