When they first announced their original Clean Energy Commitment in 2020, APS boasted about their plans to decarbonize. According to their own release, they weren’t doing what they described as the “easy thing” other utilities were doing–developing resource plans that still allow you to produce some carbon emissions, so long as you offset them elsewhere. No, they were committing to go “carbon free,” which means shutting down every single source of baseload power beside nuclear and replacing it entirely with solar, wind, and battery storage.
But late last week, APS announced a modification to their climate commitment. Instead of going carbon free, APS is switching to carbon neutral by 2050.
How is the new commitment different than the old one? For ratepayers worried about skyrocketing utility bills, it doesn’t change much…
Arizona Public Service (APS), the state’s largest electric utility, announced Wednesday it will no longer pursue its previous pledge to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050. The company also scrapped its interim emission reduction targets and removed a commitment to end coal-fired generation by 2031 from its website. The utility now aims to be “carbon neutral” by 2050 — a less stringent target that allows for continued fossil fuel use if emissions are offset through technology such as carbon capture.
“Our aspiration has evolved based on changes to energy markets and customer needs, and our plans are built around doing what’s right for the people and prosperity of Arizona,” said APS spokeswoman Jill Hanks in a statement to 12News.
The announcement quickly drew sharp criticism from environmental advocates, who accused the company of backing away from its public commitments. “APS is walking away from every clean energy promise it made to the public, to regulators, to shareholders, and to the communities it serves,” said Autumn Johnson, Executive Director of the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association. “We are left with vague intentions and zero accountability.”
A free-market advocacy group also voiced concerns, though from a different perspective. The Arizona Free Enterprise Club argued that the new plan still comes with a heavy cost to consumers. “While this is modestly better than the carbon-free plan they have been pushing for the last five years, APS’ new ‘carbon neutral’ plan will still cost ratepayers billions,” said Scot Mussi, the group’s president. “The priority should be reliable and affordable baseload power for Arizonans, not meeting arbitrary carbon goals that require massive amounts of expensive wind and solar that will degrade the grid.”
Some of Arizona’s elected officials also weighed in. Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs criticized the decision on X, writing, “Arizona needs an abundance of energy, with a strong, and reliable grid to keep our communities safe and to continue our economic growth. This decision sets us back. It makes our air dirtier, hurts our growing clean energy economy, and forfeits the cost savings of renewable options.”
She continued, “I’ll be reaching out to APS to discuss their decision and reiterate that we must continue investing in new energy technologies and diversify our energy portfolio at the fastest rate possible.”
I'll be reaching out to APS to discuss their decision and reiterate that we must continue investing in new energy technologies and diversify our energy portfolio at the fastest rate possible.
Hobbs’ response is interesting given her history with APS. After her inauguration, it was revealed that Pinnacle West Capital Corp., the owner of APS, donated $250,000 to Hobbs’ inaugural fund. The group also made a $100,000 donation in 2024 to Hobbs’ secret litigation fund.
Republican gubernatorial candidate, and sitting U.S. Representative, Andy Biggs offered a sharply different take than Hobbs, posting, “Every utility in our state should be prioritizing reliable and affordable energy for Arizonans, not trying to meet the demands of environmentalists pushing the Green New Scam that hurts Arizona businesses and families. As Governor, I’ll make sure Arizona aligns with President Trump’s energy agenda to help our economy flourish.”
Every utility in our state should be prioritizing reliable and affordable energy for Arizonans, not trying to meet the demands of environmentalists pushing the Green New Scam that hurts Arizona businesses and families.
APS data shows most of the state’s surging energy demand is coming from the expansion of data centers rather than residential growth. The company and its investors view the sector as a major opportunity for revenue.
While APS maintains it remains committed to expanding cost-competitive clean energy, the rollback represents a significant departure from the 2020 pledge.
Jonathan Eberle is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
For years, the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) has been the stomping ground for the left to push its Green New Deal Agenda. In fact, it was just over two years ago when the commission quietly released its plan to impose California-style energy mandates in our state. Their goal was to ban fossil fuels and require most electricity companies to provide “clean” energy by 2050. Thankfully, the commission voted down these energy mandates in January 2022. But that hasn’t stopped the left from trying to find other ways to exploit the ACC.
One of their latest efforts has centered on Tucson, and as part of its Green New Deal agenda, Tucson Electric Power (TEP) asked the ACC for rate hikes to subsidize electric vehicles. But TEP didn’t get everything it wanted…
By cutting off oil and gas exploration as part of a global campaign to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, policymakers aligned with climate activists are “misdirecting scarce innovation resources,” according to an analysis of energy transition efforts.
While proponents of Environmental, Social, and Governance investing continue to seize upon the International Energy Agency’s (IEAs) “roadmap” for reaching net zero as a plug for their ambitions, the authors of a new study probing into the agency’s projections find that they are based on faulty assumptions.
The net zero initiatives that IEA foresees can only materialize if demand for coal, oil, and natural gas plummet while consumers gravitate toward so-called renewable energy in the form of wind and solar. But as the report from the RealClearFoundation and the Energy Policy Research Foundation makes clear, this is a dubious proposition.
“Rather than being a plausible description of the future, demand for hydrocarbons withering away is best thought of as an expression of a political or an ideological aspiration, as opposed to an objective assessment of the future,” the report says. “The failure to invest in increased supply is far more likely to result in upwardly spiraling prices as demand increasingly exceeds supply, as the Biden administration understood when it used the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the nonstrategic purpose of tamping down gasoline prices.”
The foundation is a nonprofit group founded to examine energy economics and policy with an emphasis on energy security. The geopolitical implications of net zero policies and ESG investing figures into its analysis of IEA’s roadmap. A big part of the problem lies with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, widely known as OPEC, and the leverage it could gain over western nations including the U.S.
