Green may be good, but it’s not free.
That’s what energy giant American Electric Power told EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson last week.
She wasn’t listening.
The company said new EPA emission-reduction regulations would cost hundreds of jobs at AEP, and hike electric rates by tens of millions of dollars.
“Misleading at best, scare tactics at worst,” she hummed to reporters.
Ah, but she didn’t say wrong.
How could she?
The EPA, after all, is flogging new emission regs that will force AEP to:
* Close five electric plants, with a loss of 6,000 megawatts of generating capacity — triple what Indian Point sends to New Yorkers every day.
* Kill 600 jobs, sucking $40 million a year in wages out of the economy.
* Retrofit its remaining plants at a cost of $6 billion to $8 billion — every penny of which will eventually be passed on to ratepayers, further sinking the economy.
Much of this is in service of the EPA’s anti-global-warming initiative, requiring with regulation what Congress refused to mandate legislatively: that companies drastically reduce carbon emissions.
“Because of the unrealistic compliance timelines in the EPA proposals, we will have to prematurely shut down nearly 25 percent of our current coal-fueled generating capacity, cut hundreds of good power-plant jobs” and spend billions to meet the requirements, said AEP Chairman Michael Morris.
That means “significant” rate hikes for some 5 million customers in 11 states.
Businesses, already reeling from the crumbling economy, will be hit even harder — with rate hikes of up to 35 percent, AEP said.
We’ll give Jackson this: Such numbers are scary — especially since there is no compelling reason to disbelieve them.
Energy Luddism of any sort is never good, but for a major federal agency to be enthusiastically undercutting President Obama’s professed goal of creating new jobs while turning around a dramatically deteriorating economy is bizarre.
Kudos to AEP’s Morris for calling Jackson out on it.