Gov. Walz’s 100 percent carbon-free electricity mandate would increase your family’s electric bill by $137 per month

In Part 3, we discussed how the Walz Proposal would necessitate billions of dollars in new spending on wind turbines, solar panels, and battery storage facilities. In Part 4, we explain that this extra spending would increase your family’s electric bill by an average of $137 per month, every month, through 2050.

Click here to view other installments in the series.

It ain’t easy being green

Some people believe that replacing coal and natural gas-fired power plants with wind turbines, solar panels, and battery storage technologies will be easy to accomplish and reduce electricity prices, but soaring electricity prices and blackouts in California show that this belief is wishful thinking and not objective reality.

The fact of the matter is that reducing carbon dioxide emissions, regardless of the method, is an expensive endeavor.

Both the Walz Proposal and a Lower Cost Decarbonization (LCD) Scenario, which focuses on building new nuclear power plants, battery storage facilities, and retrofitting existing coal plants with equipment to remove carbon dioxide from their emissions, will increase the cost of electricity for Minnesota families.

However, the Walz Proposal will cost much more for Minnesota families than the LCD Scenario.

Increasing electric bills for Minnesota families

The graph below shows the annual cost of the Walz Proposal from 2022 through 2050 and compares it to the cost of the LCD Scenario. The dotted orange line shows the average annual cost of the Walz Proposal, and the solid orange line shows the actual cost per year.

On average, the Walz Proposal would cost Minnesota residential customers an additional $1,642 per year in electricity expenses.

The solid orange line shows the annual cost of the program. By 2025, the average Minnesota family would be paying an additional $500 in electricity expenses. Families would pay an additional $1,500 per year by 2034, and in 2040, Minnesota households would pay an additional $2,934 in electricity expenses, an extra $245 per month.

Residential customers would not be the only ones affected by the high cost of the Walz Proposal. Electricity costs would also rise for commercial customers, many of whom are small businesses, and industrial customers, like Minnesota’s manufacturers and miners. We’ll discuss the impact on commercial customers in Part 5.