The DFL's affordability BS

The DFL is pretending to care about families' budgets. That's a heaping pile of BS. In 2009-10, DFL senators and congressmen voted for higher health insurance premiums by voting for the ACA. Since then, they've voted in lockstep for subsidies for health insurance companies. In March of 2021, when the economy grew at a rate of 6.5% rate, Democrats voted in lockstep for the American Rescue Plan. That gave the U.S. a 9.1% inflation rate in July, 2022. That was the highest inflation rate in 41 years.

According to Rep. Tom Murphy's op-ed, "When they passed Minnesota’s 100% carbon-free electricity mandate in 2023, the New DFL promised our state cheaper power. Xcel Energy’s ratepayers are now finding out otherwise. Xcel, the state’s largest utility, has asked regulators for $490.7 million in rate increases over 2025 and 2026, a 13.2 percent jump, and named investments in cleaner electricity generation as a driver. Regulators trimmed the interim increase to 5.2 percent, but the direction is set. Minnesota families will now pay more for electricity, and we were lied to about the true cost."

This is disgusting:

A wind turbine selling electricity at $30 per megawatt-hour is worthless to a family freezing through a windless January night.

That is the gap Minnesota energy analysts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling set out to close. Their “Always On Levelized Cost of Energy” model assigns wind and solar the full costs of backup generation, transmission, overbuilding, and curtailment required to keep them reliable.

Applied to Minnesota, that model put the all-in cost at roughly $272 per megawatt-hour for wind and $472 for solar. Those are modeled figures built on a specific set of assumptions, not observed market prices, but they answer a question the state government conveniently failed to ask: what does intermittent electricity actually cost once you stop hiding the energy backup bill somewhere else on the ledger?

In other words, the DFL didn't hesitate in lying to Minnesotans. Lying is to the DFL what breathing is to people. It's what comes naturally to DFL politicians. It's that simple. Isaac Orr's testimony was ignored by the DFL:

The DFL is as worried about affordability as arsonists are worried about preventing arson. Simply put, the DFL doesn't care about affordability. This verifies that:

The contrast between wind and solar versus traditional energy sources is stark. The Energy Information Administration puts the cost of a new natural gas combined-cycle plant, a resource that needs no separate backup fleet to come online when called upon, at $46 to $49 per megawatt-hour for units entering service in 2030. These plants also tend to have lower transmission costs because they can be built near demand. Existing coal plants, already paid off, run cheaper still. Counted honestly, wind’s all-in costs run five to six times that gas benchmark, and solar’s run nine to ten.

Repeal the blackout bill. It isn't worth the price hike.