Commentary—

Gas Prices High? Electricity Is Next

By William A. Collins

Power plants,

Are like your home;

Risk is great,

If you don’t own.

Perhaps you suspect that you’re being victimized by that axis of energy evil — Congress, the White House, and the oil companies. And of course you are. We’re all being victimized. We’re gouged at the gas pump and defiled at the drilling rig. Meanwhile the two strategies that could actually save us — greater energy efficiency and reduction of immigration — are both left to languish. Whatever legislation that does pass seems aimed instead at furthering the welfare of corporations, not us.

Worse luck the same principles hold true for electricity. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, ISO New England, state public utilities commissions, the General Assembly, and the governor all aim to assure that power companies can make a buck. And why not? That’s where the lobbyists come from, who are often former colleagues. Thus our electric rates continue creeping upward, and in October 2006 are scheduled to spike.

In some parts of the country, happily, greater vision has prevailed. Roughly one third of all Americans buy electricity that is produced by government. It’s cheaper and not subject to price jumps caused by the energy cartel. In still other states, the ones wise enough not to have deregulated, utility agencies still maintain some semblance of control.

But in Connecticut, at the behest of the power companies, we have forsaken most of that regulatory control. What has saved our bacon so far is that the legislature, guilt-ridden for having bought into deregulation in the first place, has itself been passing annual price control laws. Otherwise our rates would already be through the roof.

What lawmakers have neglected to do, however, is direct the state to start generating electricity itself, other than (commendably) from garbage. This inaction represents a serious failure of public policy. Connecticut still hosts six outdated power plants that the state could buy cheap, fix up, and bring back on line. Fortunately most of these plants are located along the shore where the juice is needed most. Today they produce very little, being fired up only when there’s a shortage. Had the state acted on this plan in a timely fashion, we would not now need those dreaded new power lines to funnel more kilowatts down to the coast. The kilowatts would already be there.

But publicly owned power does not make any money for the utilities. In fact, it eats into their market. That’s why California power companies put $1 million into fighting a referendum in San Francisco that would have taken electricity there public. The proposal lost by one percent of the vote. Foresightful Los Angeles and Sacramento already had public electricity and thus survived the famous California power meltdown unscathed. Utilities understandably didn’t want this system to become a trend.

No such worry here. Among the countless raw materials that Connecticut lacks, the biggest is vision. We prefer to grouse and whine when cartels do bad things to us. With a state economy so dominated by Wall Street, we’re careful not to offend.

Nor do we plan ahead. Connecticut is heavily dependent on nuclear power, a slender reed at best. Two of our four atomic units are already shut down, never to reopen. The other two produce well, but when you’re dealing with atoms you never know when some incident will pull the plug. And it is always best to develop a breadth of resources, some of them government-owned. That’s the only safe protection against what’s happening to us now with gasoline.

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