Thread by @jglarusso

1. This @CommonWealthMag video asks whether electricity customers are getting their 💵’s worth for charges added to their bills to fund MA public energy and environmental policies.

Then it fails to answer the question.

2. Asking a question and not answering it—asking a question to create a dramatic effect or to make a point rather than to get an answer—is the very definition of a *rhetorical* question.

So let’s repeat it, simply for effect.

“Are we getting our money’s worth?”

3. The video *does* point out that while MA electric rates are the 4th highest in the US (bad), MA is ranked 31st for per capita electricity expenditure & 44th for per capita electricity consumption (good). But while the favorable expenditure & consumption stats begin to get ...

4. ... at the benefits—the value—that MA electricity customers receive in *return* for the energy policies they’re paying for in their electricity bills, there is no attempt made to calculate the dollars & cents value of those benefits.

The costs of the policies are significant.

5. The cost of the RPS standard? “$11.25 for the typical customer in Jan. 2019.”

The cost for RGGI?
“$600M b/t 2008 & 2018.”

The cost for MassSave EE programs?
“$2.8 billion over the next three years.”

Payments to LDCs for mandated OSW contracts?
“$168M over 20 years.”

6. And after hearing those big numbers, just as the vein in the middle of the viewer’s forehead is beginning to throb, we get the money line (so to speak)—the crescendo that the video has been leading up to all along ...

7. “One thing is clear: all of the charges—roughly 1/5th of the typical customer’s bill—have very little to do with the actual electricity you are buying, and *everything* to do with state energy policy.”

Really?

🤣

No, of course not. The *opposite* of this statement is true.

8. All of the billed charges that finance state energy policy have everything to do with the *actual* electricity you are buying.

The kilowatts you paid for? Absent Mass Save EE programs, you would have used more of them—and paid more for the privilege.

9. Shocked that all of those charges contribute to making your MA electric rates the 4th highest in the US?

Perhaps you’d want move to Alabama then, whose rates are ranked 28th—much lower than MA’s. But (oh snap!) they have the *highest* US elec bills!

bit.ly/2DhTeSj

10. And those charges you pay for renewably sourced electricity and RGGI electric power carbon reductions? I presume that you do entertain the faint hope of leaving your kids and grandkids a habitable planet.

Am I right?

11. So, yes,state energy policies have *everything* to do with the actual electricity you buy.

And state policies—sound state policies—have everything to with this 👇🏻.

12. A soaring gross state product, and an increasing MA population—both sustained without appreciably increasing the state’s energy consumption. And oh, P.S., MA pulled all of that off while substantially *reducing* its GHG emissions.

Put a price on all of that.

13. Pricing the cost of public policy without pricing its benefits is a setup.

It is worth answering the question “are we getting our money’s worth?”
But unanswered the question is mere rhetoric. And data provided w/o context is not information—it’s disinformation.

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