Commentary—

Electric Power To The People

By William A. Collins

Get my power,

Out of plugs;

For which I pay,

Those well-dressed thugs.

In case you’ve been spelunking for the past five years, you may not realize that our nation has a couple of serious problems with electricity. The first is that making it tends to heat up the planet. This in turn melts ancient ice caps, which raises the level of the ocean, one day bringing tidewater to somewhere between Davenport and St Paul. In the process Florida, Holland, and Bangladesh will go the way of Atlantis.

The other problem is who should actually make the electricity and sell it. The Enron debacle hinted that our present system might be flawed. Likewise, when our own state legislature even raises the issue, the Capitol is suddenly so flooded with dark-suited lawyers and lobbyists that it looks like a Brooks Brothers outlet.

This sartorial onslaught is always a sure sign that money is on the table. Lots of money. Oil, gas, coal, and uranium companies spend profusely whenever their God-given right to wallow in the subsidized electricity market is called into question. Similarly, power generators and distributors pour forth like hornets when anyone stirs their nests by suggesting that government itself might be a reasonable substitute for their comfortable cartel.

In Connecticut, with the highest electric rates of all, Larry Cafero, the House Republican leader, has been moved to term any dabbling in public ownership of electricity as “Socialism.” This is a concept to which he evidently does not subscribe. Heaven forfend.

Meanwhile socialist hotbeds like Cleveland, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and other people’s republics have been blithely making their own juice for many decades and selling it more cheaply to their citizens than do the corporations. Such public owners are also more hospitable to schemes for small-scale local generation and incentives to reward renewable energy producers. Corporations understandably are not thrilled at this kind of grassroots competition.

Nonetheless, it’s coming. A heartwarming story by the Associated Press reported on the hot battle between two neighboring giant Texas ranches over whether one of them may install a humongous wind farm. Texas, ever versatile, already produces more kilowatts from wind than any other state. One day, though, it probably will be upstaged by the Dakotas, known as the Persian Gulf of wind power. Maybe that explains why so many folks move away — lots of bad hair days.

But electricity remains a rotten business. The biggest federal subsidies go to nuclear, with coal, oil, and gas following along. Renewables get peanuts. Regulatory authorities also are keyed to corporate welfare. As are state legislatures. Issues like whether, where, and with what fuel power plants are built are typically not publicly debated decisions. They’re private profit decisions, with sainted nonprofit agencies trying valiantly to fight off the worst ones.

Public policy formation, though, being critical to our lives, ought to be in public hands. So many of our power decisions now lie in the hands of the generating cartel and Wall Street hedge funds that we have good reason for deep concern. And since wind and sun don’t require an endless stream of expensive fuel, it comes as no surprise that those big domestic investors are sticking with fossil fuels. That’s where the money is. Indeed the biggest investor in subversive wind power in this country comes not from America at all, but from Spain.

As citizens, unless we generate our own juice, we’re simply corks bobbing on the fickle ocean of corporate whim. The General Assembly met this year with orders to “do something” about this, but basically, it failed. In many states like ours, it’s the same. The deregulation genie is out of the bottle and it’s nearly impossible even for lawmakers to put it back. The only permanent cure is local, homegrown bootstraps power. Luckily, that’s the best angle on controlling global warming as well.

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