Pay Up, Suckers
Well that’s nice:
Last week PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the electric grid for 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia) held its 2015 capacity auction. These are the first real, market prices that take Obama’s most recent anti-coal regulations into account, and they prove that he is keeping his 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”
The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity – almost all natural gas – was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.
It’s not like you weren’t warned, proles.
Fortunately, the price increase is after Nov. 2012.
Another GOP campaign ad writes itself. Now will they actually run it?
So if Mittens is in office…
“It’s Obama’s fault.”
Nah, that doesn’t sound like Mitt.
If these utilities sign contracts, which is what it sounds like, electing Mitt won’t cancel the contracts. As a well known change agent once observed, elections have consequences, and we’ll be feeling the consequences of 2008 for sometime to come.
Oh,well…eleven of the thirteen states voted for Obama, so it is actually hard justice.
Yeah, but some of us red residents of said blue states are sucking wind with the rest of these non-AoSHQ Morons. Hard justice my ass.
I’m sure your blue neighbors will be happy to advise you on all your heat and lighting decisions. And by “advise” I mean “compel”.
If you can’t beat em or thin the herd, flee.. I fled to TX, best choice I ever made..
Texas should have remained an independent republic!
Democracy is the idea that the common man knows what he wants, and deserves to get it good and hard. – Mencken
And nominating ORomney proves the People haven’t gotten it nearly hard enough.
I read the Fox story online and immediately sent the link and relevant quotes to my electric company and to the local news station. Since the local power is generated entirely by two coal fired plants I asked the question what happens to the city if those two plants are forced to close. Or what happens if everyone’s electric bill goes up by a factor of eight.
Obviously no one believes it will really happen. Everyone believes that congress will change the law, [cognitive disconnect] (congress is paralyzed by those evil republicans, it’s not the democrat party even though the democrats control the senate. The county votes 2 to one democrat every election).
So the whole idea the electric rates will go up is simply not believed here. The state regulates electric rates, so IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. The whole idea is so preposterous, no one believes it will happen.
Meanwhile Obama’s EPA appointees are working to make it happen.
So there you go.
OT, but another datum point that Dear Liar is the anti-Midas, via Drudge at the moment: FRIENDS: OBAMA TOUTED FACEBOOK IN ‘CAMPAIGN’ TOWN HALL…
No wonder the IPO is sinking.
So, there’s two possible outcomes here.
1) President Obama is reelected, and the rules go into force. $136/MW is accurate.
2) President Romney is inaugurated in 2013, and the rules do not go into force. However, rates rise by some indeterminate amount because of the delays already caused in replacement and expansion of coal plants.
I’d be curious to know more about outcome #2.
Whatever happens, it will be blamed on Bush.
Nah, we’re almost at the gates of the pre-blame Romney era now. This will be one of his first failures, I bet.
Luckily, thanks to Obama’s peerless vision and foresight, the high utilities bills will be more than offset by the savings from everyone driving their new fuel-saving electric Chevy Volts …
… which require charging from the higher-priced electricity, increasing grid demand and driving up utility prices even higher.
Don’t be silly. Obama has the whole thing figure out: less jobs, less commuters, less drivings, less electricity needed to charge up the exploding Volts, lower electricity bills to the no-incomes.
That’s right, elkh1, a million proles freezing in the dark don’t use much electricity at all.
As Western aid workers on the Dark Continent say, “Africa wins again.”
Romney must highlight this and pledge to end the coal plant regulations that shut them down. The campaign needs to give researched estimates of what average electricity bills will be if these Obama EPA regulations stand and those 2015 prices go into effect. How can the campaign be made aware of this?
Looks like there’s more to the story here. The capacity prices are higher, but the fuel costs are likely to moderate the impact. This is from the Chicago Tribune:
RETAIL PRICES
Ott said the capacity prices’ overall effect on retail consumer electricity rates would likely be moderated by other factors like weak natural gas prices.
“Capacity is a fairly small component of the retail price of electricity, and the cost of capacity at the retail level tends to be averaged out over several years,” Ott said.
Link to the article:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-18/news/sns-rt-us-utilities-pjm-capacitybre84h182-20120518_1_reliability-pricing-model-minimum-offer-price-rule-base-price
Indeed. Almost 165 GW of capacity were purchased in this auction whereas only 14 GW of retiring coal capacity is mentioned. Yes, the latter was completely unnecessary and did result in some unnecessary additional capital cost; nearly 10%. Yes, that will result in some increased generation cost borne by ratepayers. However, as mentioned, this will be offset by lower NG fuel costs per MWh than for coal.
Ladles and Gentlemints, let’s not fly off the handle on this situation.
Obama is America’s first blackout President!
That’s racist!
Obama’s current electric bill while living on the taxpayer dime – zero.
Obama’s level of concern about families paying their electric bill from now on – also zero.
The establishment who gave us Moromney wil say nothing and do nothing to stop electricity rates. The rino establishment repubics are nearly as diabolical as the commie democorrupts. When Ovomit was elected in 2008 Americans sighed their one way ticket to the fourth world thanks to the media by lying for and suppressing what the true goals of the obumunists were.
Whoa, guys, lets do a fact check/reframing here before the kvetching gets too loud. The auction is not for obtaining raw generated power, but transmitting power over the grid from a remote power company to a local power company when the local power company lacks generation capacity (e.g. a region is under a heat wave and needs spare juice due to extra A/C loads).
The high bid prices reflect not the scarcity of energy, but the scarcity of another resource— access and use of the transfer grid itself. The grid hasn’t been upgraded and expanded since deregulation of the energy sector 15+ years ago. No one owns it, so no one invests and maintains it. It’s basically falling apart. It’s a major bit of oversight that happened due during the deregulation process.
If you want transferred-power prices to go down, someone needs to invest in the grid. Either the government needs to invest in it (for the common good) or regulation needs to be put in place to create a private grid-supplier, and cede the existing grid assets to them.
Yea, I’ve often cited that one of the reasons that electric cars don’t make any sense is because the grid in some areas can’t handle a million electric cars on the road; particularly during the summer. But you have to wonder why the sudden increase in price to distribute power across the grid. And if you look you’ll see the reason is that the coal fired plants are closing down. Coal fired power generation has dropped from 44% to 36%. This means the natural gas powered generating plants will have to pick up the slack. That means the likelihood of having to transfer power across the grid is going to “necessarily skyrocket”.
Lights can, and probably will, go out. Regulations will never be clawed back. The bureaucratic mess / entrenchment is a gazillion times bigger than the president / party. They (both Ds & Rs) have bread legions of roaches that are breading legions of roaches. The time to stop all of this was many decades ago. Thank you Nixon, your EPA has killed the west (and kills Africans – DDT-ban).
This ties in nicely:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/22/obama-wants-the-electric-reliability-corporation-to-stop-assessing-electric-reliability/
Another parcel of bad news for the Obama fairy tale’s tragic rewrite in November.
Interesting coincidence. 13 cents per killowatt is the price point the solar companies need to be competitive.
From the Fox report “Why the massive price increases? Andy Ott from PJM stated the obvious” Andy is Scott’s middle name and PJM is Rogers’s company. I never suspected that PJ Media had such clout.
Missing from this discussion is any reference to other years.
See slide 5 of this document from PJM.
http://www.pjm.com/~/media/markets-ops/rpm/rpm-auction-info/2012-13-base-residual-auction-report-document-pdf.ashx
12/13 was basically an odd blip that was preceded by many higher priced years.