If the demand for petroleum is higher than what is projected in IEA’s roadmap, which is highly likely, the foundation estimates that OPEC’s share of global oil market could rise to an astonishing 82 percent by 2050. OPEC includes Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.
“Wittingly or otherwise, ESG investors are undermining the security interests of the West during a period of rising geopolitical tensions,” the foundation warns in its analysis. The upshot is that the west is well positioned to maintain a healthy level of independence from OPEC with the right mix of policies. The foundation points out that IEA was initially established in response to the “first oil price shock” in the early 1970s “to act as a buyers’ group of western nations in an attempt to counteract OPEC market power.” But given how politically fashionable “net zero” efforts have become, the agency has clearly strayed from its mission.
“The IEA could have chosen to remain faithful to its original mandate, but as the Energy Policy Research Foundation report shows, in seeking to become a cheerleader for net zero, the IEA has allowed itself to be used as a tool for climate extremism, has misled policymakers, and has endangered the world’s economy and Western security, all while forsaking the purpose for which it was created.”
A key part of the foundation’s report focuses on the negative consequences that would flow from halting investment in new oil and gas fields based on the idea that a seamless transition can be made to renewables. American energy consumers can expect to take it on the chin.
In the first decade under net zero emissions, the foundation estimates that global oil and gas fuel receipts will be between $12.2 trillion and $52.6 more than what IEA envisions under its policy scenarios. Put simply, consumers will have to pay more for less oil and gas along with all the costs associated with making the energy transition.
The foundation’s analysis also highlights the environmental degradation that could result from a headlong rush toward net zero that does account for financial and technological realities.
“Reducing oil and gas supply will contribute to various environmental and health effects around the world. First, it will likely lead to a resurgence of coal consumption, as many low- and middle-income countries may struggle to afford higher-priced natural gas for heating, cooking, and electricity generation,” the report warns. “As a result, coal-to-gas switching in many countries may regress, increasing local air pollution and exacerbating health crises in many urban areas.”
Self-described environmentalists might also want to take a hard look at the amount of land wind and solar could gobble up. The foundation calculates that solar and wind generation capacity needed to achieve net zero requires an area equivalent to the combined size of California and Texas while the bioenergy needed for electricity production would be about the size of France and Mexico combined.
Apparently, there’s more than just raw economics at stake. What environmental advocacy groups typically describe as clean, and green is neither.
The geopolitical, economic, and environmental costs of net zero call out for a political course correction.
Kevin Mooney is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and the Senior Investigative Journalist at the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free-market think tank. He writes for several national publications. Twitter: @KevinMooneyDC
During her May 15 speech to The Beyond Growth Conference held by the European Parliament, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen, citing a 1970s de-growth plan published by the Club of Rome, made reference to the European Union’s “social market economy” five times in a span of less than 150 words.
A “social market economy,” of course, is a reference to the sort of central economic planning engaged in by authoritarian socialist governments throughout history. “And this is exactly why we put forward our European Green Deal,” Von Der Leyen told the conference. “Building a 21st century clean-energy circular economy is one of the most significant economic challenges of our times.”
The agenda of the Beyond Growth Conference focused on devising plans to manage the destruction of economic growth that is a centerpiece of the real agenda of the energy transition. Limitations on energy minerals and other resources required by wind, solar and electric vehicles, and on the ability to continue printing trillions of debt-funded dollars and Euros in a vain attempt to subsidize them to the scale required to displace fossil fuels inevitably means the forcing of common citizens in the Western world to scale down their standards of living and limit their mobility to meet the net-zero by 2050 goals being dictated at the global level. Thus, the need for the EU to move “beyond growth” and back to a more primitive mode of living.
Rising recognition and acceptance of these limitations, along with the success by Western governments in enforcing authoritarian edicts on their populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, is now leading to a rapid evolution in the overarching narrative and talking points related to the energy transition. The former energy transition narrative of “we will scale up renewables and EVs and you won’t even notice the difference in your daily lives” has been transformed to “we will scale everything down and you will just have to live with it” with stunning speed during 2023.
A report titled “The Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility” issued by the World Economic Forum in May is another great example. Based largely upon a 2017 UC Davis report titled “3 Revolutions in Urban Transportation,” the WEF report advocates for authoritarian governments to force the reduction of the numbers of vehicles on the road from the current global estimate of 1.45 billion to just 500 million. The UC Davis report went largely unnoticed in 2017 because the climate alarmist lobby had not been sufficiently emboldened at that time to publicly discuss its real goals. But that mask is now coming off.
The authors of the WEF report claim citizens who can no longer own cars would still be allowed to move away from their planned cities of the future, but only via “shared transport,” i.e. electric buses and a new network of thousands of miles of high-speed rail. But California has clearly shown that thoughts of building a huge network of tens of thousands of miles of new high-speed rail in the western world in the next 27 years is a complete fantasy. California’s own high-speed rail boondoggle, originally proposed 27 years ago in 1996, has seen its budget blossom from $8 billion to over $130 billion, and still hasn’t managed to lay a single mile of rail.
The real world simply does not conform itself to fantasies like this plan, and everyone at the WEF is fully aware of that reality. Thus, what this plan really amounts to is a scheme to enable the speeding-up of implementation of socialist/authoritarian governments in the West to enforce the new restrictions on the lives of common citizens, an effort that began to accelerate during the COVID pandemic. Authoritarian governments always endeavor to restrict the free flow of information outside of approved propaganda, and restricting mobility is a key means of achieving that goal.
As we see the EU and the WEF now freely admitting, economic de-growth and forcing citizens of Western nations to live smaller, less prosperous lives are the real end goals of this energy transition. The narrative has officially shifted, and we would do well to take them at their word.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
