Local opinion: Electric utilities increase your expenses, their profits

Re: the July 21 articles "How much keeping cool will cost you" and "Big profits in forecast."

Those costs share a common root cause that is avoidable if our Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) acted to optimize public benefit, a fundamental AZ Constitutional responsibility. Both costs are exacerbated by electric utility generation of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.

When sunlight strikes those emissions, thermal energy is created. That thermal energy significantly increases average temperatures, which consequently increases electricity usage, ratepayer costs, and utility profits, that then create more heat trapping emissions. An insidious and regressive cycle. Per the article, for 4 months of “summer”, Arizona Public Service (APS) and Tucson Electric Power Company (TEP) ratepayer costs will increase by about $8 million.

Our ecosystem cannot store that much energy. It releases the energy creating extreme weather events that cause power outages, floods, healthcare costs, damage public infrastructure, personal property and increase community and insurance costs to repair damages.

In addition to personal and public property damages and costs, a record number of TEP power poles have been downed. TEP is charging those costs to their ‘captive’ ratepayers instead of TEP shareholders whose corporate manager decisions exacerbated those costs.

The emissions and costs can be greatly reduced by accelerating the transition from using coal and natural gas to generate electricity to utilizing local Arizona lower and fixed cost solar and energy storage; use Arizona’s “free” and abundant sunlight to generate electricity instead of generating caustic emissions and higher temperatures.

Per the US EIA, Residential TEP customers pay 60% more than industrial customers; 13.73 vs 8.64 cents per kilowatt hour. Utilities say that residential customers cost more to serve because of their “load factors”, the difference in their average usage and peak demand time usage, so they must use expensive natural gas fueled Peaker Generation to service the usage fluctuations. Adding lower cost utility scale and residential energy storage to the TEP distribution grid would better manage demand fluctuations and enable significant reductions in rates.

In addition to avoiding future damages, costs, and chronic rate increases, the benefits of quickly transitioning to solar-energy storage include:

• Reduced water usage and replacement costs. TEP conventional generation loses about 6 billion gallons of water to evaporation each year. APS about five times more.

• Lower utility costs. Solar/storage incur much less operation & maintenance costs than conventional fossil-fueled generation.

• Economic stimulus/balance state budget. Arizona has many new manufacturers that could provide photocells, modules and batteries which would increase higher wage jobs, local trade, create more taxpayers AND ratepayers, and tax revenues without increasing tax rates. Arizona could expand its export of “clean” lower cost solar electricity to other states.

• Microgrid efficiency. Solar and energy storage can be located much closer to the consumer to reduce costs and significantly improve reliability by creating microgrids at existing utility substations and by reducing dependency on vulnerable and expensive transmission infrastructure which loses 8% of the electricity during transmission.

• Federal money. Federal taxes you’ve already paid are available to fund solar and energy storage.

The ACC also continues to constrain vs. facilitate ratepayers from using solar to generate electricity to reduce their costs and community damages. Solar with energy storage would reduce the residential “Load Factor” issues and improve the reliability of the common utility system. Enabling Community Choice Aggregation (CCA/CCE) Solar Programs would greatly expand those benefits.

Your taxes fund the Arizona Legislature that has the authority to require that the ACC optimize benefit to ratepayers. It is perplexing that neither the ACC nor AZ Legislature have been effective in optimizing benefits, avoiding chronic rate and surcharge increases, and consequent damages and costs to ratepayers and taxpayers caused by obsolete technology and harmful emissions.

The ACC has the authority, legal and moral responsibility to require that Arizona electric utilities avoid costs, optimize benefit to ratepayers, reduce 80% of their current fossil fueled generation by 2030.

Be active in demanding that your elected and appointed “employees”, ACC and Legislature officials, earn their compensation by acting to simultaneously reduce your costs, stimulate Arizona’s economy, and balance the Arizona budget without tax/rate increases.