We asked Missouri PSC Commissioner Maida Coleman about the poverty simulation at this year’s NARUC Summer Policy Summit. Excerpted from the article “Chairing NARUC's Committee on Consumers and the Public Interest,” here’s what Commissioner Coleman said:
I just read another article — by another expert in combatting climate change — about how U.S. electric supply can get to a hundred percent renewables. I’ve lost count of how many of these articles I’ve seen.
A hundred percent can be achieved economically and rather expeditiously, it is typically asserted, remarkably without nuclear power plants. The magic bullet is usually massive quantities of battery storage. But the more thoughtful of these articles adds huge amounts of hydroelectric storage and, in particular, high-voltage transmission.
On August 30, the U.S. Commerce Department published detail on July’s gross domestic product. Including detail on its largest component, personal consumption expenditures. In July, one and a third percent of personal consumption was for residential electric bills.
Is that a lot or a little? One way to answer this question is to look at what other categories of personal consumption were near one and a third percent in July.
Exactly one and a third percent was also spent on higher education.
A hundred percent will be carbon free by 2050. Or by 2040. Or even by the year 2030, which is but eleven years from now. We hear this in the news all the time, about goals being set for de-carbonizing the country’s production of electricity.
Which begs the question, where do we stand at the present time? On Monday, the U.S. Energy Department answered this important question, through the first half of 2019.