You’ve got to be kidding. CT electricity price increase.
As a concierge utility, Exergy Energy, works for its customers, making sure they get the best value for their energy spend. Those of you in Connecticut will be seeing a fairly substantial price increase starting in September, so we took a deeper dive into what is driving this. The following quote is startling.
“The increase in Eversource bills scheduled to take effect Sept.1 was largely focused on providing incentives for residential customers and other rate groups to purchase chargers for electric vehicles, according to Ratliff. Those incentives are being paid for through the public benefits charge.”
Here is the link to the entire article:
Connecticut electric bills jumped more than expected. Here’s why rates may climb further
So, to incentivize people to buy EV chargers, everyone’s bill is going up. A city resident that doesn’t own a car is going to help defer the cost for their suburban counterpart. How about my grandmother who no longer drives?
We all understand that we have to sacrifice to address climate change, but as we have repeatedly seen, the taxes to incentivize this energy transition are highly regressive. First movers, typically the wealthier, get the incentives. These incentives invariably decline and go away over time, when the less wealthy can finally make the investment. Solar with net metering is a perfect example.
A similar distortion is the cost for highway maintenance. This is almost exclusively financed through gasoline taxes. So, the EV driver is subsidized by the ICE driver. This is even more profound when you consider that the average EV is substantially heavier than its ICE counterpart and causes more highway road damage.
People need to realize that the energy transition is going to be expensive and problematic. It would be nice if it weren’t also regressive.