Log In


Reset Password
Archive

Commentary-Power Struggles Over Our Power

Print

Tweet

Text Size


Commentary—

Power Struggles Over Our Power

By William A. Collins

’Lectric prices,

Start to swell;

Thanks to power’s,

Brash cartel.

Electricity remains a massive game with giant stakes. It features a few big winners and millions of small losers — us! This is what commonly happens to players who don’t even realize they’re in a game.

The winners are the corporations that control that game, among them Northeast Utilities and United Illuminating. In 2002 Northeast spent $600,000 lobbying in Hartford just for some new deregulation wrinkles. That was the biggest lobbying outlay of any industry that year. And how much do you suppose electricity consumers spent lobbying? Right. That’s why your electric bill zoomed up last winter, and why it contains several incomprehensible line items allegedly describing what you’re paying for. If one such line truthfully read, “Bailing out CL&P from its foolish investment in nuclear power,” the public might begin to get the drift.

Fortunately for us, CL&P is still regulated, more or less. It operates the wires, poles, transformers, and other hardware that carry the juice to our homes. But even more threatening in the long run are the megafirms that actually produce the juice. Most prominent just now is NRG Energy Inc, Connecticut’s largest supplier and owner of four of the Sooty Six power plants. Rubbing its hands at the prospect of profits in our deregulated state, NRG is now even contemplating moving its national headquarters from Minneapolis to Milford.

But regardless of which predator ends up supplying us in the days to come, rates are sure to continue their current upward zoom. One major factor was the ill-advised rush to natural gas-generating plants that dominated the last decade. Gas was cheaper than oil back then, and the plants themselves were far cheaper to build. The companies also greenwashed themselves by touting the lower pollution levels from gas than from oil or coal. Now gas is in short supply and the price has gone through the roof. That means we pay through the nose.

Wind power could help us out of all this, there being plentiful raw material blowing night and day across the ocean shallows off Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. The trouble is that rich people live there. They don’t want their endless empty vistas besmirched by a forest of distant windmills. Walter Cronkite and the Kennedys have taken to the barricades. Some environmentalists are similarly fighting to keep windmills off the equally breezy and scenic ridges of northern New Hampshire.

Ironically a national Democratic victory in November could further increase our bills. The current administration has been cheerfully coddling those big coal-burning plants in the Midwest, which send us a little power and a lot of pollution. Restitution of the old Clinton rules would lessen the smog but boost the cost.

Another part of the problem is the Independent System Operator, or ISO, that interstate front for the power companies that is always telling us we need more gold-plated power lines. CL&P loves the ISO. Under its orders, the company gets to build a gorgeous system, charge it all to us, and keep a tidy percentage for itself.

Still unresolved for the long run is the fate of wires and pipelines across Long Island Sound. Long Islanders once tried to go nuclear for their power, but it didn’t work. Now they’re low on supply, high on price, and eager to tie into Connecticut’s cheaper gas and megawatts. Politics and profits being what they are, they may one day succeed. Connecticut just won the latest round when the existing electric cable was shut off, but don’t bet the farm on that order holding.

Far smarter would be for each Sooty Six host town to issue revenue bonds, buy the ancient local plant for itself, replace the burners with the latest technology, condemn CL&P’s local wires, and create its own municipal power authority. Municipalities that have done this elsewhere are now in Fat City, protected from the electricity cartel and from frequent legislative sellouts. Then with more power being generated locally, we wouldn’t need all those intrusive new high voltage lines either. Otherwise, we’re in for some nasty California-style surprises as time goes on.

(William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)

Comments
Comments are open. Be civil.
0 comments

Leave a Reply