Expect political leftist climate alarmists and class warriors to try to make a last stand this week at the New Orleans City Council meeting to stop the final step in Delta Utilities’ acquisition of gas distribution throughout Louisiana.
During 2024, the entity, a subsidiary of the private investment firm Berhard Capital Partners, has successfully navigated the regulatory hoops to buy up all of CenterPoint Energy’s and Entergy Louisiana’s natural gas business plus the distribution network throughout the state (as well as Energy gas business in Mississippi, also part of the deal). Only Energy New Orleans remains without such approval, which the Council seems poised to give at its Thursday meeting, adding to the Public Service Commission’s nod from earlier this fall.
Over a billion bucks will go towards the effort expected to be wrapped up the middle of next year. If comments planned for submission to the Council from a variety of business and social organizations spanning the gamut indicate anything, approval will be popular.
But not for a select group of leftists who see the deal as a method of inducing more natural gas consumption at potentially higher prices. The separate deals approved pretty much follow the same script: no changes to existing operation and no price hikes for 15 months, although the New Orleans part also promises (and has been set in motion already) locating Delta’s headquarters in the city, boosting commercial prospects and adding a couple of hundred jobs.
However, the leftists complain there’s no guarantee price increases won’t come in 2026 as they allege rising prices are inevitable because Delta isn’t public which makes it easier for it to raise fees and purportedly the boom in LNG exporting is causing a supply pinch that raises domestic prices. They picked up a big backer in the dying embers of Democrat Joe Biden’s Department of Energy that this week issued a report claiming this.
But that’s merely advocacy literature backing the ideological imperative of climate alarmism following its imperative of faith that burning more of a fossil fuel like natural gas will fuel catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Higher quality research exposes the weakness of the belief that prices will escalate, revealing instead that as LNG output has expanded and exports begun this has not affected pricing, because the increased demand was met with increased supply and U.S. household prices continue to be among the world’s lowest. The bankruptcy of the CAGW argument has led regulators to dismiss this opposition.
Nor does the transparency argument hold any water. The PSC will continue to regulate gas provision statewide except for New Orleans, where the Council will regardless of whether Delta is private. It still will have to submit almost-entirely public documentation for any rate increase, and if voters don’t think either body holds Delta accountable enough on rates or other activities, they can hold regulators accountable by replacing them at the ballot box.
There’s no good reason the deal shouldn’t go through, and possibly provisional costs will decrease with integration statewide and economies of scale. The Council doing what is expected of it along and long with other regulators performing its due diligence should make consumers under the deal better off in the long run.
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