By Assemblyman Michael Torrissi Jr.
Sticker shock of high energy bills has crushed New Jersey residents throughout the state.
I’ve heard it from many constituents in my Legislative District, who are Atlantic City Electric customers, and I’ve seen it reflected in my own bill.
New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities voted to raise energy supply rates in the state by 13 percent. They also approved an 8-percent increase in Atlantic City Electric rates. That paired with an incredibly hot July created astronomical bills that would cause anyone to have a meltdown.
The fact that Governor Phil Murphy and his administration are approving rate increases that hit 20 percent is bad enough on its own, but that’s only the effect of an overall bigger problem that they caused. The driving force behind what your seeing is bad policy, mainly the Governor’s Energy Master Plan.
Everything comes with a price - windmills and gas appliance bans and electric car mandates and nuclear power plant closures and natural gas pipeline proposals being shuttered, and on and on and on. These are the policies being enacted in New Jersey for the last seven years. The cost of them is astronomical.
Every voting session, when Democrats approve these measures, the New Jersey Rate Counsel comes to the statehouse and warns every legislator that what they’re about to do is going to have to be paid by the ratepayers. They say plainly that energy and gas bills will go up because of this. Democrats ignore them and vote yes anyway, regardless of how expensive their policies are.
Who do you think pays for the billions of dollars in windmill tax credits? All of us who use natural resources to cool and warm our homes. The cost of lining our coastline with windmills gets spread out by the ratepayers because they don’t generate enough energy and make enough money to pay for themselves.
The big secret with green energy is it’s not currently economically viable. I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to see a green new world, but you must be honest with people – to achieve it, you’re going to have to pay, and a lot.
That might be easy for wealthy celebrities to preach, but for the vast majority of the families I represent, it’s just not feasible. I, for one, am strongly against these mandates if it means driving people out of their homes.
So next time you look at your monthly bill, don’t assume that it just magically increased because that’s the way of the world. Don’t take inflation sitting down. We need to fight back against bad politicians with bad policies, because they are taking money from your pockets and food off your table.
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