No, it's not the "lobbying, campaign money, and bribes" purported to be in your electric bill in this stunningly incorrect article, it's the supposed "advocates" (as the article calls them) who are meddling in your electric rates for political reasons.  This whole article is a political stunt targeting fossil fuels and the electric industry after those same "advocates" didn't get their way trying to change FERC's accounting rules three years ago.  These crafty shysters are just using you as a battering ram to try to get their way through new overly prescriptive laws written by people who don't understand utility accounting in the least.  And it pisses me off.

First, let's take a look at those self-proclaimed "advocates" who shopped this article to the USA Today reporter.  The "advocates" do not have a mission or responsibility to advocate for electric consumers.  Their mission is simple.  

It's all about climate change and employing sensationalism and made up bullshit to make people angry at certain targeted corporations.  It's not about saving you money on your electric bill, or stopping corruption.  These advocates don't actually DO anything to help ratepayers, except spew ignorance.  They have very little knowledge of electric rates and have never ever brought or prosecuted an electric rate case.   They are not consumer advocates, or even watchdogs.  They don't "watch" anything on behalf of consumers, they exploit tidbits they dig up by turning them into something they are not.

The charges in the electric bill you pay are determined by two different places:  your state utility board and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.  Your state determines the rate you pay for generation and distribution, and FERC determines how much you pay for transmission.  Both systems already prohibit the recovery of money paid for lobbying, campaign money, and bribes.  What these climate change fanatics are doing is exploiting certain utility accounting failures to pretend they happen routinely.  No, they do not.  All the examples are one off instances of regulatory failure that were not uncovered by these self-proclaimed "advocates," but by REAL consumer advocates and even by actual consumers themselves.

Utility accounting is complicated, but I managed to master it over a number of years when I actively investigated a utility's recovery of advocacy and advertising costs to influence public officials to approve a transmission project.  I investigated, I challenged, I went through hearings, and I ended up before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.  Over that time period, I learned all there is to know about FERC's ratemaking process. 

Utilities record their expenses according to a chart of accounts.  A chart of accounts separates and organizes a utility's expenditures by type or purpose.  Each category of cost is defined in the chart of accounts.  A chart of accounts describes the different categories of expenses.  Here's FERC's Chart of Accounts.  States use a very similar system based on FERC's chart for consistency.  Rates are set based on these cost categories from the Chart of Accounts.

At the state level, distribution utilities (the ones who send you your monthly bill) use what are known as stated rates.  A stated rate is a dollar figure set by the state commission after examining a utility's typical expenses for a test year.  Once the rate is set, the dollar figure doesn't change until a new rate case is filed many years down the road.  The utility gets the same set amount of money every year and how it spends it is the utility's business.  Certain categories of costs such as lobbying, campaign contributions, and bribes are excluded from the rate.  The Chart of Accounts instructs that these expenses be placed into accounts that are not recoverable in rates.  However nobody is checking because it's a moot point... the amount collected cannot change.

Transmission rates that are set at FERC end up billed to your distribution utilities to be passed on to you in your bill.  The distribution utility and the state commission cannot change these rates but must pass them through to your bill without adjustment.  

At FERC, transmission utilities use what are known as Formula Rates.  A formula rate is a set of tables  that the utility fills out each year with account totals according to its Chart of Accounts.  The formula is the rate, not a set dollar amount.  All accounts, such as the one for lobbying and political contributions (bribes aren't legal and don't have an account), is either included or excluded from the formula rate.  The formula rate excludes these types of accounts from recovery.  Once FERC sets a formula rate, the utility is responsible for filling out the formula every year and calculating a monetary amount that it can recover as a rate.  The utility must do this in accordance with the Chart of Accounts and the formula.  The utility can then recover that amount without further supervision because the formula and Chart of Accounts limits recovery.  FERC does not review or approve the yearly filings.  They go into affect automatically. 

However, there is transparency where anyone who pays these rates (and their legal advocates from the various states) can examine the charges that flow through the formula into rates.  If an error is detected, the ratepayer can challenge the rate and FERC may order corrections.

