Power companies are preparing to spend the most money in decades to shift to renewable energy and replace aging infrastructure.
Pay more now, or pay a lot more later.......
Excerpt from this story from the Wall Street Journal:
American utilities are planning their biggest spending increases in decades to upgrade aging grids, prepare for electric vehicles and make the transition to renewable energy—moves poised to further boost power costs as consumers face historic inflation.
The plans propose tens of billions of dollars in spending in the coming years to reduce carbon emissions, partly in response to state and federal mandates, and to replace aging infrastructure that has become more prone to failure. Edison Electric Institute, an industry trade group, expects that utilities will invest roughly $140 billion each year in 2022 and 2023, substantially more than any year since 2000, when the group began tracking spending.
Executives said the investments are critical to meeting renewable-energy targets and bolstering the reliability of the grid as outages become longer and more frequent. Climate change, they said, has heightened the need to simultaneously hasten the shift to carbon-free electricity sources and upgrade the grid to withstand severe weather patterns scientists link to rising temperatures.
Utilities are also preparing for higher electricity demand as customers increasingly adopt electric vehicles and become more dependent on the grid to charge them, in addition to replacing traditional furnaces and gas appliances with electric alternatives. The movement toward electrification is in part driven by consumers, as well as efforts by cities and towns to phase out natural gas for cooking and heating in the midst of concern regarding climate change.
The increased spending is expected to result in higher electricity bills, as utilities are typically allowed to recoup the cost of capital investments, as well as a rate of return, from customers after receiving regulatory approval.