We don’t discuss what’s happening at the Louisiana Public Service Commission all that often. That’s probably going to need to change this year, because the PSC is starting to look like a problem which could hamper the state’s economic competitiveness.

For a long time Louisiana’s electric rates were some of the best in America. It was a shame that we couldn’t take as much advantage of them as we should have because our tax structure is no good, but low electric rates did contribute to the large industrial construction boom the state was able to pull together during the Jindal administration.

Then came Hurricane Ida in 2021, which knocked out a decent-sized chunk of the state’s electric utility infrastructure. You’ll remember there were significant parts of southeastern Louisiana where the power was out for two to three weeks; that can happen when 150-mph winds batter transmission towers and throw trees into transmission lines all over the state.

It cost a great deal of money to repair that infrastructure. The state’s utility companies spent it, rebuilt the power grid quickly, and then began recouping the cost of those repairs through electric rate increases.

That’s how it works.

Of course, one of the PSC’s members, Lambert Boissiere, was taken out in the 2022 election cycle by the crypto-gay, pro-Hamas Green New Deal communist Davante Lewis, a Democratic Socialists of America devotee who rode some $2 million in out-of-state Hard Left campaign money to victory. Lewis ran not on an accurate portrayal of who he was but rather on lowering electric rates.

The rates are lowering on their own. According to ElectricRate.com, Louisiana’s average electric utility rate stood at 9.37 cents per kilowatt hour in December, which was a more than eight per cent drop from December 2022. Lewis would like to claim that’s courtesy of his doing, but the fact of the matter is most of the repair cost to the state’s power grid has been paid off and that’s why the rates are dropping.

The problem with falling electric rates is that politicians think that means it’s time to come up with things that will make them go up again.

So now, Lewis and his new buddy Craig Greene, who is supposed to be a Republican, are cooking up a plan to force Louisiana’s utilities to practice “resilience.” Tomorrow at the PSC meeting this plan goes up for a vote.

What is Greene pushing? From an email circulating around this week…

• Immediate and ongoing investment in grid resilience. Please note that this becomes infrastructure in which utilities recover as part of the rate that you pay
  • Florida invested over $22 billion. Louisiana would have to invest nearly $10 billion. Florida has 22 million citizens. Louisiana has 4 million. Recovery becomes massive through collection through the bills.

• Recovery of costs will come from customers, either in storm restoration costs
• Florida utilities were able to recover costs associated with resilience plans from customers.
• Regular upkeep and maintenance to the latest standards, prevent the need for massive action as such

It might make some sense to look at mirroring Florida’s grid resilience plan; after all, Florida’s hurricane risk is probably the most similar to Louisiana’s of all the states.

On the other hand, a $10 billion investment is an off-the-charts figure. And yes, it would absolutely result in jacking those electric rates back up in order to pay for “grid resilience.”

Naturally, Lewis is demanding set-asides for minority contractors out of that $10 billion. Because of course he is.

The thing to understand is that the big dog on the Florida utility porch is a company called Next Era. They’ve begun making inroads into the Louisiana market, and they’re fairly well connected with Greene. There are even people who say Greene is a puppet of Next Era. As T-Emile Zola noted in a piece here at The Hayride last week…

Greene’s former executive assistant Bo Staples was hired by NextEra as senior Director of regulatory and political affairs in Louisiana. NextEra is contracted with the southern strategy group in Baton Rouge through their partner, Brad Mittendorf. Mittendorf is evidently never far from Greene and the reputed Svengali of Greene and the setup. Greene’s most recent executive assistant, David Zito, who departed the commission in November 2023, has been hired by a company called Gabel Associates as a “Senior Associate” and reputed to be working on utility issues of NextEra co-op customers in Louisiana. And a former employee of the southern strategy group, Grayson Walls, is now the executive assistant for Craig Greene. Brad Mittendorf’s son has been hired by NextEra.

And there was a good bit of pushback in Florida to that massive amount of “resilience” spending. It’s nice to have things like underground power lines, but that’s expensive as all get-out, and all of these goodies come on the backs of ratepayers.

The point of the PSC is, at the end of the day, to keep the electric rates low. We’ve got the best electric rates in America, right now, less than two and a half years after getting crushed by a hurricane, and that’s before this new, additional “grid resilience” program that Lewis and Greene want to push on the state.

So you don’t need billions of dollars to upgrade the power grid. All this does is increase utility expenses, which get passed on to consumers. And there’s something a little more pernicious going on, which is that the big utility companies have lots of ready cash to lay out on these kinds of mandatory “resiliency” upgrades, while the little ones don’t. They’ll have to take on debt to pay for this stuff.

And debt is highly expensive nowadays.

What happens when you burden cash-poor companies with mandatory new costs? In the case of utilities you generally don’t drive them out of business but what you might well do is put them in play for a merger with a larger company.

Like, for example, a Next Era.

And we have some cash-poor smaller utilities here.

This bears watching. It would be nice if the PSC would vote down this “grid resiliency” boondoggle that Greene and Lewis are pushing, but either way, we would be better served not having PSC members who are openly doing the bidding of out-of-state lefty nonprofits and rapacious utilities.