The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Rick Rappaport
TEP wants to get the word out about its “transparency,” as in telling everything — even what you’re not asked about. The transparency that matters most? What’s behind those utility rates which so dearly strain monthly bills that 60,000 Tucson households “qualify" for low-income utility assistance programs? The core issue is TEP's energy costs. With the true cost of renewable energy — from raw materials to recycling/disposal — significantly less than that of coal, oil, gas or nuclear, let's grade TEP's transparency about key cost issues.
TEP’s been doing some creative accounting about the amount of renewable energy delivered to your light switch — claiming that amount is well over 20%. But in a state averaging over 300 days of sunshine annually, TEP actually supplies retail consumers with under 14% renewable energy. Their accounting is anything but transparent. It adds up all the renewable energy it delivers to both retail (residential, commercial and industrial) and non-retail customers, but then divides that total only by its retail sales — instead of by the percentage allocation each sector uses. This inflates and misrepresents the percentage of renewables delivered to your light switch. Had to enlist a power plant analyst to discover this.
Failing grade for transparency.
Now Project Blue. Section after section of its Energy Supply Agreement (“ESA”) is redacted and unreadable. TEP still claims transparency — everything is scrutinized by Arizona’s Utility Commission ("ACC") and therefore publicly accountable. Well, aside from the current utility commissioners' track record of approving pretty much anything and everything the utilities want, that ESA between Project Blue and TEP allows those two parties alone to set rates behind closed doors.
The Arizona Attorney General has appealed the ACC decision approving this private parties’ rate fixing. This lack of transparency will lead to increasingly higher rates. Project Blue will suck up unfathomable amounts of electricity. It will be a one-way street of rate hikes right to your wallet.
Failing grade for transparency.
And just how transparent is TEP’s continual fist-pounding that utility-scale solar is so much cheaper than rooftop solar when TEP — especially in their anti-Prop 127 campaign — hid from the public that it costs a boatload of money to get that utility-scale solar onto their grid and into your light switch. Rooftop solar avoids substantial costs like constructing transmission lines and maintaining much of the new supporting infrastructure. And those transmission line costs from rural anywhere? Only rising as communities NIMBY up and reject these utility-scale solar projects. TEP’s rooftop vs utility scale accounting has already proved a formidable opponent to the truth. Rooftop solar costs about the same, and does not come with all the environmental harm that new transmission lines and maintenance bring —biodiversity loss, increased carbon pollution and habitat destruction.
Failing grade for transparency.
Behind this lack of transparency lies the truth behind TEP’s skyrocketing rates: an energy mix out of step with the rest of the country’s. In 2024 and 2025, nationally, 95% of all new electricity-generating capacity was derived from solar, storage, and wind. In 2020, 2021 and 2022? over 80%. TEP's transparency response? Straight out of the tobacco industry’s playbook: deny and fund disinformation. It disrupts the grid, there’s not enough data, the data is wrong, the accounting is too complicated for you to understand, it’s those outside agitators, you name it. TEP has buried its 134-year-old head in oil and gas sands. It’s an old company, as Dallas Duke's opinion points out, but it’s way past its sell-by date.
Getting employees to write supporting opinions and running TV ads showing employees helping out at food banks is disingenuous at best when it’s your actions that are pushing people to those food banks. TEP has become the dinosaur of U.S. utilities, turning its back on the rising tide of reliable renewable energy and storage. That tide will drown TEP unless it can stop hiding behind unsupportable renewable energy data, closed-door rate agreements and distortions of rooftop solar's true costs. Its “transparency” is more like a one-way mirror.
The ground is shifting, and TEP is losing its balance.
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