Green Orders Make Life More Expensive – Daily Breeze

How’s your electric bill this summer? Is it killing you?

Well, if you think it’s bad now, get ready because it’s going to get much, much worse.

Consider the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. In 2021, the Los Angeles City Council directed the DWP to prepare a “strategic long-term resource plan that delivers 100% carbon-free energy by 2035 in a manner that is equitable and has minimal adverse impact on ratepayers.”

How’s it going?

On 1 July, DWP’s Public Accountability Office, also known as the Taxpayer Advocate, published a report analysing DWP’s Strategic Long-Term Resource Plan 2022, which was issued in July 2023 to the DWP Board.

This is what was found.

The monthly bill for a single-family home, assuming monthly consumption of 700 kWh, would increase from the current $144 to as much as $550.

LADWP staff looked at four different paths to achieving “100% clean energy” by 2035 or 2045 and decided to recommend the one that would increase monthly bills by an average of 7.7% per year.

“The likely costs and impact on rates/bills may warrant further discussion,” the Taxpayers Advocate’s Office suggested.

Yes, further discussion would be a good idea.

The report points out that Senate Bill 100, which requires “100% clean energy by 2045,” bases that calculation on retail sales. The percentage of “clean energy” generation required by that 2019 bill is actually only 90%.

But a ratepayer advocate says the cost of raising that 90% to 100% to meet the Los Angeles City Council requirement exceeds $20 billion, more than four times LADWP’s energy system budget for fiscal year 2021-22. “The average charge per LADWP customer would be more than $12,500,” the report said.

The Los Angeles order is just one of California’s idiotic directives.

In 2006, California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act (Assembly Bill 32). It tasked the California Air Resources Board with developing regulations to force reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

CARB regulations now micromanage every corner of California’s economy. Reducing greenhouse gases, according to CARB’s “scope plan,” means tightening regulations on agriculture, power generation, industry, buildings, transportation, recycling and waste management.

“The final modeling for the Scoping Plan shows increased ambition,” CARB states on its website, “projecting a 48% reduction in greenhouse gases below 1990 levels in 2030, which exceeds our statutory obligation to reduce emissions by 40% below 1990 levels in 2030.”

At what cost? And who pays for it?

Of course you do. CARB enforces its greenhouse gas reductions through a cap-and-trade program that requires refiners, utilities and manufacturers to buy greenhouse gas emission permits. That extra cost raises the price of gasoline, diesel fuel, electricity and everything else produced or transported in California. You pay for it in higher prices for food and other essentials that contribute to California’s extraordinarily high cost of living.

Other costly idiocies include plans to ban “new natural gas generating capacity in the electricity sector.”

One look at the state’s daytime and nighttime electricity supply on CAISO.com, California’s grid operator, reveals that we’ll all be baking in the dark without natural gas. For example, at 11:15 p.m. Thursday night, California’s electricity demand was 28,585 megawatts, and 10,152 megawatts of the state’s supply, more than 35%, was generated by natural gas. Another 5,487 megawatts was supplied by imported electricity, generated in other states that don’t share California’s disdain for reliable power.

If you plug in an electric car at night, it will charge with natural gas. If you want it to charge with “renewable” solar and wind energy, take another look at LADWP’s estimates of what that will do to your electric bill.

This underscores the folly of California’s slow-motion order banning the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars and trucks and forcing a switch to electric vehicles. A lawsuit filed against CARB in 2022 by The Two Hundred for Homeownership, a California nonprofit, seeks to repeal the “Advanced Clean Cars II” regulation. “CARB’s 2035 ban on the sale of new ICE vehicles disproportionately harms poor and working families in California’s inland and rural communities,” the lawsuit states, “including majority-minority communities that must commute far to work.”

The Two Hundred for Homeownership is the successor organization to The Two Hundred, a coalition of civil rights leaders that sued CARB in 2018 over regulations that made housing more expensive and less affordable in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from commuting. The lawsuit raised important issues about how the greenhouse gas regulations restricted housing construction, but because CARB’s 2017 Scoping Plan was later replaced by the 2022 Scoping Plan, the Fresno Superior Court ruled that the lawsuit was moot.