The cost of government regulations raises the cost of electricity
Your local electric cooperative works hard to keep costs low. We’re always looking for ways to work smarter and cut costs, while maintaining the always-available reliability our members expect.
Most of your monthly power bill—3/4 of it—goes to pay the cost of generating electricity and delivering it to the local cooperative. That’s the cost of building, maintaining and operating power plants and transmission infrastructure.
The cost of government regulations on power plants is a big part of the cost of power supply. Over the past two decades, our power provider, East Kentucky Power Cooperative (EKPC), has spent well over $1 billion adding equipment to its power plants to reduce emissions.
U.S. federal government regulators thinik it is reasonable for EKPC to spend $10.7 billion—doubling rates for cooperative members—to capture and store carbon dioxide (CO2) on just one power plant. EKPC won’t do that, of course. Instead, EKPC is working to find affordable ways to reduce CO2 emissions and also maintain reliable energy for Kentucky.
What government regulators really want is for traditional power plants to close and be replaced by renewables like solar and wind. But the fact is, even if we rely heavily on renewables, we will still need to maintain traditional power plants for times when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. Otherwise, the lights will go out when we need them the most.
So, government regulators want Americans to pay billions for new renewables, while continuing to pay for reliable plants that only operate a fraction of the time. EKPC is going to court to fight those regulations.
We are committed to providing reliable electricity that is increasingly sustainable, and doing so at a reasonable cost for our members.