Rep. Reagan Paul (R-Winterport) sent a letter to Maine’s Department of Energy (DOE) Deputy Secretary James Danly on Monday, asking the department to examine and publish the true costs of Maine’s green energy push.
“The persistent claim that wind and solar are the cheapest form of generation makes for an effective talking point, but it does not hold up when customers pay their bills. While utilities are often blamed for rising rates, it is in fact the underlying generation resource choices that are driving these cost increases,” said Paul’s letter.
According to Paul, the DOE energy cost assessments often quoted in policy fail to include a variety of expenses that lead to rising energy costs for Maine consumers.
These costs, often referred to as “system effects” include the costs of compensating for low effective capacity, increased maintenance costs, energy grid upgrades required by intermittent energy production, additional transmission infrastructure, and battery replacements.
While those costs have a very real impact for Maine ratepayers, they do not factor into data cited by left-wing lawmakers, who claim that green energy sources like solar and wind are cheap and effective.
“These are real costs showing up in your electric bill right now — often buried in ‘public policy’ charges, stranded costs, shifting accounting definitions, or spread across ratepayers so politicians can continue claiming wind and solar are ‘cheap,'” said Paul in a social media post.
The letter requests that the DOE issue guidance to affirm the importance of evaluating the hidden costs to assist lawmakers in making informed energy policy decisions.
The letter received support from other Republican legislative members of the Energy, Utilities, and Technology Committee.
In her social media post about the letter, Paul highlighted the recently passed “climate superfund” bill that will use hundreds of thousands of dollars to retroactively come up with a cost to associate with greenhouse gas emissions going back to 1995.
DOE ” see you in court ”
Paul looks white, therefore the letter and request is racist.
I would love to see all the real numbers
Make sure any costs include the destruction of our once beautiful state.
shocking, be careful playing with electricity, dad warned me
The fad is over. The only ones cheering on solar and wind are the ones making money off off this scam, gleefully taking in money from honest ratepayers.
Ex Senator Troy Jackson and current PUC Commissioner along with Democrat legislators colluded with ISO-NE to adapt a major transmission line that will cost Maine electric customers over 200 million dollars to move wind power south to other New England States from Aroostook County. This is the straw that will break the camel’s back and finish off Maine’s economy.
Hopefully someday we’ll find out how much money Democrats and their contributors pocketed from this scam. It’s easy to steal from taxpayers when Democrats control all levers of power!
maybe ? they will find out how much went to …. queen janet , agnes the king , sellMe pingreed , and even bernice sandbager …… for their roles in this fiasco called green energy ………
Thank you,good luck.
I’d like to see someone look into the impact of LED lighting on children’s behavior and lack of learning in K-12 schools.
The D in LED stands for diode, LEDs can only run on DC current, the dial out is a one-way valve that only lets electricity go one way. Your car alternator has six of them to convert the three phase AC the alternator produces into DC.
The problem with using LEDs on standard AC power is that the voltage of AC drops to zero 120 times a second and then reverses. This doesn’t affect an incandescent lightbulb because it doesn’t cool off enough to stop giving light. But both fluorescent lights and LED lights are blinking, and this flickering is just beyond the consciousness of the human eye.
There was a great deal of research in the 1970s and 1980s into fluorescent lights causing what was then called hyperactivity. By the problems we didn’t know what ADHD was back then, but the other part is that research was valid, and they showed how to infected all children. They were document experience where they replace the fluorescent lightbulbs with incandescent, and the teachers noticed and improved behavior in the children and better learning.
LED lights also flicker. The only way not to have them flicker is remove all the electronics from the bulb and run them off of the 4.5 DC current that they actually run on.
But that research was valid and I’d like to see it brought back today to see if these LED bulbs and other energy saving stuff is causing some of the problems we have in K-12.