Verminous, lame-dumb cluck New Jersey governor Phil Murphy - he of the rodential, yellow-fanged overbite, off-shore wind obsession, and illegal migrant home sanctuary - was in an expansive mood at the end of April. He got to participate in a bit of performative theatrics that allowed the Green grift-addicted chief executive to pretend he gave a rat's patootie about New Jersey electrical customers.

He doesn't.

But that fact was immaterial to the sheer joy of having his Democrat toadies in the NJ legislature hand him something to sign with cameras and press all around that made it look like he did.

The governor put pen to paper on a brilliant piece of legislation that didn't do anything to address the skyrocketing price of electrical bills in the Garden State - oh, no.

This 'preventing sticker shock' bill forces the electrical companies to give the beleaguered consumer a 'heads up' if their bill is going to be high for the coming month. Having done nothing over the course of the past decade but everything humanly possible to drive up the price of producing electricity in the state to begin with, all the NJ Democrats were just tickled electric slide blue with their brilliant idea.

New Jersey’s gas and electric utilities will be required to inform certain customers of their energy use and costs before monthly bills are issued under a bill Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law Tuesday.

The bill is a bid to allow customers to adjust their usage to avoid unforeseen spikes in utility costs. It comes after shockingly high utility bills seen this winter, bills that are expected to rise again after rate increases add roughly $25 to monthly bills beginning in June.

“The sticker shock of large utility bills at the end of the month can be unaffordable for working families trying to manage household finances,” said bill sponsor Assemblyman David Bailey (D-Gloucester). “The early notifications will give them the ability to adjust their usage and prevent surprise bills that break their budgets.”

Under the new law, utilities must inform customers of the cost of their electricity and the amount of kilowatt hours or therms they’ve used by text message or email on the 10th and 20th days of a billing cycle.

Instead of actually fixing what is horribly wrong with NJ's grid to maximize efficiency, reliability, and savings, they've benevolently awarded the poor consumer a chance to turn the heat down, lights off, or A/C up and make their already stressful lives a little more miserable, to avoid being clobbered with a whopping bill.

THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES

Around the same time Murphy and his pals were patting themselves on the back for their magnanimity, residents of the state were being warned of an incoming 20% rate hike looming this summer. Why?

Because they've shut down all their reliable power generation in the state, and Murphy's bet on the climate cult has been an expensive, abject failure. Since 2017, the state has shut down six major power plants (five coal and one nuclear), none of Murphy's promised 'reliable and affordable' Green energy schemes have come to fruition, and the state has been forced into importing electricity. 

But, hey! Turn the TV off, swelter in your living room, and you can shave a bit off that tab as the meter spins. 

You have some control, however scant and unfair, over that part of your bill.

But there are more insidious and non-negotiable ('non-bypassable') items on a NJ utility bill that are simply appalling once you find out about them, and dive into the numbers. It's not as simple as utility taxes.

These fees have been added to every NJ bill every single month since 1999 and are called 'Societal Benefits Charges' (SBC). They are just as whack as they sound and have turned into a massive, never-ending slush fund for the state legislature and governor to dip into to pay for pet projects. 

This is older information -2013 - but it gives you an idea of how slushy it is. Gobsmacking amounts of money, with the biggest, slushiest chunk being the Clean Energy Fund portion of it.

In 1999, when the state broke up its electric and gas monopolies, a little-noticed provision in the legislation imposed a surcharge on customer utility bills. Dubbed the societal benefits charge, it would pay for a variety of programs in the energy and utility sectors deemed worthy of financing by policymakers. Few knew then, however, how costly the program would be.

...In 2012, the SBC cost utility customers $790 million, a small rise from the $777 million it netted the previous year. Only the income tax, sales tax, and corporate business tax raise more from residents and businesses statewide — excluding property taxes, which are imposed by local governments. In the past decade, the surcharge has raised more than $5 billion from electric and gas customers.

...The two biggest chunks of the program involve efforts to finance clean energy programs ($309 million in the 2012 budget) and efforts to help low-income families pay their utility bills (at least $292 million), according to numbers provided by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. The low-income program has grown dramatically since the state passed a law ensuring that those families do not pay more than 6 percent of their household income on energy bills.

