In 2020, Arizona’s largest monopoly utility announced a voluntary commitment to one of the most extreme clean energy goals in the world: to go 100% carbon free by 2050. Five years later, they’re rolling that commitment back. Sort of.
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. Under a carbon neutral commitment, future energy demand can’t result in any increase in carbon emissions, which means there is no way to expand power generation on the grid without building a massive amount of costly wind, solar and battery storage in order to not create a “carbon imbalance”. In other words, carbon neutral represents a change in speed on the road to Net Zero, not course.
As for existing fossil fuel sources such as coal, APS has decided that rather than shutting down all coal by 2031, the phase out date has been pushed back to 2038. Yet even with this seven-year delay, APS has still “not yet decided”if they will maintain operations beyond 2031. In other words, a noncommittal commitment to slow roll the shuttering of reliable and baseload power.
In fact, APS’s new climate goal brings them in line with fellow Arizona utility Tucson Electric Power, which adopted an identical carbon neutral “Net Zero” commitment several years ago. TEP is so proud of their commitment that if you help them meet their climate plans by using less energy and reducing your burden on the grid, you can even be a Net Zero Hero!
Unsurprisingly, the policy shift by APS angered the special interests and environmental activists that have spent years at the Corporation Commission pushing their green scam agenda. For them, anything that looks like the utilities are letting off the accelerator while driving off the green new deal cliff is enough to draw their ire.
But that is not the only reason they are upset. It was less than a year ago that the Republican controlled Corporation Commission unanimously approved the APS resource plan, which codified as policy all of the climate commitments supported by the left. The approved plan received no pushback, no substantive changes, and no independent cost analysis (a requirement the ACC waived). So even though APS announced a modification in their climate commitment last week, the existing resource plan, which will cost ratepayers $42.7 Billion over the next 15 years, is still the official policy for current and future energy development in Arizona.
The announcement also comes after APS and Arizona’s other large utilities heavily lobbied the legislature to pass a bill allowing them to securitize the closure of coal plants. It was sold as a way to save ratepayers money. That’s what Republicans were told at least. Democrats, on the other hand, claim they were told it was a tool to ensure they can shut down coal plants sooner and enable and hasten their clean energy transition.
Ironically, this flip flop does implicitly admit what we have been saying all along: adopting the Green New Scam will cost billions and result in blackouts. For years they told the Commission that renewables were the cheapest option. And paired with batteries, they can be just as reliable as our fossil fuel sources.
This on its face is obviously not true, but now they are owning up to it. In their announcement it is said that they are abandoning their old commitment to instead focus on affordability and reliability. Meaning they cannot prioritize affordability and reliability while also making such bold clean energy commitments.
If one positive can be gleaned from the announcement by APS, it shows that pressure from Arizona ratepayers, grassroots organizations and the Trump administration is having an impact. The frustration over double digit rate hikes to pay for expensive green new deal climate plans have boiled over, and they hope this announcement will calm the political waters.
But until every Arizona utility abandons these dangerous climate commitments, built on false assumptions and junk science, the pressure on them and the Corporation Commission will continue. That’s why it’s necessary for utilities to drop clean energy commitments entirely and return to solely focusing on affordability and reliability. It’s simply not enough to tweak the green scam—complete elimination is needed.
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