Times didn’t note Mississippi residential rates are 9.2% lower than last year and 11.4% below national average.
Steve Mitnick is Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly and author of the book “Lines Down: How We Pay, Use, Value Grid Electricity Amid the Storm.”
We have our first winner of the PUF Cross-Examination Award. The award goes to media and other statements that are so misleading they compel us to cross-examine.
The first winner is an article in yesterday's New York Times.
The article, entitled "Piles of Dirty Secrets Behind a Model 'Clean Coal' Project," by Ian Urbina, implies that a utility project has driven electric rates to unbearable levels. It states:
"Campaigning for a seat on the Mississippi Public Service Commission, Thomas A. Blanton, an opponent of the project, ran television ads featuring an older woman eating dog food and warning of sacrifices that poorer people sometimes make to afford electricity. In cramped trailers where some of the poorest people in the state live, summer temperatures topped 110 degrees - potentially deadly for older residents who could not pay to keep their air-conditioning running...
The project did create jobs, but Mark Klinedinst, a retired economics professor from the University of Southern Mississippi, said that more were lost in the region as businesses laid people off to pay for the higher electrical bills caused by Mississippi Power rate increases from plant construction."
The article didn't note that Mississippi residential electric rates are 9.2 percent lower in April 2016 (the latest month of data), than in April 2015. Nor did it note that Mississippi residential rates were 11.4 percent below the national average.
Indeed, the state's commercial rates are 14.3 percent lower than last April. And 7.0 percent below the national average.
The state's industrial rates are 14.1 percent lower than last April. And 15.0 percent below the national average.
Every bill and cost, for any good and service, is challenging for low-income households and struggling businesses. That's as true for bills for electricity, even if they are just a few percent of expenditures.
Nonetheless, we urge the Times and others to take greater care, if and when they're inclined to blame electric bills for poverty and layoffs, scourges for which there are multiple causes and multiple approaches to lessen their burden.
As the magazine-of-record for electric and natural gas utility regulation, for eighty-seven years, Public Utilities Fortnightly will occasionally applaud and groan about media and other statements on our industry.
Steve Mitnick, Editor-in-Chief, Public Utilities Fortnightly
E-mail me: mitnick@fortnightly.com
