Why would Corp Com want to give $9 billion to APS, etc?

Laurie Roberts

opinion columnist

Well, that didn't take long.

The Arizona Corporation Commission, a soon-to-be wholly owned subsidiary of Arizona Public Service, has proposed eliminating a requirement that utilities provide energy-efficiency programs that reduce your electric bill.

Put another way, the commission is pondering a move that would take close to $9 billion out of our pockets over the next few years and hand it over to APS and Arizona's other electric utilities.

"It's a truly awful proposal that will hurt the people of Arizona," said Kris Mayes, who chaired the commission when the requirement was adopted in 2010. "It just is really hard to understand where this is coming from."

Actually, it seems A Pretty Simple thing to figure out.

If you wondered why APS would secretly fund campaigns to get certain candidates onto the Corporation Commission – or to (try to) get Commissioner Gary Pierce's son Justin into the secretary of state's office – wonder no more.

Payback, it seems, may be coming and it's a $9 billion b@#ch .

In 2010, the then-bipartisan Corporation Commission voted 5-0 to require electric utilities to reduce the amount of power they sell by 22 percent by 2020. This, by helping homeowners and businesses conserve energy.

Since then, the utilities have spent millions subsidizing the cost of home-energy checkups and low-power light bulbs, buying old power-guzzling refrigerators and offering rebates to customers who install more efficient pool pumps and seal those leaky air ducts and such.

The program is paid for with a $2 to $4 tariff tacked onto your electric bill. In 2013 alone, APS and Tucson Electric Power customers knocked $77 million off their utility bills as a result.

Or put another way, that is $77 million that APS and TEP did not collect.

Earlier this year Commissioner Pierce, who voted for the program in 2010, held a meeting to determine if anybody had a problem with the conservation standard. Nobody spoke up.

So naturally, Pierce is now pushing to dump it, questioning whether the program is cost effective.

"We want to be as energy efficient of a state as possible but not overpay for this energy efficiency," he told The Republic's Ryan Randazzo on Wednesday.

Curiously, Pierce couldn't supply Randazzo with a single example of an efficiency measure that is costing consumers more that it's saving them.

The program does, however, cost the utilities – the guys who are in this business to sell you MORE electricity, not less -- a tidy bundle. And that's not even factoring in the added profit they could make if they could get off this conservation jag and just build more power plants.

Count Jeff Schlegel, the Arizona representative for the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, among those scratching their heads at the commission's proposal, which was filed on Election Day.

"We're seeing a politically motivated attack to remove something that's actually doing great for customers," he told me. "I don't know who that would be from. The only organizations that would benefit from the elimination of the standard would be a utility that wanted to make more by selling electricity to customers."

Look for a vote early next year, when Tom Forese and Doug Little join the all-Republican commission. That is, Forese and Little, who were elected with a little help from a $3 million dark money campaign that is widely believed to have been funded at least in part by APS.

They'll join three other commissioners, who were also supported by APS in 2012. (APS officials say they didn't know APS's contribution to the Arizona Chamber's independent expenditure group would be used to help the three commissioners. That, however, doesn't change the fact that it did.)

APS spokesman Jim McDonald said APS is ahead of where it needs to be to meet the 22 percent standard in 2020 and has been repeatedly honored by the EPA for its energy-efficiency program. He declined to comment on the commission's proposal, saying the utility will file its position later this month.

"When we make this kind of filing to the commission, it is our practice not to discuss what that filing will be in advance of making it," he said. "But I think you'll be very interested in reading it."

I'm guessing APS will publicly support the program. After all, it isn't what the folks who run APS do in public that's in question. It's what they do in private.

This is the outfit that last year said they weren't funding a secret ad campaign aimed at raising the utility bills of rooftop solar customers, until they eventually admitted that they were.

This is the outfit that refuses to address the widely held belief that it secretly funded this year's campaign to get Forese and Little elected.

The problem with secrecy is that it breeds suspicion.

The commission's energy-efficiency standard is good if you like to see that drop in your electric bill. It's good if you like clean air and available water.

So who isn't it good for?

I, for one, am Absolutely Positively Stumped.