Sunday, August 23, 2009

Austin Energy users to pay big price for 'green'

Branch Carbonian Cult is coming to Austin. The higher cost of 'green energy' will be spread across all Austin Energy users under a plan the City Council signed off on. In the past, greenies could sign up for 'green energy' ie, wind and solar, and would pay the higher price. But now the cost will be spread over all users to give the 'green energy' consumers a break:

"Pace says that by 2020, Austin Energy's plan will have raised homeowners' monthly electricity bills 22 percent over what they now pay."
They call it a small amount. 22% iincrease and they are pretending its a small amount? The reason we have historically had low rates in Austin is that we rely on cheap energy - LCRA hydro and LaGrange coal, plus nuclear that has low fuel and operating costs. The City Council is now squandering money to pursue wind/solar/biofuels follies that are very expensive, in particular a multi-billion bio-fuels deal. To make all ratepayers pay for the folly/desire of a few is wrong.

Furthermore, expensive wind and solar energy does nothing to actually help the environment. First, global warming fears are overstated and are in any case not mitigated by a tiny shift in power generation in a single locale; CO2 is harmless; third, we get a goodly portion of electricity from nuclear energy which is zero emissions anyway. If CO2 is the problem, then why isn't the nuclear electricity in the 'green energy' program as a solution? Not politically correct to mention all these facts, but they add up to the fact that w
Wind and solar are taxpayer and ratepayer subsidized boondoggles, already aided by massive federal subsidies. So we will pay a lot of extra money for something that will have no meaningful benefit to the environment. The price of environmental greenwash is not cheap.

1 comment:

Jack said...
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