We think we’ve made it clear at AENJ that we want people to pay as little as they need to for the energy that they need, which is why we have continued to support an all of the above energy strategy. We just don’t support a shell game to make it happen.

That’s why you could say it is frustrating to see the smoke and mirrors coming out of Trenton these days. The Governor and Legislators said they were “providing criticial economic relief” for rising energy costs because they were raiding funds as a way to soften the financial blow of the poor policy decisions that have been made by the state. The problem is, this was always predictable (particularly if you’ve read our emails the last few years) and we’re not doing anything to make sure it doesn’t keep happening.

The headline of another story was about how officials were “scrambling to stop utility increases.” And that’s the thing, they’re not addressing the root of problem, so they’re not fixing anything. They’re not addressing how we got here in the first place to have these utility increases at all:

Sure we can talk about whether you agree or disagree with 40% of your utility bill going to programs that are not paying your energy usage but that wasn’t supposed to be raided to add a subsidy to a subsidy without doing anything to address the cause of the situation.

The real problem is we aren’t reducing the costs, we are kicking the can down the road for a few months and will still have to pay for it later. We also still haven’t repealed any of the mandates that have driven up costs and limited supply. With requirements for more EV’s and more heat pumps, costs will only continue to rise. So not only are they not building new generation, they are not repealing the mandates that are manipulating the demand side of the equation either.

The simple fact that our elected officials need to understand is that an energy grid does not generate energy, it distributes it. So blaming the grid operator only serves to gaslight the public without doing anything that will lead to better policy.

Bad policy and election year gimmicks don’t solve the problem. Building new generation solves the problem. And until we do that, everything else is smoke and mirrors