The real problem here (and in any rate process) is the process of assigning account numbers to expenses.  Since some accounts are recoverable and some are not, assigning an expense to an incorrect account can make it recoverable in error.  Utilities have A LOT of these errors.
The way to keep these inappropriate expenses out of consumer electric bills is to actually examine and challenge rates, however the "advocates" can't be bothered to do that.  It's a lot of work.

Back in 2021, these "advocates" and some other clean energy and progressive political groups asked FERC to change the way its formula rates handle industry trade association dues.  They claimed FERC should make these unrecoverable and require the utility to get special permission to recover them during an approval process that doesn't exist for formula rates.  FERC opened a rulemaking proceeding (Docket No. RM22-5) to consider making changes.  These "advocates" and friends wanted FERC to require disclosure of all trade group expenditures and other political contributions so that it could easily use this information in anti-utility public relations campaigns.  They didn't want to have to waste time using the investigative process to find out information they could use against utilities, they wanted it handed to them on a silver platter.  They filed all sorts of cute suggestions that demonstrated their complete ignorance of FERC's ratemaking process.  FERC is supposed to destroy a system that works in order to play politics with special interest groups?  I filed initial and reply comments with a couple of other ratepayers who had successfully challenged transmission rates.  You​ can read them here

and here

Our comments schooled these political dummies and advocated for minimal process changes and more training for utility accountants.  And then FERC just abandoned the whole thing without taking any action.  What started as political meddling in order to scrape up information that could be used to attack utilities in advertising and social media campaigns was foiled by people who had actually successfully used FERC's process to challenge rates and score refunds for consumers.  Honestly, if we can figure it out and use it, then any "advocate" could do the same.  It doesn't need to be further dumbed down for you.

But the political schemers weren't done yet.  They took their manufactured complaints to state legislatures and told elected officials that they needed to change the ratemaking process to prevent the inclusion of lobbying, bribes, and campaign contributions in rates.  Because legislators know even less about utility ratemaking than the advocates, they were easily led by the nose.  You'd think the legislators would ask the state utility commissions and real ratepayer advocates if these changes were a good idea, but apparently not in at least three states where political special interests rule the legislature.

And they even got one Congress critter to file their legislation on the federal level.  It's an eye-watering display of micro-management of utility ratemaking that really doesn't change anything because none of it is workable.  The legislation attempts to change FERC's Chart of Accounts, which is a regulation written and approved by the Commission.  Legislators pass laws that do something or other... and regulators write regulations that define the process by which the agency will carry out the law passed by Congress.  Congress rarely gets into the weeds with this kind of detail because it is not an expert on ratemaking.  It wisely leaves the details to the experts.  However, that's not what happened here.  The "advocates" and their liberal political friends wrote the regulations they way they wanted them to be (usurping FERC's authority to write its own regulations) and then sent them to their Congressional pet for passage.  This is a stunningly bad idea.  Fortunately, it appears that the federal legislation has been DOA for more than a year.

Wake up, folks!  These political schemers have no business destroying the system that sets the electric rates you pay.  They don't know how the system works!
Don't believe everything you read in the main stream media these days.  It is often the brain farts of idiots.

Student reporter Mary McCue Bell is studying Investigative Journalism.  Stay in school, girl, you've got a lot more to learn!  Now I'm not sure what they're teaching in school these days, but a real investigative reporter doesn't approach a story with a preconceived agenda.  Bless her heart, she actually interviewed someone with a different point of view, but then curated the actual information she received to fit with her own opinion.  That's not investigative journalism, that's propaganda.

A fight across Missouri over transmission towers for reliable energy, her headline blared.

Reliable energy?  She forgot to "investigate" that word.  Reliability is a function of regional grid planners.  In Missouri, that's managed by MidContinent Independent System Operator, or MISO.  If a transmission line is needed to provide reliable energy in Missouri, it is planned and ordered by MISO.  Grain Belt Express is NOT a MISO project.  Instead, it is a speculative investment venture, an unneeded addition to MISO's grid.  GBE's owners are speculating that if they can build the project that voluntary customers will pay separate fees to use it to transmit energy across the state.  However, GBE only has one customer in Missouri for less than 5% of its available capacity.  GBE is not for "reliable energy."

