Sowers: Electric bills are going up a lot, anyway

David T. Stevenson’s Opinion in the Daily State News gave a small history of Delaware legislature bills and power grid billings, budgets and planning (“Offshore wind bill disastrous for ratepayers”). The part that might be useful is the tiny bit in the last one-third, dealing with getting more electricity with less emissions and with little or no increase in your electric bill.

He and a lot of other people are missing the significant point. Big cost increases in things other than electric bills are already in the crystal ball. This year and last year, climate change-induced record extreme weather has caused increased storm damage far beyond Stevenson’s couple-hundred-bucks higher power bills. In high-risk storm damage areas of the USA, property insurance rates have skyrocketed to extra thousands of dollars per year, and in some places, some insurance companies have withdrawn altogether from the market. You don’t have to believe me; just do an internet search yourself with the keywords, “climate change” and “storm damage” or “insurance costs.”

Climate change is going to get worse in future years, and my idea is you should have a hard look at the whole picture, not a little dinky part of it. You are going to see more serious crop damage, too, and that will consequently lead to cost increases at the grocery store. For a recent example, in Houston, Texas, residents got record storm damage (100-mph winds) that included — in published photos — a downed power grid transmission tower. That is not going to be fixed in two to three days. A lot of people down there will have dead refrigerators and no air conditioning for weeks, maybe more. What could be the dollar value of lost food and extra inconvenience from that? Between my refrigerator and freezer compartments, I have a couple hundred bucks’ worth of food to lose if power goes out for two to three days. How about restaurants, schools and other businesses in cases of extreme heat? What could be the dollar value of increased future insurance costs?

Not so much in Delaware in 2023, but in lots of other places in the USA and other places in the world, many temperatures hit record highs of 115-120 degrees for record-long periods. And, in some places, the power grid had outages because of high air-conditioning demand. Last year, Europe estimated 60,000 extra heat deaths from its extreme temperatures because many fewer people there, than here, had air-conditioned homes. You should be thinking more about backup power than your electric bill going up. Or at least small, battery-powered fans.

Arthur E. Sowers

Harbeson

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