Political Quotes

“As you know, the Nickles amendment, which is the pending business, would reduce the amount of penalty in effect that a public utility would bear if it did not produce the required amount of electricity for retail sales with so-called renewable energy resources. This has to do, again, with the portfolio that we call the renewable resources that would be required to account for 10 percent of the retail sales of all the investor-owned utilities in the country. Bear in mind that the publicly owned utilities are exempted only because a point of order would have been effective against the inclusion of the public utilities in the amendment due to the unfunded mandate nature of the underlying provision. Ultimately, this probably will apply both to investor-owned and public utilities, but for the moment it applies only to the investor-owned utilities. When I talk about a penalty on the utilities, of course, I am really talking about a penalty on the utility customers because utilities are not in the business of losing money--at least not very long. As a result, their expenses are charged back to their customers. What we are really talking about in the underlying bill is a requirement that these utilities produce 10 percent of their retail power from so-called renewable resources, such as wind, solar, or biomass energy.”