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Energy future shouldn’t be held hostage to myths

In a December 6th commentary, Gordon Tomb, a senior fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation, argued Pennsylvania must weaken environmental and energy regulations to attract data centers. It’s a familiar but flawed premise: that regulation is inherently anti-growth and that renewable energy requirements undermine reliability and competitiveness. It misrepresents both the realities of modern data-center development, and the economic and energy challenges Pennsylvania actually faces. Tomb treats data centers as uniquely vulnerable to oversight, as if they will flee at the first sign of ...

Future of energy policy begins in Pennsylvania

As states grapple with rising electricity prices, lawmakers struggle to strike a balance between affordable energy and responsible environmental stewardship. Achieving both may seem impossible, but Pennsylvania proves otherwise. Over the last decade, the Keystone State has aptly demonstrated that states do not need to sacrifice energy development in favor of heavy-handed Green New Deal-style restrictions. Pennsylvania lawmakers arrived at this conclusion on the heels of a four-month budget impasse. The monthslong stalemate ended when Gov. Josh Shapiro and the General Assembly agreed ...

‘Obamacare’ a prescription for fraud

Remember when Americans were told that the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) would lower health care costs and that if you liked your doctor, you could keep her? How things have changed over the past 15 years. Health care costs continue to rise faster than inflation and millions of Americans have discovered that their health insurance plans don’t cover their chosen physician. As the saying goes, to add insult to injury, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a severe indictment of the federal Obamacare insurance exchanges that revealed troubling ...

‘Affordability first’ flips script on energy policy

In early November, U.S. Rep. Troy Balderson’s (R-Ohio) simple Affordable, Reliable, and Clean Energy Security Act underscored the titanic shift in the public psyche over the past decade. Note, it’s neither the “Clean and Reliable Act” nor the “Clean and Affordable Act.” Instead, affordability gets top billing. This is no accident: Electricity costs are skyrocketing, and affordability is top of mind for Americans. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports average retail revenues per kWh increased in 46 states since last August. Those rates vary significantly from ...

Why is everyone overwhelmed?

It seems that the term “overwhelmed” is getting a significant amount of ink these days. What does it mean and why do people use it so often? According to the online etymology dictionary, it is a mid-14th Century word describing, “to turn upside, overthrow, knock over.” It is allegedly from the Middle English whelmen “to turn upside down.” So “overwhelmed,” as I suspected, is even worse than just being “whelmed.” When someone is overwhelmed, they are not just knocked down or thrown; they are completely submerged. It appears that the word may have its origin ...

Finger-pointing on energy useless

Pennsylvanians are frustrated by rising electricity bills, and rightfully so. In a letter sent just this week, Gov. Josh Shapiro pointed to PJM, the regional transmission organization that manages our power grid, as the cause of these increases. In reality, energy costs more because we’re not producing enough of it. Before we point any fingers, it’s important to understand what PJM is, what it does and, most importantly, what it does not do. PJM is one of nine regional transmission operators (RTOs) in the United States and the largest in the nation. It coordinates electricity for ...