Energy Costs
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Might the Senator be willing to retain the floor for a moment to yield for a question?
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. In Rhode Island, we have a grid. ISO New England it is called. It is through that grid that electrons get from powerplant to the grid and from the grid to people's homes, and it is run as a basically common utility.
I assume Hawaii, which is geographically quite distinct, has its own grid.
So on our grid, this Revolution Wind project, as I said, is going to come on at 9 cents per kilowatt hour into a market where the prevailing rate is 18 cents. So if President Trump and his minions at Interior and EPW and Energy can stop that plant, they are making Rhode Islanders, New Englanders, buy 18-cent power instead of 9-cent power. So that raises the price for everybody.
By the way, for those of you who are listening, the ISO grid, like almost all the others--the price at any given minute on the grid for electricity is set by the highest cost plant that has to operate to meet that level of demand. So if you can get that 9-cent cost to be the highest cost, that is it for everybody, but if you got to go back to 18, that is also it for everybody. That plant just doesn't raise costs to pay itself back; it raises grid costs for every electron that is running at that same time.
So what that produces is, sticking with the 9- and 18-cent example, the 18-cent cost comes out of ratepayers' pockets. They have to pay their electric bill at 18 cents. They could have paid only 9 cents; instead, they are going to pay 18. The difference is going to go to the fossil fuel industry, to the big donors of Trump.
I call this a scam that Trump and his minions, for their big fossil fuel donors, are deliberately holding clean energy off the grid, which is cheaper, so that the grid can't go to it, has to go to higher and higher cost fossil fuel plants, so consumer costs go up. But that additional money that consumers have to pay goes to the fossil fuel industry, which gave him hundreds of millions of dollars to be elected, and this is payback for them.
Only Trump is no fool. Why pay it back himself or ask his political supporters to pay it back when he can go to electric consumers and bury it in their bill and make consumers pay to send hundreds of millions of dollars to these big donors.
So that is what we see in New England.
On the Hawaii grid, how does this work also?
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