Miss Mary was also completely bamboozled by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor (NIETC) designation process, which claims to be creating corridors for the transmission of reliable energy.  However, DOE also has no authority to plan the transmission system, or order transmission projects.  Its role is advisory only.  It can produce mind numbing reports, and designate corridors for private transmission developers like Invenergy, but it has no authority or jurisdiction to plan or approve the transmission system.  Only the regional grid operators like MISO can determine that a line is needed for reliability, and MISO relies on its own deep knowledge of the system to make plans.  It doesn't take orders from a silly, political agency like DOE.  The only thing reliable about GBE is the propaganda it produces.

Perhaps Mary should have pondered the significance of the passage of time before declaring that "a nationwide plan to increase the reliability of electricity and reduce consumer costs" is playing out in Missouri.  The idea for Grain Belt Express was hatched more than a dozen years ago, long before the government's recent "plan" that started with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021.  This battle started long before Mary recently discovered it.

Missouri citizens elected Senator Josh Hawley as their representative, no matter how disappointing that may be to Miss Mary.  His job is to use his "bully pulpit" to protect their interests.  Is the "bully pulpit" phrase just a sullen swipe at him because he refused to be interviewed by a student journalist with an agenda?  She certainly loved the bully pulpits inhabited by clean energy pot stirrer James Owen and political gasbag Tyson Slocum.

James Owen is not insensitive to landowners?  Ha ha ha.  No landowner actually believes that.  I don't either.  I watched his arrogant dismissal of their concerns while testifying at the PSC.  Maybe you ought to check his previous statements and videos.

Despite what the DOE told Miss Mary, the fact is that Grain Belt Express requested the Midwest-Plains transmission corridor to benefit its bogged down project with the ability to appeal state permitting denials, like the one recently ordered by an appeals court in Illinois.  GBE also wants a corridor so it can score a federal taxpayer-backed loan guarantee to build its project that currently doesn't have enough customers to be economic.  The Kansas Corporation Commission testified before a legislative committee just last week that GBE told them they requested the 5-mile wide corridor from DOE.  Who's lying here?  The DOE, or GBE, or the KCC?  Why don't you investigate that?

And here's something else to investigate... transmission lines do not create electricity, so they alone cannot "keep up with the nation's increasing power demands."  What we need is new baseload generation that can be depended upon to generate when needed, and it needs to be located near the increasing power demands, not imported hundreds of miles on unnecessary transmission lines.

What does Otto Lynch from Pennsylvania know about farming in Missouri, with his contention that farmers can easily farm around towers?  Nothing at all!  His views about farming are of no consequence and add absolutely nothing to this story.

Ditto on political gasbag Tyson Slocum, farming grant money in Washington DC for his half-assed attacks on the energy industry.  His perception of the landowners within proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors comes from the smug satisfaction of someone who isn't impacted in the least.  The real jackbooted thugs pretend that "meaningful consultation" with landowners before carrying on to a pre-determined conclusion somehow makes the stealing of private property okay.  It doesn't.  Would it be okay if I allowed you to cry a little about losing your purse before I forcibly took it?

Slocum's comments demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge about NIETCs.  I honestly can't remember him ever once commenting or being involved in this process.  He is inconsequential and his comments add nothing to this story.  He's a non-entity who never misses a chance to display his ignorance to anyone who will listen.

Key word here -- "investigate."  I give this project an F.

The U.S. Department of Energy has made a grave execution error in its rollout of National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors.  The DOE *thought* it could keep the whole thing under the radar until its planned corridors were selected, only engaging in public notice and participation when it was too late for impacted communities to derail their plans.  That hasn't worked out so swell, and citizen to citizen notification has created a public relations nightmare of epic proportions.

