To my knowledge, Colorado is the only state in which regulators allow utilities to incorporate a carbon tax into the economic models used to make resource acquisition decisions (see here and here). Ratepayers can’t see it in their monthly bill, but the tax is used in the models, and the models dictate spending. It’s the worst kind of virtual reality: The carbon tax leaps from computers to ratepayer wallets.

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission was authorized to allow for a carbon tax in 2008 with the passage of HB 1164 by the General Assembly. The legislation was advertised as an essential component of former Governor’s Bill Ritter’s environmentalist “New Energy Economy,” but, in practice, the carbon tax has served as an accounting loophole through which Xcel Energy, the largest investor-owned utility in the State, has awarded itself big time profits. In a previous post, I explained in some detail how Xcel uses the carbon tax. Here are a few examples:

• One of Xcel’s priorities is winning market share from independent power producers on the wholesale electricity market. Older natural gas plants are Xcel’s fiercest competitors, because they have already paid off their capital costs, so they can bid electricity prices relatively low. The $20/ton carbon tax eliminates this advantage, because new plants are more efficient than older plants. It tilts the playing field to Xcel’s favor.

• In implementing HB 1365, the Clean Air Clean Jobs Act, 2010 legislation mandating fuel switching from coal to gas for almost 1,000 megawatts of electricity along the Front Range in Colorado, Xcel used the $20/ton carbon tax to obfuscate the price impact. The carbon tax inflated by scores of millions of dollars the baseline rate against which the costs of the law were calculated.

• On HB 1001, Colorado’s renewable electricity standard, Xcel employed the $20/ton carbon tax to circumvent the 2% rate cap that lawmakers had implemented to protect consumers. The effect of the carbon adder is to significantly expand Xcel’s annual expenditures, which increases the pool from which the company can reap profits.

A recent flip flop by Xcel demonstrates the company’s cynical manipulation of the carbon tax. As part of the 2007 Electric Resource Plan, Xcel committed to building a 250 megawatt concentrated solar power plant in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado.  The commitment was finalized in late summer, 2009. Less than a year later, in June, 2010, Xcel petitioned the PUC for permission to abandon the solar plant.

Investor-owned utilities like Xcel play a delicate balancing act when it comes to capital expenditure. Generally speaking, the more Xcel spends, the more profit it makes, so it has an incentive to press for as much capital construction as possible. However, if the utility builds too much, and prices rise too fast, then it risks a backlash from the legislature, which could lead to the enactment of policies inimical to the utility. The 250 megawatts of concentrated solar power was so ridiculously expensive that Xcel realized it could upset this balance, and thereby risk blowback from the General Assembly.

Altering an Electric Resource Plan is no small matter. There are serious due process issues inherent to unilaterally changing a PUC-approved order. So Xcel needed a good reason for backing out of the solar deal. Specifically, it had to demonstrate that solar power is egregiously cost-ineffective relative to conventional power generation.

For accounting purposes, Xcel calculates the cost of renewable energy relative to natural gas generation. And in calculating the cost of natural gas, Xcel should be bound by the procedures established by Phase 1 of the 2007 Electric Resource Plan, which included, for the first time, the carbon tax. But that would have harmed Xcel’s argument, because the carbon tax would make gas much more expensive vis a vis a carbon free energy source, like concentrated solar power. So Xcel dropped the carbon tax. Here’s how Xcel’s Kurtis J Haeger, Managing Director of Wholesale Operations, justified Xcel’s decision in April 14, 2011, testimony before the PUC.

“We attempted to use the approved resource planning methodologies and factors from the last resource plan as we are directed to do…and in this case, the assumption used in the ’07 Resource Plan was for a carbon tax or carbon proxy to go into effect in 2010. Sitting in 2011, I know that didn’t happen…We updated the assumptions because the carbon assumption we had in the original modeling was not valid anymore.” [Transcript from April 14 PUC hearing, p 19 lines 19-21, 25; p 20 lines 1-4, 12-14]

This rationalization is bogus. It’s been apparent that the Congress won’t put a price on carbon since the fall of 2009, when the Senate shelved a cap-and-trade scheme that had been enacted by the House the previous summer (the legislation was the American Clean Energy and Security Act), yet this didn’t stop Xcel from using the carbon tax in its models.

