The Arizona Free Enterprise Club released a statement on Wednesday severely criticizing the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC). The statement came after the ACC, which is charged with protecting Arizonans from a non-competitive energy industry, voted to abdicate its duty by allowing formulaic rates that increase automatically year over year, as opposed to every increase being subject to public scrutiny and requiring approval.
The vote on Tuesday was carried 3-2 with commissioners Anna Tovar and Lea Márquez Peterson dissenting. According to the ACC, its policy statement “allows regulated utilities to propose formula rates in future rate cases. Under this approach, the ACC reviews and accepts as the rate a formula for calculating the utility’s cost of service, including clear definitions of inputs to that formula and a process for updating rates every year as the utility’s costs change.”
The commission claimed, “Formula rates will still be monitored closely to ensure that the utility does not over-earn relative to the cost of service for providing service (plus a reasonable return on invested capital), while continuing to provide service safely and reliably.”
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club responded in a statement saying:
“Following contentious double digit rate hikes being approved and ESG Resource Plans committed to going ‘Net Zero’ by 2050 being rubber stamped, the Commission has rushed through approving new rules masquerading as a mere ‘policy statement’ that could insulate utilities and the Commission from having to face ratepayers in future rate cases. The ‘policy statement’ would depart from traditional rate making and pursue ‘formula based rates’ offloading risk from investors to ratepayers and baking in automatic rate increases with little transparency or opportunity for ratepayer engagement.
“The only support for this ‘policy statement’ came from the utilities themselves. The Commission is charged to protect ratepayers by regulating the utilities, not the other way around. The Commission should pump the brakes, not rush through major rulemaking decisions in a lame duck session.
“The Arizona Free Enterprise Club is committed to protecting ratepayers, ensuring affordable and reliable energy in Arizona. We will continue to work to ensure utilities will not be able to force their captive ratepayers to foot the bill, especially through automatic rate hikes, for their costly goal to go ‘Net Zero’ by 2050 by shuttering reliable sources of energy generation to build out expensive and unreliable wind, solar, and battery storage projects.”
Attorney Dan Pozesfsky of Arizona’s Residential Utility Consumer Office (RUCO), expressed a similar view according to 12News saying, “Trying to implement formula rates through a policy statement rather than through rules is inappropriate, illegal and in this case denies due process.”
The outlet reported that the ACC, ignoring its own plans for the vote, rushed to schedule it noting that in a previous meeting Commission Chairman Jim O’Connor had told stakeholders, “Give us feedback. Bring us guardrails.” He added, “I eagerly look forward to that kind of input at our next workshop.” However, no workshop occurred and no published legal opinions were issued.
Diane Brown of the nonprofit Arizona PIRG Education Fund stressed that the vote was conducted with critical questions about the scheme remaining unanswered. She said, “This is precisely to me why it was so important to have the legal memo that this Commission said they would get. While there are statements that there will be increased transparency, I’m not seeing evidence of that. It is troubling to me that we haven’t heard from the ALJ (administrative law judge). We have not heard from Staff.”
Many Arizona energy consumers are about to see some savings in their bills in time for the holidays.
This month, the Southwest Gas Corporation sent a notice to the Arizona Corporation Commission about a rate decrease to consumers effective at the start of October.
The statement from Doran A. Miller, a Regulator Manager, said, “Pursuant to Decision Nos 74595 and 79038, Southwest Gas is providing notice that the Gas Cost Balancing Account rate will decrease from $0.30911 per therm to $0.00 per therm effective October 1, 2024. This results in a decrease of approximately $7 per month for the average single-family residential customer.”
In an exclusive comment to AZ Free News, Republican Commissioner Kevin Thompson responded to the notice from Southwest Gas, saying, “Any significant savings for the ratepayer should be welcomed, particularly in this economy. The cost of natural gas fuel is required to be passed along to ratepayers as a monthly surcharge that the Commission regularly reviews to make sure customers are paying the actual cost. This helps ensure utilities don’t over collect or earn a profit on this necessary resource.”
Thompson added, “As volatility in domestic and international markets have subsided, and the cost of natural gas dramatically decreases, most Southwest Gas customers will see a noticeable decrease in their monthly gas bill beginning in October.”
Earlier this year, the Corporation Commission shared a report from WalletHub, which showed that Arizona had the second-lowest energy cost out of the 50 states in the North American union with a $400 bill.