Midwestern states are rightfully terrified at the thought of 5 to 18 mile wide scorched earth corridors being taken from private landowners using federal eminent domain.  And because there was absolutely no useful information provided by the DOE, rumor and speculation has created a firestorm of opposition.  Elected officials have stepped up to defend their constituents, with numerous local resolutions against NIETCs being passed, and state and federal legislation to thwart the program being introduced.  The die has been cast... the public has written its own NIETC narrative, and they HATE the idea of NIETCs.

One such state is Kansas, which recently called staff from the Kansas Corporation Commission before a legislative committee to provide answers.  Why is a state utility commission explaining the actions of the federal government?  I will say, though, that the KCC representatives generally provided accurate information and only tried to "sell" Grain Belt Express to the legislature, not the NIETCs.  You can watch the approximately hour-long presentation and Q&A with the legislators here.

Fast forward the video to hour 5:07:58 to get to the the beginning of the KCC presentation before the committee.

The KCC shares that the Midwest-Plains Corridor was originally requested from DOE by Grain Belt Express, but now GBE has asked the DOE to narrow the 5-mile wide corridor to "only" half a mile.  Even at half a mile wide, this corridor could still house another 12.2 transmission lines like GBE!  A half mile is 2640 feet.  Grain Belt Express, and other large AC transmission projects of 500 or 765 kV use a 200 ft. wide right of way.  2640 feet could house 13.2 transmission lines.  Were the legislators supposed to feel better about a possibility of "only" 13 new transmission lines across Kansas?

Here's another point to ponder... the KCC guys explained that GBE has a current application at the KCC for approval of the "collector lines" GBE wants to build to connect proposed wind and solar farms in southwest Kansas to the Grain Belt Express.  KCC expects to approve this application on September 30 (like the good little Polsky lap dogs that they are).  However, the collector lines are NOT within the proposed NIETC.

The collector lines are the red and blue lines.  Proposed NIETC corridors are the green and tan lines.  The collectors are not within the proposed corridor.  I guess GBE doesn't really "need" those after all?  And why should they when the light green NIETC brings power to GBE from Oklahoma?  Here's what that looks like.

The Midwest-Plains corridor connects to the Mountain-Plains-Southwest corridor, which covers a huge swath of land in the Oklahoma Panhandle, where Invenergy is building the country's largest wind farm.  If Kansas thinks that GBE is going to spur economic development of large wind farms in Kansas, perhaps it should take a deep breath and think again.

The KCC says that GBE has asked for the NIETC in order to help itself to certain government handouts, but it forgot to mention the federal loan guarantee that GBE has applied for.  That program guarantees that the U.S. taxpayers will cover the $7B cost of GBE if Invenergy defaults on its loan.  GBE has not yet shown that it has enough customers to pay for its transmission project, and without customers it would not have enough revenue to pay the loan back.  The KCC instead suggested that GBE could help itself to "capacity contracts" where the DOE buys service on the transmission line that it will never use.  Instead, the DOE would pay for the use of the line until it can manage to re-sell it to some other customer (that didn't want to buy it in the first place).  Unfortunately, the KCC doesn't seem to realize that there is a finite amount of money to be used for capacity contracts and that the money has already been awarded to other projects.  There isn't enough money left to sign capacity contracts with GBE.  What GBE wants is that federal loan guarantee.

One of the legislators questioned whether NIETCs are a violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reserves certain powers to the states.  He should also recognize that it's also a violation of the Fifth Amendment, because it takes private property and reserves it for future transmission lines without compensation to the landowner.

For some reason, these guys think that Invenergy is "better" than Clean Line Energy Partners.  It's not.  It's that Invenergy is using eminent domain and the threat thereof to secure easements.  Clean Line never used eminent domain, and Clean Line actually intended to export Kansas wind on its transmission line.

Eminent domain is still eminent domain, whether it is granted by the KCC or the federal government.  It was greed that made the KCC give GBE utility status back in 2011.  It's utility status that gives transmission companies the right of eminent domain under Kansas law.

