by Gordon Tomb

Each month, Pennsylvania’s 6 million electricity customers—all facing rising bills—are charged for services of questionable value without knowing how much they are paying and, for most, that the charge even exists.

Enacted by the legislature in 2004, Pennsylvania’s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards Act (AEPS) requires that 18 percent of an electricity seller’s offering consists of energy from sources like wind, solar, biomass, and other technologies deemed worthy of special treatment.

In 2025, this program, now in its third decade, cost customers more than $700 million. Although the amount each customer pays isn’t entirely visible on an electric bill, a household using 800 kilowatt-hours per month pays $4.11 every month at the 0.514 cents per kilowatt-hour compliance cost. While the charge for residential customers appears modest, AEPS’s lifetime cost of more than $3 billion amounts to a giant handout to special interests at the cost of everyday ratepayers.

Political opposition to AEPS, despite its significant burden, is sparse.

This is a stark contrast to another less-costly subsidy for green energy: the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Costing $3.81 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in 2025, RGGI’s tax on carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel plants costs less than AEPS’s $5.14 per megawatt-hour. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania withdrew from RGGI’s multi-state program last fall when Gov. Josh Shapiro agreed to drop his legal battle in favor of RGGI as part of the state budget deal. The original 2019 proposal to join RGGI rightly drew a firestorm of objections from Republican legislators and business and labor constituencies.

Six years of litigation over RGGI cratered investment in reliable energy, leading to today’s environment of energy scarcity and rising rates.

So, what accounts for the survival of one costly subsidy and the death of another?

AEPS came to fruition when prices were relatively stable, while Pennsylvania’s RGGI tax debate came at a time of skyrocketing prices and dwindling supply. In today’s environment, a new tax (i.e., RGGI) is far more vulnerable compared to an already established and codified one (i.e., AEPS). Plus, a divided legislature typically results in a stalemate on any new legislation, so old laws remain on the books—and the status quo marches on.

But AEPS is worth revisiting as the program’s costs are ballooning. Pennsylvanians’ prices rose more in the last five and a half years than in the previous 16 combined.

AEPS not only drives up your electricity bill but also fails to advance these politically preferred technologies beyond a tiny part of the energy mix. Pennsylvania’s share of electricity generation from renewables between 2013 and 2024 has plateaued at 4 percent—mainly because these sources require costly backup power and consume large amounts of land and materials to produce relatively little energy.

For these reasons—and more—leaders of the “green” movement are backing away from “decarbonization” commitments that have led to economic decline in places like Germany. Yet, Pennsylvania’s bureaucracy persists like an automaton ignorant of machine learning.

The latest AEPS annual report continues to promote “the realization of a net zero electricity grid by 2050.”

But that goal isn’t plausible when considering how inefficient these mandated sources are. Energy writer Robert Bryce explains the “law of power density,” showing how many units of energy a specific source produces compared to how many units it uses in its production. Wind and solar produce a 3.5:1 ratio, which is a pittance compared to coal (10:1), oil and natural gas (30:1), and nuclear (100:1).

Power density, for which these ratios are a measure, “helps us understand why wind and solar energy cannot, will not, ever be able to power our society,” says Bryce. “In addition to their incurable intermittency and dependence on the weather, they require too much land and other resources.”

These inconvenient truths should inspire skepticism of not only AEPS but also any proposal to expand the mandate. As part of his Lightning Plan, Governor Shapiro proposed a new spin on AEPS: the Pennsylvania Reliable Energy Sustainability Standard (PRESS). PRESS more than doubles the mandated percentage, requiring 50 percent of Pennsylvania’s electricity to come from similar sources by 2035. If enacted, Shapiro’s new mandate would result in $155 billion in added energy costs, doubling household electricity bills over the next decade.

Fortunately, PRESS failed to make it into this year’s state budget, sparing hard-working Pennsylvanians from paying even more in their monthly utility bills.

However, Pennsylvanians aren’t out of the woods. AEPS continues to drive up bills, and the looming threat of PRESS remains.

It is time for state leaders to prioritize affordability and allow technologies to stand on their own abilities to deliver low-cost, reliable energy.

This commentary was first published at Real Clear Energy, September 2, 2026.

Photo attribution:  Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Gordon Tomb is Senior Advisor at the CO2 Coalition and senior fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania free-market think tank.