When we were growing up, mom constantly harassed us kids to turn off lights whenever we left a room because we weren’t made of money. She never imagined we would ever live in an upside-down world where the electric company would try to charge us more if we used less electricity.
Of course, there were lots of things none of us could ever imagine back then, including living in a world when there would be even more important reasons to use less electricity than to lower light bills. Namely, to save the entire planet from being destroyed by wildfires, floods, tornados, hurricanes, droughts and other catastrophic weather extremes caused by global warming.
We Energies (WEC Energy Group, Inc.), Wisconsin’s largest public utility, was embarrassingly late in joining the fight to preserve the only planet we’ve got, but at least it’s finally stopped expanding the dirty, coal-fired energy it produces in Oak Creek and, last year, shut down its 38-year-old coal-burning plant in Pleasant Prairie. It’s now increasing the use of solar, wind and natural gas, claiming it will cut global-warming carbon emissions from 2005 to 2023 by 40% and by 80% by 2050.
The public relations campaign makes it sound like a company belatedly trying to do the right thing. So why does We Energies want to punish ordinary citizens for helping such a noble company save the world by installing their own solar panels producing clean, renewable energy while saving money on their energy bills? That sounds more like We Energies just wants to raise prices on mom for using less electricity.
Hefty Price Increase
We Energies is asking the state Public Service Commission (PSC) to allow it to add a hefty surcharge that would wipe out nearly 25% of the financial savings for those installing solar panels on homes or businesses. That’s right. An energy company moving aggressively into renewable energy to cut its costs will charge more to any customers trying to do the same thing. Customers who don’t need as much energy will pay higher prices for less. Customers forced to pay for the right to produce their own energy not only pay more to use less energy, but they reduce company costs further by eliminating the need for We Energies to build more capacity to produce more energy.
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If you got lost in all those nonsensical sentences, you’re reading them right. It’s all part of a radical shift in energy pricing in 2014 when Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s PSC began raising the fixed price all customers were required to pay every month instead of charging strictly based on the amount of energy customers actually use. As a result, the fixed monthly price in Wisconsin has nearly doubled since 2014 to $17.60 compared to the national median of $9.50. Users of enormous amounts of energy get bargain-basement rates, while low-use customers like mom grossly overpay.
Higher monthly fixed fees actually discourage energy conservation. Now, We Energies wants to further discourage customers from improving the health of the planet by penalizing them with a surcharge.
Unfortunately, we don’t have to guess whether the PSC will go along with such a nefarious scheme. It already did in 2014 at the same time it began raising fixed monthly prices. A Dane County judge struck down the surcharge a year later citing insufficient evidence of need from the utility. Democrat Tony Evers is the governor now, but he was prevented from appointing a new Democratic majority on the PSC by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on the legal theory that a rightwing Supreme Court will allow lame-duck Republican legislators to take any unethical actions they want to eliminate the appointment powers of a newly elected Democratic governor.
What About Renewable Energy?
Wisconsin hasn’t actually raised renewable energy standards since Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s first term after a bipartisan climate change task force produced legislation setting a goal of 10% renewable energy production by 2015. By Doyle’s second term—when he proposed increasing the goal to 25% renewable energy by 2025—know-nothing Republican climate change deniers refused. Today, 10 states and the District of Columbia have adopted far more ambitious future goals of 50% or more of their power to be supplied by renewable energy, including goals of 100% in California, Hawaii and Washington, D.C.
With a United Nations’ panel of scientists warning the world has little more than a decade to get serious about radically cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that fuel global warming, my mom was ahead of her time in nagging us to turn off the lights we weren’t using. She also was suspicious about how Republicans always seemed to care more about big business than about all the little guys like us. But she would still be shocked to imagine Republicans would ever allow the electric company to charge us more for using less electricity to punish us for helping to save the world.
