From State Rep, Steve Reick:
Wait, Who Is Responsible for the High Utility Bills?
As temperatures dip, we are beginning to see our utility bills go up, again.
Everything is becoming more expensive, and I hear from more and more constituents about the tough financial decisions they are having to make as they balance the costs of medicine, food, utilities, and healthcare, and property taxes.
This pain is being felt across the state.
Unfortunately instead of it leading to a bipartisan effort to address the root causes of cost increases, it has led to finger pointing.
A couple of weeks ago, JB Pritzker along with four other Democratic Governors sent a letter to PJM – a regional organization that manages the wholesale electricity market in parts of the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and South. In the letter, the governors called for “PJM to take urgent action to address the increasing cost of electricity bills.”
You can read the whole letter here, but here’s the Cliffs Notes version of the letter:
While the Governors accept that their anti-carbon energy production policies coupled with their pro-electrification policies have increased demand and decreased supply (commonly known as “Econ 101” for the benefit of all the “name your favorite social-cause studies” majors out there) *maybe* contributed to the cost increases, they lay out demands for PJM to fix the price hikes they caused.
It’s rich to see such posturing from Governor Pritzker. He passed and signed legislation that forced the elimination of a large portion of our base-load energy generation capacity while providing exorbitant subsidies for unreliable and expensive “green” energy, not to mention the subsidies allowing rich people to buy electric cars.
Pritzker’s policies are going to eliminate the one major thing that will attract new business to Illinois: reliable and relatively inexpensive electrical power, and when the prophesies of the Green Revolution fail, angry letters from him trying to deflect blame aren’t going to change that.
