Across the country, ratepayers have been seeing the steady increase to the costs to power their homes and businesses. And if consumers thought last year’s spikes looked bad, they’re bound to cringe when they learn that utilities across the country have requested or been approved for $29B in rate hikes in 2025 so far, more than double than this time last year.
Arizona is no different.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has long fancied herself as a champion for ratepayers. After another round of rate hikes rolled in at the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), this time a proposed 14% increase by both APS and TEP, AG Mayes fired off a press release announcing that she will “vigorously oppose” these requests as “Arizona residents struggle to keep up with ever-increasing electricity bills.”
Setting aside the fact that the AG has little purview over ACC affairs, Mayes seems to think that her own time serving on the Commission back in the 2000s makes her uniquely qualified to stop what seems like an endless barrage of double-digit rate hikes by our public utilities. Unfortunately for ratepayers, having Kris Mayes involved will only pour fuel on the Net Zero fire currently raging at the Corporation Commission.
You see, Kris Mayes is the one that laid the foundation for the Green Scam rate hikes Arizonans are suffering through today. In fact, the biggest irony to having Kris Mayes jump into the rate hike fray is that it highlights the dangerous parallels between the Commission she served on in 2006 and the one that we have today.
Kris Mayes was actually appointed to the Corporation Commission as a Republican (even if in name only) by then Democrat Gov. Janet Napolitano. Despite an all-Republican commission (as we have today), Mayes was the leading voice for the original green new deal mandate.
That first mandate, the Renewable Energy Standard and Tariff (REST), required 15 percent of all energy generation to be from renewable sources by 2025.
To meet the costs associated with the REST rules, the utilities received cost recovery from ratepayers to pay for these projects that accrued in the hundreds of millions. In 2012, there was another APS rate hike, to cover in part the buildout of solar facilities, battery storage pilots, and transmission upgrades due to increased costs of integrating intermittent renewables on the grid.
By 2019, the price tag for Mayes’ REST rules exceeded $1 Billion dollars, all paid for with rate hikes and fixed charges.
After Mayes’ departure from the Commission, she went to work as a lobbyist and consultant for the green new deal cabal. She even chaired the “Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona” campaign in 2017, an initiative measure bankrolled by California billionaire Tom Steyer to insert a clean energy mandate in the constitution.
So after two decades of fighting for grid crushing renewable mandates, you would think Kris Mayes would be ecstatic at the news that both APS and TEP have embraced her green agenda and have committed to go Net Zero by 2050. It’s exactly what she wanted—a carbon free grid dependent on wind and solar to keep our A/C units running in the middle of summer.
Mayes should also be thanking the current Republican controlled Commission for doubling down on her radical energy commitments.
Just last year, the ACC approved integrated resource plans developed by APS and TEP that turbocharged her REST rules, putting Arizona on the path to have 90% of future energy generation come from renewables while closing all remaining coal generation by 2031.
But now the bill for the green scam is coming due, and Kris Mayes wants to feign outrage at the rate hikes needed to fund it. Her plan is to blame the utilities and the Corporation Commission for the projected $42 billion this radical energy transition will cost ratepayers, even though they are implementing the plan she originally put together. The green energy experiment in Arizona was never going to be cheap. What’s truly ironic is watching its architects pretend to be surprised by the cost.
Aimee Yentes is with the Arizona Free Enterprise Club.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/Arizona Department of Transportation)
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