OG&E Issues Resource Plan that Will Raise Costs and Pollute

Oklahoma City, Okla. - Last week, Oklahoma Gas and Electric (OG&E) filed its final Integrated Resource Plan with Oklahoma regulators. This required report charts the long-term strategic plan for the utility that sells electricity to almost 1 million Oklahoman households and focuses on changes expected over the next five years. It outlines which resources OG&E will depend on to generate this electricity and reduce energy demand and how much the resources will cost ratepayers. 

The Sierra Club submitted formal comments on the IRP, emphasizing that the plan waits too long to stop burning coal at two mega-polluting and aging coal plants in the state – Sooner and Muskogee – thus ensuring that customers will foot the bill for expensive updates. This in turn also continues to force many neighbors to breathe polluted air across Oklahoma every year. OG&E’s plan also doesn’t go far enough to establish accurate real-world costs for renewable energy, energy efficiency, and demand response – which are the most affordable measures for reducing energy use and enjoy bipartisan support and federal incentives to reduce costs for customers. Instead of accurately considering the benefits of clean generation, OG&E wants to reflexively build expensive new gas plants. 

In response to OG&E’s final IRP, Sierra Club advocates issued the following statements:

“So many Oklahomans are struggling to pay their OG&E utility bills, especially low-income folks who are paying way more than their fair share simply because they can’t afford better insulated walls, doors, and windows,” said KJ McKee, director of the Oklahoma Chapter of the Sierra Club. “Others are breathing in polluted air near OG&E’s old coal plants, Sooner and Muskogee. We are very disappointed that the IRP does not chart a cleaner and more affordable future for the state and instead reflexively relies on gas that is so susceptible to volatile price increases. Sierra Club and its advocates and partners in Oklahoma will keep pushing this utility and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission to do better for our residents.”

“OG&E has failed to fully evaluate the option of ceasing coal operations at the Sooner and Muskogee units as soon as feasible to keep customers from overpaying for uneconomic electricity,” said Kate Huddleston, a staff attorney with the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. “We already know that Muskogee is operating in the red so much that it loses $4 million every year. And when OG&E is faced with a requirement to update its aging coal units, it should not repeat its past mistake of spending hundreds of millions of customer dollars to do so. Continuing to punt the decision on these units could lead to once again installing costly emission controls – and money out of Oklahoma customers’ pockets – that could have been avoided if OG&E had simply planned ahead.” 
 

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