The SBC also finances other programs: $27 million to pay utilities for bills they are unable to collect from customers; $83 million to pay for the costs of cleaning up former manufactured-gas sites, which were used to produce electricity. It further set aside $78 million for assorted social programs, helping customers in need obtain discounts on their phone and assisting seniors who have questions about their utilities, among other programs.

See the numbers now? Some folks have SBC charges that are over $40 on their bills, and businesses are paying enormous fees.

The clean energy portion has been squandered on such things as $82M for $4250 subsidies to help New Jerseyans purchase EVs and a trifling $27M in 2024 to help pay for charging station installations.

Not to mention Murphy's unending and unsuccessful offshore wind schemes have chewed through significant portions of tens of millions of dollars and spat them back out.

As if the waste wasn't insult enough, when the legislature needs some fast cash because they've overrun their checkbook, they dip into the 'clean' slush fund with their dirty little fingers without even the courtesy of leaving an IOU.

New Jersey has routinely raided the state’s Clean Energy Fund to cover unrelated state budget gaps, diverting almost $2 billion since 2010 away from a fund intended to reduce fossil fuel reliance, according to a new report released Thursday.

New Jersey Policy Perspective found that former Gov. Jon Corzine shifted $242 million from the fund to unrelated needs, and his successor, Chris Christie, continued the practice, redirecting more than $1.2 billion during his two terms in office.

Gov. Phil Murphy has plucked more than $533 million from the fund for other purposes since he took office in 2018, even though he vowed during his 2017 campaign to stop such raids, according to the report. Murphy’s transition team also published a 2018 report recommending the fund be used in the way it was intended.

Officials instead spent nearly $2 billion from the fund on things like NJ Transit operations, state park maintenance, and utility bills for state buildings.

This is all too tempting a gold mine for state Democrats ever to contemplate forgoing. So, while the cameras were busy watching the governor as he preened about alerting residents to astronomical bills thanks to their opulent standard of living, the legislature was busy drawing up a demand for an increase in the SBC charges. They decided they were going to have to have a minimum of $60M available to distribute as incentives for companies to build large-scale energy storage systems in the state.

Michael from Wake Up, NJ took himself down to Trenton to testify at the bill hearing in front of the Appropriations Committee and lay some truth on them.

Wake Up NJ Speech from Trenton today in the Assembly Appropriations Committee on Bill A5267

How are you doing members of the committee, My name is Michael from Wake Up New Jersey, Bill A5267 means to procure and incentivize transmission-scale energy storage for "renewables" such… https://t.co/zvLXkw0oae pic.twitter.com/my0yFPxBTZ

— Wake Up NJ 🇺🇸 New Jersey (@wakeupnj) May 15, 2025

Here's some of what he had to say:

...Why don't we go over a few these programs,  

Ever Heard of Charge Up New Jersey? It's a program that gives folks up to $4,250 dollars for buying Electric Vehicles and chargers. This is costing NJ residents over $30 million dollars a year in their electric bills  

How about 'It Pay$ to Plug In', this program has spent $100M since 2012 on EV chargers in your electric Bill! This program cost ratepayers $27M this year alone as an SBC 

Per year Electric Vehicle Programs total $82.5M, Clean Energy Equity costs us $16.6M, NJ Wind total $22M and Energy Storage is currently costing the rate payers $29.5M per year, just to stress again this bill your voting on today will jump it up to $60M a year at a minimum! More than double it's current total...

$60M a year for energy storage facility handouts in one of the most expensive states in the country, and a state where none of their renewable schemes have even panned out yet.

...New Jersey residents pay over $8,100 more per year than the average American Household on their bills and pay around $700 more per month in overall bills compared to the national average.

...We are already hurting with the worst property and corporate taxes, one of the worst income and gas tax rates, and the absolute worst overall tax burden at over 54% of your lifetime earnings being syphoned from our NJ residents  How much more do you want to take from us? How do you justify so much money hidden in our electric bills yearly? This endless spending path is unsustainable, we need more money in our pockets, not less Voting yes for this literally raises our electric bills yet again, is that really what you want to do to the people of NJ?

As he was making absolute sense, I can only assume no one paid a lick of attention to him. As it is also NJ, I'm very interested to know who's getting a cut of the additional $60M a year.

The only green energy I see is the money laundering.