Fattened profits are a much more plausible reason for Xcel to suddenly flip-flop on the carbon tax. Quite simply, when use of the carbon tax benefited Xcel, the utility wanted to use it. And now that the carbon tax no longer benefits Xcel, the utility doesn’t want to use it.

I’m contributing to a lawsuit, filed by the American Tradition Institute, against Colorado, alleging that the State’s green energy production quota, known as a Renewable Electricity Standard, is an unlawful violation of the Congress’s authority to regulate interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Read all about it here.

In an earlier post, I listed the top five worst governors on energy policy. Alas, four of the five were lame ducks, which means that my original list had a very limited shelf life. With that in mind, I made a new list. This one is limited to sitting governors and governors-elect, so it should remain relevant for the foreseeable future.

And so, without further ado, THE TOP FIVE WORST GOVERNORS ON ENERGY POLICY….[cue drum roll]…

5         Kansas Governor-elect Sam Brownback

Sam Brownback has yet to serve a day as Governor, but he earned a place on this list for a particularly egregious mistake he recently committed while representing Kansas in the U.S. Senate.  It happened late last July. At the time, with an election looming, Senate majority leader Harry Reid decided that to drop debate on a Soviet-style renewable energy production quota, known as a Renewable Electricity Standard. Cap-and-trade had already died in the Senate, and the Congressional calendar was nearing its end, so Reid’s decision to abandon a RES meant that the 111th Congress would avoid the worst ideas in energy policy. Then, Sen. Sam Brownback, in an apparent effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, announced that he would introduce aRES. Thankfully, Brownback’s proposal was ignored.

4.       New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

Christie’s skepticism of global warming alarmism is great. What’s not so great is his continued participation in a regional cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme. For whatever reason, the climate skeptic sounding governor has yet to pull his state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the aforementioned energy tax.

3.       Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick

For Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, climate policy is all about style over substance. In one sense, that’s a good thing, because Patrick (like me) has no interest in expensive energy policies.  In 2008, for example, Gov. Patrick championed the Global Warming Solutions Act, which, according to the Governor’s press release, requires emissions reductions 25% below 1990 levels by 2020. That sounds like a big commitment, but when you read the fine print, it turns out that the legislation mandates emissions reductions of only 10% below 1990 levels. Moreover, the State’s business-as-usual future is projected to reduce emissions 3% below 1990 levels by 2020. And when you account for federal and state policies already in place, Massachusetts is on track to reduce emissions 18% below 1990 levels by 2020. The upshot is that the Governor’s climate plan is pointless, which is probably the reason why his website’s “key priorities” page makes no mention of global warming. While I appreciate the Massachusetts Governor’s aversion to expensive energy climate policies, by enacting  long term, legally binding emissions reductions targets, he created a powerful tool with which environmentalist lawyers can gum up economic activity.

2.       Maryland Governor Martin O Malley

Governor Martin O Malley wants his constituents to believe that they can have their cake and eat it, too, when it comes to climate change mitigation. In 2009, Governor O Malley sponsored the Greenhouse Gas Reductions Act, which requires emissions reductions 25% below 2006 levels by 2020. Yet the law requires that any emissions reductions strategy also, “produce a net economic benefit to the State’s economy and a net increase in jobs in the state.” Of course, these are mutually exclusive propositions. No matter how much politicians blather on about “green jobs,” the fact remains that the price of “doing something” about climate change is forsaken economic growth. To be sure, O Malley ensured that he wouldn’t be the one to square this circle. The law postpones any meaningful requirement until after the Governor is safely out of office.

1.       California Governor-elect Jerry Brown (the #1 worst by a landslide)

Californians will rue the day they elected Jerry Brown for a second stint in the Governor’s mansion. He is exactly the wrong person at the exact worst time. The start of Brown’s term coincides the implementation phase of the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, which grants the state executive virtually unlimited authority to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. Governor-elect Brown has given every indication he will use this unprecedented expansion of authority in an imprudent manner. In the 1970s, when he was last governor, Brown refused to allow new generation resources to be built in the State, claiming instead that energy efficiency regulations would so diminish energy demand that no new power plants would be needed. Of course, he was wrong, and the policies he put in place led directly to the California energy crisis in 2000/2001. During the Schwarzenegger Administration, Jerry Brown served as Attorney General, and in that capacity he sued California counties for failing to take climate change mitigation into account in their long term growth strategies. It is difficult to overstate what trouble lies ahead for California.

