Joshua Remley and his wife Elizabeth were shocked last year when their monthly power bill topped $700, well above the $170 to $250 or so they paid when they moved
They’d wondered if they missed a payment to Alabama Power Company the prior month. But they hadn’t.
People are also reading… In one of the poorest states, the only investor-owned electric utility earns one of the biggest profit margins in America. Documents from experts filed in another state, for example, show Alabama Power earning a 38% higher profit margin than neighboring Georgia Power. In a statement, company spokeswoman Alyson Tucker said the company’s electricity prices are below the national average.
“They’re regulating themselves,” he said of the company. “Alabama Power handpicked basically everybody that was in office other than me.”Alabama’s average monthly residential electricity bills are the third highest in the nation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The state falls behind Hawaii and Connecticut.While people in Georgia have electric bills averaging $134.11 per month and people in Mississippi average $135.31, Alabamians averaged $147.
The office of Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall, in a May 2020 filing with the commission, wrote that Alabama Power Company’s new natural gas projects would “significantly impact millions of customers in the monthly bills they must pay for electricity.” The Southern Environmental Law Center, representing two clean energy groups, told the commission that the company had overestimated its future energy and natural gas needs, but it supported the solar energy and energy storage proposals for their cost benefits. Because solar energy comes from the sun, customers don’t pay any cost for fuel to run the plants.
That year, Remley, the Pinckard man, saw his bill reach $700 at his three-bedroom home with an attached garage and study. He, his wife and their sons, ages 14 and 3, try to only run electricity in the evening because they’re at work or school during the day. Still, their power was cut off briefly last year when they couldn’t pay their bill.
A day after its Dec. 6 meeting, where the commission oversaw the third and fourth Alabama Power rate increases of the year, a commission press release about the rate increases included comments from the three commissioners blaming President Joe Biden’s energy policies. “We use so much electricity to produce air conditioning in our sweltering hot summers,” she said. “But to add to that, most of the people in Alabama, a majority, in fact the highest state in the country, use heat pumps to heat their homes in the winter.
She said she supported wind and solar energy but defended the state’s reliance on natural gas. “Fossil fuels are what made our country great.” John Garner, the commission’s executive director and chief administrative law judge, told Tidwell the question was off limits. “If you’ll wrap it up quickly,” Garner said. “We are drifting a little far afield.”
But the commission denied a public record request by a clean energy group on that issue, saying the documents were confidential. And the Alabama attorney general provided no records in response to a request from the Opelika-Auburn News, suggesting records were “privileged.”
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