According to the Corporation Commission, there were a handful of factors separating Arizona from other states:
“Diverse generation sources – Arizona relies on a mix of generation sources, from nuclear, natural gas, hydropower, renewables, and battery storage.
“Self-Sufficiency – Arizona is not dependent on imported power. We tap into the market if needed, but our utilities’ focus is providing Integrated Resource Plans to guarantee future readiness. The Commission diligently oversees upgrades and construction.
“Proactive maintenance to ensure reliability – The Commission prioritizes daily maintenance and line work leading up to the summer to ensure the grid is ready for the extreme heat and high load.”
Republican Commissioner Lea Marquez Peterson reacted to the report from WalletHub, writing, “The data released in the report reflects the priorities of our Commission – reliable energy at the most affordable rates. I’m proud of the service and affordable rates we work hard to provide to ratepayers throughout the state.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
The catalog of Vice President Kamala Harris’s history on energy policy is as thin as the listing of her accomplishments as President Joe Biden’s “Border Czar,” which is to say it is bereft of anything of real substance.
But the queen of word salads and newly minted presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has publicly endorsed many of her party’s most radical and disastrous energy-related ideas while serving in various elected offices — both in her energy basket-case home state of California and in Washington, D.C.
What Harris’s statements add up to is a potential disaster for America’s future energy security.
“The vice president’s approach to energy has been sophomorically dilettantish, grasping not only at shiny things such as AOC’sGreen New Deal but also at the straws Americans use to suck down the drinks they need when she starts talking like a Valley Girl,” Dan Kish, a senior research fellow at Institute for Energy Research, told me in an email this week. “To be honest, she’s no worse than many of her former Senate colleagues who have helped cheer on rising energy costs and the fleeing American jobs that accompany them. She doesn’t seem to understand the importance of reliable and affordable domestic energy, good skilled jobs or the national security implications of domestically produced energy, but maybe she will go back to school on the matter. No doubt on her electric school bus.”
During her first run for the Senate in 2016, Harris said she would love to expand her state’s economically ruinous cap-and-trade program to the national level. She also endorsed then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s harebrained scheme to ban plastic straws as a means of fighting climate change.
Tim Stewart, president of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, told me proposals like that one would lead during a Harris presidency to the “Californication of the entire U.S. energy policy.” “Historically,” he added, “the transition of power from a president to a vice president is designed to signal continuity. This won’t be the case, because a Harris administration will be much worse.”
But how much worse could it be than the set of Biden policies that Harris has roundly endorsed over the last three and a half years? How much worse can it be than having laughed through a presidency that:
As Biden’s successor for the nomination, Harris becomes the proud owner of all these policies, and more.
But Harris’ history shows it could indeed get worse. Much worse, in fact.
While mounting her own disastrous campaign for her party’s presidential nomination in 2020, Harris endorsed a complete ban on hydraulic fracturing, i.e., fracking. She later conformed that position to Biden’s own, slightly less insane view, but only after being picked as his running mate.
Consider also that while serving in the Senate in early 2019, Harris chose to sign up as a co-sponsor of the ultra-radical Green New Deal proposed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. It is not enough that the Biden regulators appeared to be using that nutty proposal and climate alarmism as the impetus to transform America’s entire economy and social structure: Harris favors enacting the whole thing.
As I have detailed here many times, every element of climate-alarm-based energy policies adopted by the Biden administration will inevitably lead the United State to become increasingly reliant on China for its energy needs, in the process decimating our country’s energy security. By her own words and actions, Harris has made it abundantly clear she wants to shift the process of getting there into a higher gear.
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.
President Joe Biden’s time in the White House is mercifully coming to an end. He is now officially a lame duck with six months to go.
Biden was a victim here of a corrupt Democratic machine that — along with a complicit media — thought they could pull off a grand election-year deceit, despite his failing cognitive abilities. The Democratic establishment and a compliant media convinced millions of primary voters that Biden was of sound mind and ready to serve four more years. This lust for power put America in danger.
How could they be so unpatriotic?
So, where will Biden stand in the history books? He was not a failed president because of his declining cognitive abilities. It was his policies that wrecked America.
It is hard to point to a single policy that he got right. On the economy, he was catastrophically bad.
The trillions of dollars of debt he rung up bought nothing. He sent inflation to the highest levels in almost forty years.
The average family lost $2,000 of income after inflation during his reign. More people died of COVID during his presidency than Trump’s — despite the availability of the vaccine.
