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Home – Energy & Climate Change Policy News – High Electric Bills Are a Choice—and Pennsylvania Must Choose Wisely 

High Electric Bills Are a Choice—and Pennsylvania Must Choose Wisely 

Joshua Schubert | Sarah Montalbano

Pennsylvania legislators have prioritized electricity affordability this year. First, they exited the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the multistate carbon-tax compact. Then, with the newly passed state budget, they defeated Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Lightning Plan, which would have layered an additional in-state carbon tax and expanded Pennsylvania’s clean-energy mandate. 

But Pennsylvania’s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard (AEPS) remains on the books, unexamined for 20 years. AEPS requirements are modest compared to other states, which makes repealing them the real test of whether Harrisburg believes in affordability, or just got lucky twice. States, especially the blue ones, endure expensive electricity through policy choices, not geography—and Pennsylvania teeters on the verge of making the wrong choice. 

AEPS requires that 18.29% of electricity sold by Pennsylvania utilities come from a list of “alternative” sources: a Tier I of solar, wind, biomass, and, increasingly, coal-mine methane, as well as a Tier II built around waste-coal remediation. In 2025, AEPS cost Pennsylvania $5.14 per megawatt-hour of the electricity it covers. 

Fully phased in by 2021, its target hasn’t been revisited since it was written in 2004; lawmakers have touched the law only twice, in 2017 and 2020, both times narrowing eligible sources but never questioning whether Pennsylvania’s consumers should be forced to pay for expensive, unreliable generation in the........

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