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Entergy Mississippi is an electric utility. It has a legal monopoly in 45 counties with almost 400,000 residential customers (households). It is regulated by the Mississippi Public Service Commission (PSC). The PSC has allowed Entergy to increase rates for these customers 32% over the last three years. Why? Should customers pay even more for less?
Entergy has some old and inefficient generating plants. They are expensive to operate and maintain. So, their electricity is expensive. The PSC’s main job is to see that utilities provide affordable reliable electricity. It hasn’t done its job. It should have encouraged Entergy to replace the old plants years ago. It didn’t. That may explain the 32% rate increase.
The PSC was busy encouraging Mississippi Power’s Kemper County Lignite plant experiment. It took seven years and $7.5 billion for the PSC to admit the experiment was a failure. Then the PSC approved $986 million to salvage pieces of the failure for a hybrid natural gas plant, $114 million to transmit its power to Mississippi Power’s monopoly service area, and another $78 million for “regulatory assets.”
Oops. Now the PSC says Mississippi Power has too much power. It must shut down some other plants to make room for the hybrid’s power. So, customers will pay $1.2 billion for the unneeded face-saving salvage job, plus costs to shut down operating plants. Seems there’s no end to customer pain from the PSC’s Kemper experiment. To be fair, it had help from a Governor, Department of Energy bureaucrats, contractors, consultants, out of state workers, and other pilot fish.
Now it’s doing it again. Different experiment. Different commissioners. Different promoters. Different Governor. Some of the same lobbyists, bureaucrats, and pilot fish. Similar predictably bad results for customers. Are we slow learners or what?
The experiment this time is solar power. The PSC is the enabler. Entergy is the experimenter. Customers are the guinea pigs – again. Entergy already has one solar plant. It plans more. Estimated total cost is $1.2 billion. Kemper deja vu all over again.
Entergy’s solar dreams are also built on exaggeration, wishful thinking, and some outright lies. Here are some examples. Sunshine is free, therefore solar electricity is cheap. Government subsidies and tax breaks pay most of a solar plant’s cost, therefore solar plants are almost free. Solar plants don’t emit carbon dioxide, therefore there will be fewer climate change disasters.
Solar proponents ignore solar’s intermittency (plants don’t work 70- 80% of the time) and its resulting blackouts. They fantasize about batteries that will store enough power to deliver (dispatch) electricity when solar doesn’t work. Until fantasy becomes reality, utilities that build solar plants must also build natural gas plants to dispatch power when solar can’t.
So, customers pay twice – for solar plants and for natural gas backups. That’s the real appeal of solar for utilities. They get to build more plants. Thanks to the PSC,
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