In our dogged determination to defend New Mexico taxpayers and utility rate-payers, we attended the 2nd PNM public meeting on the Energy Transition Act (ETA). This time the meeting was in Farmington (a community that will be severely-impacted by the shutdown of the San Juan Generating Station).
You can read our thoughts on the first meeting in Albuquerque and see the handout underpinning this post here. According to PNM’s handout, the “baseline” cost of the ETA is $4.678 billion dollars (they hide it by creatively writing $4,678 M). Yet, PNM claims they will be reducing costs to rate-payers. So, how does this happen? Where is the money coming from? That’s a good question and while PNM added a slide to the Farmington presentation (below) that was not in the first presentation, if you look carefully the slide contemplates savings of $379 million (top right of slide).
That’s not even close to making up for $4.678 BILLION, let alone surpassing it in a way that provides cost savings to rate-payers. The good news is that PNM added this information as a response to our initial efforts. The bad news is that the numbers don’t even come close to adding up.
The $4,678M (or $4.678B, or $4,678,000, however you want to show it, I think we can all handle different decimals here) is a $379M savings versus continuing to run and maintain the San Juan coal plant for the next 20 years. The cost of continuing down that path would be $4,678M + $379M = $5,057M. So, indeed, this whole plan would be reducing costs to customers.
I appreciate your comment. So, all I’m asking for is a detailed explanation of the overall savings in plan 1. I saw a general explanation of the $379 million. At this point all we’ve seen is a lot of numbers. Where do the cost savings come from and where are additional costs incurred?