We have wasted used a lot of bandwidth recently on the subject of the Biden Administration, some Democrat-governed states, and the global warming climate change activists wanting to force everyone away from natural gas and into electric utilities.

The southeast is the only region in the country in which electricity is the primary fuel for heating homes, due to the more rural nature of the area making natural gas service more limited, and our generally milder winters. And those people depending upon electricity to heat their homes are seeing some real sticker shock.

Seniors among customers struggling with rising energy bills

by Christiana Ford | Friday, January 20, 2023 | 8:45 PM EST | Updated: 8:53 PM EST

FRANKFORT, Ky. (LEX 18) — State regulators are investigating how to ease volatile fuel costs passed onto consumers that are leading to higher-than-normal electric bills for customers in Kentucky.

People living in Eastern Kentucky have been struggling with high power bills in recent months.

There’s more before the fold, including the embedded video from WLEX-TV.

Long-time residents Della and Gary Tomlin say it was not the case when they moved to Pike County and built their home in the 1980s. Her whole family helped out.

“We saved up to where we could start building ourself,” said Tomlin. “A lot of good memories.”

Tomlin started noticing a big difference after a rate hike in January 2021. Then she started to see more add-on costs on her Kentucky Power itemized bill.

“It’s ridiculous, you know, how’s people gonna make it,” said Tomlin.

She and her husband are on a fixed income and rely on social security and disability benefits to pay their expenses, similar to many families in the area.

Kentucky Power is the only utility company in the region.

They are on the average monthly payment program. Their bill for January was still $607.69.

There’s more at the original, and the WLEX-TV website is not behind a paywall.

Electricity is a regulated utility in Kentucky, as it is in every state, but utilities are allowed to pass on the costs of their fuel to customers. In eastern Kentucky, that means primarily coal and natural gas. Everything the Biden Administration are doing is leading to coal and natural gas being more expensive, and that drives up the costs of generating electricity. While the cost of living is generally lower in the Bluegrass State, coal and natural gas prices are national in nature, and inflation strikes electricity producers just like it does everybody else. Add to that the fact that, on really cold days, those people using the heat pumps that the activists want everyone to use are going to hear their heating systems running all day long, trying to extract just a little bit of energy from the 10º F outside temperatures. That’s just the nature of the beast!

Electricity is our most vulnerable-to-the-weather utility. I noted Thursday morning that the Weather Channel reported that there were 10,600 customers in Maine without electricity as a winter storm was bearing down on them. Fortunately for Mainiacs — and yes, I know the real term is Mainers; my mother’s family are from Maine — natural gas and heating oil are their primary heating fuels, and if their furnaces still require electricity to run, many of them probably have small generators which can power the 110-volt, 20-amphere systems those furnaces use. A generator to power the two 220-volt, 40-amp systems for heat pumps? That’s going to be a big, expensive one!

Of course, as electric service gets interrupted by power lines coming down due to winter weather, the power companies have to have the money to restore service, as quickly as possible, and that isn’t cheap.

Then there’s the big one: as the left try to force an ever-larger portion of our generating capacity into renewables like wind and solar power, the solar parks and windmills to generate that power have to be built . . . and the cost of those will be passed along to consumers as well. As the government tries to mandate plug-in electric cars, and more electric heat, the generation requirements are going to rise as well, meaning ever more power generation facilities will need to be built. Everything is going to cost more money!

Of course, the elites in Washington, and the silly climate activists don’t really care about the poor people living in eastern Kentucky. It isn’t that they are necessarily heartless, but simply that those people are so far outside of their conceptual framework that they just never think about them. The people in government setting policies are all wealthy enough that an electric bill doubling for them is no big deal.