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Nuclear Blackmail – Renewable Murder – Climate Suicide

Will the sponsor of the renewable cap amendment please raise your hand?

[Update: 2/27/18 – Unexpectedly, the bill was held, a huge short term victory. Read NJ Spotlight story.

But we got confirmation that the assholes from NJ LCV signed off on the poison pill provision.

These people are dangerously incompetent and corrupt too.

Here’s the confirmation, by none other than that lying sack of shit Ed Potosnak, who just raised his hand. Thanks to NJ Spotlight for reporting that:

“We are better off at looking at everything together,” said Ed Potosnak, executive director of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters. He opposes any move to separate the nuclear and green initiatives.

“It’s the wrong way. They tried it back earlier this winter and it got held up,” Potosnak said. “With some time, I think folks can get it right.”

“Looking at everything together” provides cover for a billion dollar nuke bailout and also includes a poison pill that would kill renewable energy.

Also keep in mind that Gov. Murphy’s DEP Deputy Commissioner Debbie Mans was or maybe still is on the NJ LCV Board. (We assume she has since resigned that NJ LCV post and filed an ethics review recusal request to DEP’s Ethics Officer under basic ethics requirements). Not only did NJ LCV endorse Murphy and spent over $335,000 to get him elected, but it is possible that Mans lobbied Potosnak to support the bill – or that Potosnak is just blindly supporting the Murphy administration.

Potosnak is so bad, even the “2% Man” Tom Gilbert opposed the bill:

We need the right policies in place to move New Jersey toward an affordable, efficient clean-energy future, and this legislation fails to do that,” said Tom Gilbert, campaign director for ReThink Energy NJ.

Potosnak: What an incompetent, dangerous, and dishonest asshole.  ~~~ end update]

[Update #2 – a well informed reader sent me a note to suggest additional corruption that I left out regarding NJ LCV conflicts of interest. It seems that several members of the Board of NJ LCV have financial and/or program ties to PSEG. We will elaborate as soon as supporting links are available. Debbie Mans is still listed on the website as Chair of the Board, so either she hasn’t resigned or NJ LCV is so obliviously arrogant that they feel no need to revise the webpage. ~~~ end update]

Senate President Sweeney has posted the multi-billion dollar nuclear bailout bill for full Senate vote – and likely approval – today, (see: S877 SCS – with an Orwellian title on the Senate Board list: “Energy efficiency prog.-estab.”) 

In addition to a huge and unnecessary nuclear bailout, passage of the bill would severely limit the ability of renewable energy to expand, and thereby undermine Gov. Murphy’s stated goal of 100% renewables (by the year 2050? or 2030?).

Just do the math: if 40% of NJ’s electric power if generated by nuclear, how can we ever reach 100% renewable power?

In addition to basic math, the economic and ratepayer costs of the nuke bailout would indirectly kill renewable energy, economically and politically.

A billion dollar nuke bailout would divert capital investment away from renewables in order to maintain PSEG’s aging nuclear fleet.

A billion dollar nuke bailout would deplete the finite political ability to force ratepayers to shoulder the full cost of electric power. Ratepayers will be unable to afford and balk at paying for BOTH billion dollar programs. BPU would never approve ratepayer increases to pay for both.

But those two renewable energy killers are indirect and apparently not sufficient for the greedy PSEG nuclear maniacs and Senator Sweeney and Gov. Murphy.

The current version of the bill contains a cap that would kill the necessary expansion of renewable energy, Section 6.d.(2) provides::

Notwithstanding the requirements of this paragraph, the board shall ensure that the cost to ratepayers of the Class I renewable energy requirement imposed pursuant to this subsection, shall be capped so that the cost to customers of satisfying the requirement shall not exceed seven percent of the Statewide average residential customer bill for energy year 2019, energy year 2020, and energy year 2021, respectively, and shall not exceed five percent of the Statewide average residential customer bill in any year thereafter.  The board shall take any steps necessary to meet the cap on the cost to customers including, but not limited to, adjusting the Class I renewable portfolio standard requirement pursuant to this subsection.

Those caps – 7 and 5% – are nuclear blackmail. (and they would function very much like the “cost test” in the Offshore Wind Act, which was to provide a basis and political cover for BPU to block wind. That cost test was a scheme of Sweeney and former Gov. Christie.)

They would be the death knell for renewable energy in NJ and make it impossible to meet the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals of the Global Warming Response Act, which will require major investment and larger ratepayer increases to pay for them.

The cap is obviously a ploy to negotiate and a bargaining chip. It amounts to a gun to the head of legislators by PSEG: approve our nuke bailout or we will kill renewables.

So who drafted these cap amendments and had them inserted into the bill? Who signed off on them?

No one is taking credit for them.

A reliable Trenton source told me that the amendments to create a cap were reviewed and approved by Gov. Murphy’s Office and certain members of the “environmental community”, including NRDC, EDF, NJ LCV and Rethink Energy NJ.

Senator Sweeney has suggested that they were part of negotiations with Gov. Murphy’s office.

The authors of the cap need to be held accountable for them.

Media must force Senate President Sweeney, Gov. Murphy and the environmental groups to take a public position of the amendments that would create the cap.

The nuke bailout bill must be stopped, at all costs.

Taking out the cap does not make the bill acceptable. We don’t negotiate with terrorists.