Lame Duck Session a Big Success So Far

The first week of Congress’s lame duck session has been a big success.  They haven’t done anything.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pulled a scheduled vote to invoke cloture and proceed to S. 3815, the “Promoting Natural Gas and Electric Vehicles Act of 2010,” because he did not have the 60 votes required.

S. 3815 is known around town as the Boone Pickens Payoff Bill.  Pickens told Bloomberg News this week that he thought there was a better than 50-50 chance that the bill would be enacted, so we can’t celebrate yet.

The bill would provide $4.5 billion in subsidies for natural gas vehicles and $3.5 billion in subsidies for electric vehicles plus $2 billion in loans to manufacturers of natural gas vehicles.  The subsidies to purchasers would range from $8,000 to $64,000.  The larger payments would be for purchasers of heavy trucks that run on natural gas.

But the Lame Ducks Will Be Back after Thanksgiving

Congress will be in recess next week for Thanksgiving and will return on November 29th.  There are enough big must-do items that it still seems unlikely to me that the Senate will be able to take up Pickens’s bill or the Renewable Electricity Standard (or RES) bill, S. 3813.  The RES bill is sponsored by Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the Chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and retiring Senator Sam Brownback (R-Ks.), who has just been elected Governor of Kansas.  It now has 31 co-sponsors, including three other Republicans.

The RES bill would raise electric rates in those States that haven’t yet followed the failed California model of raising rates to impoverish consumers and drive out energy-intensive industries.  My guess is that it will be blocked in the Senate by Republican and Democratic Senators from those States in the Mideast and Southeast that still depend on low-cost coal and therefore still have manufacturing.  On the other hand, there is an incentive for Senators from States that have already enacted their own renewable requirements to support a national standard in order to lower the competitiveness of the States that have not adopted renewable requirements.

[originally published at the Independence Institute's Energy Center]

When it comes to renewable energy, Colorado politicians are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. In February, the General Assembly passed HB 1001, a law requiring that Xcel use 30% renewable energy by 2020. To be sure, renewable energy is more expensive than conventional energy, but lawmakers promised that the costs would be held in check by a 2 % rate cap codified in the legislation. You see, Colorado politicians believed they could establish a Soviet-style renewable energy production quota AND Soviet-style price controls.

In early September, the Independence Institute‘s Amy Oliver Cooke and I took this silliness to task in a Denver Post oped. Specifically, we explained the regulatory machinations employed by the Ritter Administration to get around the rate cap.

Nearly a month later, Rep. Max Tyler, the lead sponsor of HB 1001, replied to our oped with a letter in the Post. Rep. Tyler’s missive ignored our arguments, and instead boasted of the ancillary benefits of government picking which energy sources Coloradans must use. Along these lines, he noted that wind power in Colorado:

• Creates more than $2.5 million for farmers and ranchers who lease land for wind generation
• Supports 1,700 construction jobs and 300 permanent jobs in rural areas;
• Generates $4.6 million in annual property tax revenue for local schools, roads, etc.

Of course, Rep. Tyler missed the point: These “benefits” aren’t a net positive for the State. Rather, they are paid for by Xcel consumers, in the form of higher energy bills, which means that Xcel ratepayers (primarily in Denver, Grand Junction, and Boulder) are subsidizing the rural development showcased by Rep. Tyler. This is a classic case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

In his letter, Rep. Max Tyler stated that, “Colorado currently generates 1,244 megawatts of wind power.” That sounds like a lot, but it’s not. Because the wind doesn’t always blow, Xcel can rely on only a fraction of its wind generation’s nameplate capacity. In practice, 1,244 MW of wind is only 124 MW of real power. That’s about half of the coal power capacity that Xcel agreed to shutter in its most recent electric resource plan.

The problem for Colorado is that this small amount of wind power costs a large amount of money. According to the Public Utilities Staff, Xcel “identified wind energy costs for 2009 of $147,431,000 and 2010 of $155,462,000.”[1] That’s about 5% of Xcel’s 2009 and 2010 sales-or more than double the 2 % rate cap that Rep. Tyler trumpets in his letter (he wrote, “Another important fact: When developing new energy resources, utilities have a 2 percent increase rate-cap on retail customer bills”).

By highlighting localized gains, Rep. Max Tyler missed the big picture. Forcing Xcel customers to pay more for less energy hurts the State’s economy. Period.