I told you so...

I hate to say it, but "I told you so." For the past year I've been warning about the high costs and even impossibilities associated with the government mandates trying to fight the fictional man-made global warming. Well now both FERC and S&P have come out and independently verified what I've been saying all along. I have pasted excerts from those two articles below:

Flawed Climate Change Policy Could Lead to “Very Expensive and Unreliable Power,” Warns FERC Chairman

Speaking to reporters following a meeting of the United States Energy Association (USEA), Joseph Kelliher, chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, warned against climate change legislation that might be good environmental policy but bad energy policy.

“I believe FERC as a rates agency has a duty to help policymakers find the right balance between environmental policy and energy policy,” Kelliher said.

Earlier this year, Kelliher abandoned his stance that environmental policy and energy policy exist in “two separate universes,” asserting that “we desperately need” to balance those policies in developing solutions.

“The fiction that they are separate universes and reserved for separate policymakers and separate discussions really has to end,” he asserted during the February 20 keynote session of the National Electricity Delivery Forum. “It is a tenable fiction in most areas, but it utterly fails, it utterly collapses when you look at climate change.”

Kelliher warned that “while the US can take a sound and acceptable path to environmental and energy policy, there is also the possibility that it will take an approach that has recklessly flawed energy policy.”

“If we were to address climate change in a way that is fundamentally unsound energy policy, we will end up with very expensive and unreliable energy supplies...”

S&P Raises Doubts on Renewable Standards

Rapid growth of renewable portfolio standards poses sobering challenges, including cost and feasibility issues that present obstacles to green advocates’ goals, according to a ratings firm’s report.

The standards on the books in 29 states and the District of Columbia direct load-serving entities to acquire a certain percentage of their power from renewable resources. This forces utilities to shift from least-cost sources toward above-market renewables in unprecedented quantities, Standard and Poor’s said in “The Race for the Green: How Renewable Portfolio Standards Could Affect U.S. Utility Credit Quality.”

In many states, the portfolio targets are significant, with more than half calling for renewables to account for 15 percent or more of a utility’s total energy supply at some future date. While some of these dates are a decade or more away, most states also have interim targets.

RPS is often discussed in “unimpeachable terms” that suggest a sizeable shift toward renewable generation can occur quickly, with little rate impact and minimal disruption to the utility sector, S&P noted.

But “while it is possible that RPS will prove to be feasible, economic and successful in every state, there is no compelling evidence that suggests this will be the case,” it said.

Utilities unable to achieve RPS requirements on the mandated schedule could be saddled with penalties. Looking at current renewables levels underscores the challenges that RPS poses for utilities, S&P pointed out. According to the Energy Information Administration, renewables accounted for about 9 percent of U.S. generation in 2006. But this figure includes conventional hydropower, which not all states consider to be “green.” If it is excluded, only about 2.4 percent of U.S. generation came from renewables.

According to S&P, to meet 2015 RPS targets, 6,000 megawatts of new renewables would have to come on-line each year. “We question whether this is attainable,” it said.

“We suspect the green marathon will be a difficult race for utilities to run,” the firm concluded.