By State Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill

Southern York County landowners know the situation all too well: utilities looking to run high-voltage transmission lines through pristine and often preserved farmland to power our energy-negligent neighbors to the south, including Maryland and Washington.

Pennsylvania is part of the PJM grid with 13 states and our nation’s capital, which requires all states to do its part to power the region.

Our commonwealth exports more electricity than any other state in the nation, thanks to reforms made nearly three decades ago that opened competitive electricity generation markets. Today, the challenge lies in delivering that power where it’s most needed: to our growing manufacturing sector and to homeowners to improve reliability.

To date, utilities have been responsible for connecting homes, businesses, hospitals and other facilities to energy generation sources like Peach Bottom Atomic Station, our hydropower plants along the Susquehanna River, Brunner Island, Calpine York 2 Energy Center, and others. These generation costs are reflected in Pennsylvanians’ utility bills. Thanks to efforts to fend off new energy taxes, generation costs remain relatively low at about 46% of a total utility bill.

In October, Shannon Osaka of the Washington Post reported on the real culprits behind rising electricity rates. According to her research, electricity generation costs are declining, while transmission and distribution costs continue to climb.

At a public hearing earlier this year, I asked utility providers whether Pennsylvania ratepayers are subsidizing the buildout of transmission and distribution lines that export power to net energy-importing states like Maryland and Virginia. The short answer: yes.

But Pennsylvania ratepayers do not see that specific cost in their utility bill as it is bundled together with a bunch of fees that continue to lead to the rising distribution and transmission costs Osaka wrote about in her piece. My Senate Bill 966 would require these costs to be broken out, providing ratepayers greater transparency into how and why their utility bills are increasing.

Instead of focusing their efforts to improve their primary responsibility in maintaining the distribution system at a reasonable cost, one major utility is now seeking even more ratepayer dollars by requesting authority to re-enter the generation space.

This utility is now attempting to turn away from the competitive generation market Pennsylvania has benefitted from to allow utilities to spend money in new generation, and in doing so, shift the risks of those investments onto their ratepayers.

The competitive electricity market, which Pennsylvania adopted nearly 30 years ago, has helped keep electricity prices in check. In a competitive energy generation market, generators compete to provide the energy necessary to power Pennsylvania and the other PJM states. In doing so, electricity generators must provide energy at lower costs, or ratepayers will find one that will.

The clear winner in this competition is the consumer. As the days get colder andPennsylvanians turn on heat pumps during the winter months, Pennsylvanians continue to struggle with rising electricity costs due to the rising cost of electricity transmission and distribution, not generation.

It would be reckless to ignore basic economic truisms by taking our commonwealth backward by allowing utilities to generate power given their current challenges of delivering our existing power to where it needs to go – to Pennsylvania homes and businesses.

We should reject efforts to allow utilities to move into the generation space as it will only mean higher utility bills for our community.

Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill represents the 28th Senatorial District, covering southern York County.