The KCC's Justin Grady did a lovely little dance trying to sell the legislative committee on GBE's ability to reverse flow and provide power to Kansas during a grid emergency.  He obviously doesn't know that it's not quite that simple.  While GBE may have the physical ability to do that, it cannot do that without injection rights granted by the Southwest Power Pool (SPP).  SPP is the grid operator at GBE's western terminus, which is the only place GBE could connect to the Kansas grid.  SPP operates the power grid and it must approve any injections of power into its grid to ensure the injections don't cause issues that can crash the grid.  Injection rights require lengthy study and enormous fees paid to SPP in order to gain approval.  Grain Belt Express hasn't engaged in that expensive and time consuming process.  GBE and its KCC representative, Justin Grady, are selling the legislators a pig in a poke.

Aside from Justin's love of Grain Belt Express (yes, the landowners know how much you threw them under the bus time and time again, Justin) the information provided to the committee was educational and accurate.

​Maybe Kansas should rethink this whole thing?  It's not too late!

What's scarier to greedy corporate interests than a grassroots movement against their industry?  Your success!  Corporate interests, whether it's the electric transmission industry, housing, data centers, or any other invasive and destructive industry are terrified of being thwarted by grassroots movements in the communities where they want to make money.

Last week, a grassroots group opposed to a new transmission line through central Maryland took their fight to the industry at a conference celebrating the data center industry in Frederick, Maryland.  

Let's examine this article using one of my favorite tools -- the seven common propaganda devices.  This tool is one of the oldest in the propaganda handbook.

The device employed most frequently by the conference organizers was "Name Calling."  

First example -- in the quoted paragraph above the demonstration was referred to as "the ruckus."  Protestors were also referred to as "noisy", a "flashmob", and "outraged".  A noisy, outraged, flashmob ruckus, a description that is intended to turn the reader against the protestors.  It's an ad hominem argument... don't pay any attention to what those people are saying because they are members of an unacceptable group.

​Protestors were also called uneducated.

...another name calling technique to marginalize you and steal your power.  I'm going to guess that Rick Weldon knows a lot less about MPRP than any one of the protestors, but he uses his position to create a presumption of superior knowledge.  The "education deficit" model has been a long time favorite of transmission project proponents.  They like to think that opposition to transmission only happens because the community doesn't have enough information to make a sensible decision.  However the opposite is actually true, the more you know about a proposed transmission project, the worse it sounds.  No amount of information or "education" can change the mind of a landowner threatened by new transmission ripping through his largest investment.

Uneducated outrage is how opponents were framed in order to make conference attendees see them as an unacceptable group who should not be acknowledged.

Meanwhile, conference organizers employed "Glittering Generalities" to boost their own position.  Jobs, school funding, dramatic growth in local businesses, Maryland's economy, land conservation, hiking and biking trails, and the most vague of all... a bright future!

Conference organizers also tried to sever Maryland's data centers from the MPRP.  Either they are uneducated themselves, or they are spinning a carefully crafted alternate reality.  Although Quantum Loophole's power supply is being provided by upgrading a dedicated transmission line to the old Eastalco plant, that doesn't mean QL won't benefit from MPRP.  Quantum Loophole's dedicated transmission line feeds power from the Doubs substation to Quantum Loophole.  Doubs is also the endpoint for the MPRP.  All power flowing through MPRP is delivered to Doubs, where it is transferred to the numerous lines feeding out of Doubs, including the one to Quantum Loophole.  Power from MPRP will absolutely be used at Quantum Loophole.  Could Quantum Loophole get as much power as it needed if MPRP was cancelled?  PJM Interconnection planned MPRP as one of several new 500kV transmission lines to serve data center load in Virginia and Maryland.  And since Quantum Loophole seems to support MPRP, it stands to reason they think they will benefit from it.

The public relations war is heating up.  But what will they say when those same protestors put down their protest signs and go inside the PSC to defend their properties through the legal process?  Will Quantum Loophole step up to defend MPRP?  Or will it use proxies to do so, such as labor unions and local business groups?  A different kind of war will break out at the PSC once the application is filed, and that's where the ultimate decision will be made.