Susan Shelley: Green mandates are making life costly

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

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

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

How’s it going?

On July 1, the DWP’s Office of Public Accountability, also known as the ratepayer advocate, released a report reviewing the DWP’s 2022 Strategic Long Term Resource Plan, which was issued in July 2023 for the DWP board.

Here’s what it found.

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

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

“The assumed cost and rate/bill impact may warrant further discussion,” the ratepayer 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” power generation required by that 2019 law is actually only 90%.

But the ratepayer advocate says the cost of getting that 90% up to 100% in order to meet the L.A. City Council’s mandate is in excess of $20 billion, more than four times LADWP’s power system budget for fiscal year 2021-22. “The average burden per LADWP customer would be over $12,500,” the report states.

L.A.’s mandate is just one of California’s idiotic directives.

In 2006, California enacted the Global Warming Solutions Act, Assembly Bill 32. It put the California Air Resources Board in charge of formulating regulations to enforce a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Today, CARB’s regulations extend into micromanagement of every corner of California’s economy. Reducing greenhouse gases, according to CARB’s “scoping plan,” means cracking down on agriculture, electricity 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 of greenhouse gases below 1990 levels in 2030, surpassing our statutory mandate to reduce emissions 40% below 1990 levels in 2030.”

At what cost? And who pays it?

You do, of course. CARB enforces its greenhouse gas reductions with a cap-and-trade program, which requires refineries, electric utilities and manufacturers to buy permits to emit greenhouse gases. This extra cost raises the price of gasoline, diesel fuel, electricity and everything that is made or moved in California. You’re paying for this in higher prices for food and other essentials that contribute to California’s extra-high cost of living.

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

One look at the state’s daily and nightly electricity supply on CAISO.com, California’s grid operator, reveals that we will all roast in the dark without natural gas. At 11:15 p.m. Thursday night, for example, California’s electricity demand was 28,585 megawatts, and 10,152 megawatts of the state’s supply, over 35%, was generated by natural gas. Another 5,487 megawatts were supplied by imported electricity, generated in other states that don’t share California’s contempt for reliable energy.

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

This highlights the craziness of California’s slow-motion mandate to ban the sale of cars and trucks with internal combustion engines (ICE) and force a conversion to electric vehicles. A lawsuit filed against CARB in 2022 by The Two Hundred for Homeownership, a California nonprofit, seeks to have the “Advanced Clean Cars II” regulation vacated. “CARB’s prohibition on the sale of new ICE vehicles in 2035 results in disparate harms to poor and working families in California’s inland and rural communities,” the lawsuit states, “including in the majority minority communities enduring long distance commutes to jobs.”

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 available in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from commuting. The lawsuit raised important issues about how greenhouse gas regulations have limited housing construction, but because CARB’s 2017 Scoping Plan was later replaced by its 2022 Scoping Plan, a Fresno Superior Court ruled that the lawsuit was moot.

Nonetheless, what The Two Hundred said then remains true. Arbitrary regulations that limit housing construction in order to limit greenhouse gas emissions are harming California families who are missing out on the opportunity to become homeowners and build generational wealth. “Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) is a misguided regulation that adds $50,000 – $1,000,000 to the cost of homes in some of the last affordable areas in California,” the group says on its website. “It is imperative that this tax on low- and moderate-income homebuyers is repealed.”

Most importantly, Californians are enduring the economic harm of high electricity bills and high housing costs for no reason. As The Two Hundred for Homeownership states in its lawsuit over the electric vehicle mandate, “GHG inventory emissions that occur within California’s borders (as measured by CARB) comprise less than 1% of global anthropogenic emissions. These emissions can cease to exist entirely (‘carbon neutrality’) and global climate change outcomes will remain unchanged.”

California’s climate targets are accomplishing nothing except increasing the poverty rate and lowering the quality of life for all state residents.

We can stop whenever we want to. The next time you pay your electricity bill, call your state representatives and tell them that.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley