When Delaware was debating the Bluewater Wind project, the opponents of wind power offered big estimates of the so-called green premium we would be forced to pay if the project went forward. One prominent legislator spoke darkly of electric bills going up by as much as 75 a month. As it turned out, the final Public Service Commission estimate of the cost of the Bluewater Wind project was 0.07 cents a kilowatt hour, which would come to not much more than a dollar a month for the average Delaware household using 1,550 kilowatt hours a month.
Why rehash this old argument? Because we're hearing it again.More specifically, we heard it last week when HB 86, which would have pulled Delaware out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, was debated. As I and others have pointed out, RGGI costs the average household about 38 cents a month-about 0.285 percent of household electricity bills. Happily, HB 86 was kept in committee. But we can expect the opponents of renewable energy to keep trying to kill programs using the same arguments.
Also worth a read is Michael Stafford's piece, "Ryan, Rand, and the Objectivist Budget," in which he neatly dismantles the thinking behind the House Republican's budget, and with footnotes.
Source: clean-energy-technologies.blogspot.com
