Scott Brocato:
Bob, it's been one of the hottest summers in El Paso's history, adding hundreds of dollars to the electric bills. Let's talk about that first for the story on El Paso Matters.
Bob Moore:
First, I think it's worth noting that probably every summer when we talk about the weather, you say exactly the same thing: it's been one of the hottest summers on record, and it's true. And we talk a lot about climate change as a society, although we talk less about it in recent years.
But I think the financial impact of climate change really became clear to El Pasoans this summer. Things are getting much, much hotter. This will be the fifth warmest summer on record. Most of the other top years are just in recent years, too. And we really, when you look at the numbers, we really hit a turning point around 2009. And so basically, heat conditions that used to be freakish, like maybe once every 15, 20 years, have really become commonplace in El Paso since 2009. And one of the big impacts of that, obviously, is we have to cool our homes and our businesses in order to get through the day as it gets hotter. And increasingly, we have to keep them cool during the night. One the things that the records show is that we're not cooling down at night the way we used to. So we're running our air conditioning more. We're running it longer. And so, especially with the rate increase we saw from El Paso Electric this year, our electric bills are going up.
And so I ran up what the mathematicians call "regression analysis" to just try to show people the impact of this. And so, you know, based on weather records here, we can show that a typical 2500 square foot house in El Paso, with this summer's heat, is going to be looking at about a $378 monthly bill just to keep up. And by comparison, we can look, you know, back 15 years ago before it got super, super hot here. And if we'd had a summer like we had, like say in 2002, 2003, our electric bills would have been $74 lower than they actually are now. And then if you go back 100 years to see what the conditions were like back then...so if we had summers now like we had back in in the 1920s, our electric bills would be almost $100 a month lower than what we're seeing now. So this rising heat is really hitting our pocketbooks.
And it's worth understanding too that the primary reason our electric rates went up both here and then probably soon in New Mexico is that El Paso Electric has to build more and more generating capacity to cover what is called "peak demand," which is basically, they have to have enough generating power to get us through the summer, even if we don't need it the other 40 or so weeks of the year. They've had to build out, and that comes back to the ratepayers. And so climate change is really hitting us in the pocketbook, especially in the summer, and that's not going to change.
Scott Brocato:
Well, let's move on to the next story, which is if you're seeing claims about Texas's voter suspense list, the story is about what the numbers actually show and what you need to know. What I'd like to know, first of all, is what is a "voter suspense list"?
Bob Moore:
That is a great question, and it's really important to understand, and it's actually leading to a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation in social media.
So the suspense list in Texas happens when the local county election authorities mail you your new registration card or have some kind of contact with you and it gets returned to them. It's not delivered. And so they don't immediately disenroll you from voting or anything like that. They just put you on a "suspense list" saying we can't confirm your address. And if you come in and vote and you're on the suspense list, it's going to take a couple extra minutes because we'll have to confirm your address. And so they try to get the word out so people can fix it ahead of the election. We have until October 5th before this election to go ahead and correct it so you don't get slowed down. And it's pretty easy to correct. You'll need to provide a little bit of information and our story explains how to do it.
But one of the concerns is, because this suspense list issue sounds so ominous and it's really not understood, there's been a lot of falsehoods on social media in the last couple weeks saying that Texas is disenrolling more than a million voters right before the election. And that's not true. And I think even though some of those posts are kind of well-intentioned and trying to make people aware, when you start telling people over and over again that the system is rigged, people are going to just start walking away and giving up. So it's really dangerous to have that kind of misinformation out there.
It is important to know that if you go two election cycles and you haven't fixed the suspension list, then you can be taken off the voter roll. So everybody needs to at least go online in the next day or so, and we walk you through that in the story, and look up your registration status and make sure you're not on the suspense list. About 90% of voters in El Paso are not on the suspense list, so they'll get good news. But if you're in that like 9.5% that is on the suspense list and you still live here, it's easy to fix and we'll walk you through that too. We want everybody to participate in the November 3rd election.
Scott Brocato:
And speaking of elections, the final story: Texas governor candidate Gina Hinojosa calls for or called for a special session on data centers during her recent El Paso campaign stop.
Bob Moore:
So Gina Hinojosa is a state legislator from Austin. She's the Democratic nominee to run against Republican Greg Abbott, who is seeking his fourth term. And the polling is showing that race is closer than governor races have been in the past 30 years or so, maybe even within single digits. There's a poll out recently that it's tied. So Hinojosa is seeing some momentum. She made a trip out to El Paso on Monday and had a couple of events, but probably the highlight for her was to talk about data centers. Governor Abbott was a champion of data centers and said he wanted to make Texas the data center capital of the country. That was before all of the public anger around data centers started to surface, and now he's backed off of that and made a couple of moves that may or may not have much impact on this.
And so, you know, Hinojosa was out here talking about what she would like to see, and she wasn't super specific. Our reporter Diego Mendoza Moyers, who is probably the leading journalistic expert on data centers here in El Paso, covered the event. And in his story, you'll see that there's really not a lot of meat on the bones yet other than global community should have more control. She wanted the legislature called into special session and said she would do that if she was elected. The problem with that is when she takes office, the legislature will already be in session. There won't be a need for a special session. So I think it is a sign, though, that data centers, which are obviously an important issue in our region, are going to play a huge role in the fall election in Texas and perhaps in New Mexico, too, because you've got a couple of interesting races there.
Scott Brocato:
And where can folks read about those stories and more?
Bob Moore:
Stay up to date with all the important news in our region at elpasomatters.org.