A new report finds that blue state residents pay far more for electricity than their red state counterparts due to aggressive climate policies.
Blue state residents, whose governments have adopted aggressive climate policies, are paying much more for electricity and fuel than their counterparts who live in red states that lack such policies, according to a new report from America’s largest membership organization of state legislators.
The report from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), provides a breakdown of energy prices throughout the United States while demonstrating the relationship between big government policies and high energy costs.
“While some states rely on free market principles and innovation to limit manmade emissions into the atmosphere, others use a more heavy-handed approach by implementing of standards, enacting mandates and pricing schemes that benefit specific types of technologies,” the report reads.
“Whether it is mandates, subsidies, or some combination of both, when the government inserts itself into the energy markets, taxpayers wind up footing the bill.”
The trend of government mandates being linked to higher electricity prices is evident throughout the report.
For instance, simply being part of the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), which dictates that a certain amount of a state’s electricity generation must come from renewable sources, pushed up electricity costs in a participating state by around 11 percent.
Big Government Means Higher Electricity Costs
Overall, the report finds that red states that lack their own green energy mandates or that don’t take part in cap-and-trade schemes (systems that limit aggregate emissions from a group of emitters by setting a cap on maximum emissions) have the lowest electricity costs.
Red states Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah had the lowest electricity prices. None of them have a government-mandated RPS or participate in cap-and-trade schemes, such as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which is a CO2 cap-and-trade program among 10 states in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the country.
Utah has a voluntary renewable energy goal of 20 percent by 2025, but it’s not a mandate. Idaho and Wyoming don’t have state-mandated net metering, which is the utility billing practice of recording the excess energy generated by a solar installation and applying it to a customer’s bill as credit toward grid-drawn energy.
By Tom Ozimek