Interest rates rose. Biden declared war on American energy. He put America back into the Paris Climate Accord—and the rest of the world went on using more fossil fuels than ever. By impeding U.S. oil and gas production and pipelines he played into the hands of our enemies — China and Iran.
Gas prices rose. Small business confidence sagged. Poverty rates rose.
Then there was the sheer incompetence. The bungled Afghanistan withdrawal was a national security disaster. The border became a broken dam with millions seeking to illegally enter the country. The government spent $7.5 billion on electric vehicle chargers and only a handful got built.
Biden gave away hundreds of billions of dollars for an illegal and immoral student loan forgiveness program. He put regulators in charge of key agencies even though — or because — they hate business. A majority of his appointees had no business experience. It showed.
When he departs the White House in the months ahead he will leave the nation poorer, weaker, more divided, more in debt, more vulnerable, and less respected than when he entered office.
This was a man who pledged to unite the country and did just the opposite. He deserves to go down in history as one of the five worst presidents of the 20th and 21st century.
Here is my list starting with the worst: 1) Woodrow Wilson; 2) Herbert Hoover: 3) Jimmy Carter; 4) Joe Biden; 5) Barack Obama.
Now the Democrats want to run Vice President Kamala Harris, who was on board with every Biden policy and helped oversee the worst border catastrophe in modern history.
Just when you thought things could not get any worse.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
A new report by the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a nonprofit dedicated to the study of the impact of government regulation on global energy resources, finds that U.S. inventories of oil and natural gas have experienced stunning growth since 2011.
The same report, the North American Energy Inventory 2024, finds the United States also leading the world in coal resources, with total proven resources that are more than 53% bigger than China’s.
Despite years of record production levels and almost a decade of curtailed investment in the finding and development of new reserves forced by government regulation and discrimination by ESG-focused investment houses, America’s technically recoverable resource in oil grew by 15% from 2011 to 2024. Now standing at 1.66 trillion barrels, the U.S. resource is 5.6 times the proved reserves held by Saudi Arabia.
The story for natural gas is even more amazing: IER finds the technically recoverable resource for gas expanded by 47% in just 13 years, to a total of 4.03 quadrillion cubic feet. At current US consumption rates, that’s enough gas to supply the country’s needs for 130 years.
“The 2024 North American Energy Inventory makes it clear that we have ample reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal that will sustain us for generations,” Tom Pyle, President at IER, said in a release. “Technological advancements in the production process, along with our unique system of private ownership, have propelled the U.S. to global leadership in oil and natural gas production, fostering economic benefits like lower energy prices, job growth, enhanced national security, and an improved environment.”
It is key to understand here that the “technically recoverable” resource measure used in financial reporting is designed solely to create a point-in-time estimate of the amount of oil and gas in place underground that can be produced with current technology. Because technology advances in the oil and gas business every day, just as it does in society at large, this measure almost always is a vast understatement of the amount of resource that will ultimately be produced.
The Permian Basin has provided a great example of this phenomenon. Just over the past decade, the deployment of steadily advancing drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies has enabled producers in that vast resource play to more than double expected recoveries from each new well drilled. Similar advances have been experienced in the other major shale plays throughout North America. As a result, the U.S. industry has been able to consistently raise record overall production levels of both oil and gas despite an active rig count that has fallen by over 30% since January 2023.
In its report, IER notes this aspect of the industry by pointing out that, while the technically recoverable resource for U.S. natural gas sits at an impressive 4.03 quads, the total gas resource in place underground is currently estimated at an overwhelming 65 quads. If just half of that resource in place eventually becomes recoverable thanks to advancing technology over the coming decades, that would mean the United States will enjoy more than 1,000 years of gas supply at current consumption levels. That is not a typo.
Where coal is concerned, IER finds the US is home to a world-leading 470 billion short tons of the most energy-dense fossil fuel in place. That equates to 912 years of supply at current consumption rates.
No other country on Earth can come close to rivaling the U.S. for this level of wealth in energy mineral resources, and few countries’ governments would dream of squandering them in pursuit of a political agenda driven by climate fearmongering. “And yet, many politicians, government agents, and activists seek to constrain North America’s energy potential,” Pyle says, adding, “We must resist these efforts and commit ourselves to unlocking these resources so that American families can continue to enjoy the real and meaningful benefits our energy production offers.”
With President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump staking out polar opposite positions on this crucial question, America’s energy future is truly on the ballot this November.
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.
