PHOENIX, ARIZONA – Today, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and AZ Liberty Network released a comprehensive analysis of the APS ’Net Zero’ resource plan approved by the Arizona Corporation Commission in 2024.
The independent analysis found that the APS ‘Net Zero’ Preferred Plan, built around their publicly stated goal of shutting down all reliable fossil fuel power generation over the next 25 years, would cost Arizona ratepayers over $40 billion dollars and likely result in blackouts by 2038.
Some of the key findings from the report include the following:
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- The APS Net Zero plan would increase monthly utility bills for residential customers by nearly $100 per month, with commercial customers seeing an increase of $454 per month.
- The APS plan would also result in serious reliability concerns due to the overreliance on intermittent power sources. By 2038, the APS service territory could face a capacity shortfall as high as 3,701 MW. This represents 33% of the total customer demand, potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses to rolling blackouts and power outages.
- APS currently meets their 8.1 GW of energy demand with 10 GW of capacity, largely from reliable sources of energy including coal, nuclear, and natural gas. To meet future energy demand under their plan relying on intermittent wind, solar, and battery storage, APS will need to overbuild the grid by nearly tripling capacity to 27 GW.
- An alternative True Least Cost (TLC) scenario modeled in the report shows that a plan built around reliable dispatchable power as opposed to intermittent wind, solar, and battery storage would save ratepayers over $20 billion dollars.
Though the Arizona Corporation Commission has a policy requiring an independent cost analysis before approving a resource plan by a utility, the Commission voted to waive this requirement during their most recent IRP process.
The full report can be accessed at the following link.
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