By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
It’s beginning to feel like the holidays outside across the Garden State. The Farmers’ Almanac predicted a “bitterly cold winter” for the Northeast this year, Save Jerseyans, including a storm in time for the New Jersey super bowl.
We can deal with it. Paying for it, however, might be a different matter altogether.
New Jersey energy consumers need to brace for significantly higher energy expenses for winter 2013.
The likely catalysts are twofold and all of the culprits are familiar…
First and foremost, our gerrymandered legislature is expected to adopt the “Bio-based Heating Oil Act” (A3161/S2268) which would impose a new mandate on oil heat retailers, requiring them to add a specific amount of biodiesel to each and every fuel mix.
The end result, called “bioheat” within the industry, costs as much as $26 per gallon, or several times more expensive than ordinary heating oil mix. The U.S. Air Force is spending $59 per gallon! The mathematics is staggering.
“Biodiesel lobbyists may love this mandate but consumers will hate it,” opined AFP-NJ spokesman Mike Proto whose organization is attempt to raise awareness (and opposition) to the legislation. “The fact is bioheat is more costly than standard home heating oil in New Jersey. Depending on where you live it could be 20, 30, or 50 cents more per gallon. Consumers should not have to bear the brunt of even higher utility prices because lawmakers in Trenton think they know better than the rest of us.”
Sequestration or not, a senior citizen couple or middle class family of five can’t borrow to pay for skyrocketing energy costs like the federal government-financed American military.
To make matters worse, New Jersey state utilities are appealing to the BPU to raise rates in a purported attempt to spend $5 billion more on Sandy-recovery and power grid-upgrade projects. Oy.
But what about the natural gas boom? We produce more than Russia now! Why isn’t that helping? In addition to infrastructure-related transportation issues, folks, the Obama Administration’s war on coal is artificially driving up natural gas prices. Sandy damage to natural gas lines and lingering Trenton hostility to fracking expansion doesn’t help.
Incompetence, greed, ideology and natural disaster may prove too much for anyone to weather over the next few months, Save Jerseyans. It might be time to pull a peanut farmer and stock up on sweaters.
In other words, it's winter.