Electricity 2 high

This is a letter sent to the NBC affiliate in Columbia S. C. doing business as WISTV.

We are giving up our quality of life to the utility companies!

Are electric utilities providing power at the lowest possible rates?

In the name of planning the electric utility companies regularly apply for and usually get rate increases to “provide for growth.” On the surface this seems like a laudatory objective. Utility companies are allowed to charge today’s customers for what they use today and for money to build out the capacity of the systems for the future. This does not seem to be completely out of bounds either. However, it is becoming a norm that when the economy is doing well utility companies get increases more easily than when it is not but the rates are still going up and up all of the times. Utility companies have over the years constantly forced more and more people to go without electricity or use less in order to survive. If electricity cost were not so expensive it is possible that the utility companies might make more money because they would have more people using electricity just to be comfortable in their homes and fewer people would have to go without. I argue that more people using electricity even at basic levels would reduce the need to increase rates. It is common nowadays to visit relatively well off folk in lavish homes who are only heating parts of their houses because they do not want to pay the high cost of electricity. Conservation is good but being forced to go without or sacrifice your comforts is not a good thing.

 WIS like many consumer advocate organizations often advises the public to utilize annual averaging payment plans to avoid the shock of the cost of the peak heating and cooling months of the year. Further, WIS and these consumer organizations will publicize and urge the folk who cannot pay their utility bills to apply for energy assistant grants from social services agencies. They do this like energy assistant grants money is from heaven or some place unrelated all of our cost. The public ought to know that this money that is used for these energy assistant grants comes from rate payers and tax payers who themselves are sometimes struggling to pay their own utility bills. Many of the people who are forced to pay for energy assistant grants are only heating or cooling parts of their homes themselves because the utility rates are so high. This may be needlessly sacrificing the quality of life and increasing our burden. Why should tax payers and rate payers pay utility companies to serve folk that they have priced out of the market without asking the utility companies to show that they are providing electricity at the lowest possible rates? We all argue for a supply demand capitalistic business climate for all businesses. Yet no other business except maybe insurance companies are able to price folk out of the market and then come to the taxpayers for subsidies via grants to their customers.

In this day of wide spread collection and circulation of economic data it is not difficult to determine the incomes per family in an area or in a demographic. Electricity prices ought to be set to reflect the ability to pay of the area served rather than just based on extracting enough money from rate payers to satisfy the planning goals of the electric utility company. I am not an engineer but I do know that presently the electricity left unused in the system cannot be stored for later use. Why not reduce rates to a point where the rate payers could be using that excess or wasted electricity in the system to live comfortably?  Why don’t the utility companies use that surplus production to provide electricity for the customers that they have forced out of the market? They do not need taxpayers to pay them while they have excess capacity that does not materially increase their cost. Utility companies are interconnected nation wide by the grid and it seems reasonable to this non engineer that power could be shifted from low use areas to higher use areas without raising rates in each region just to build separate systems designed to compete for the future. We all know that the concept of a regulatory utility commission is not working to keep rates within the means of the people in areas served by the utility companies. Fixing that system is not possible in reality and we know this as well. Yet, we should not have to reduce our quality of life without at least asking the question; are utility companies providing electricity at the lowest possible rates. A little day light on the facts might help fix the system and lower energy cost.

WIS is in an excellent position to ask these questions in a manner like fiscal managers uses zero based budgeting. WIS could trace the electricity cost from the people’s Lake Murray and other power plants to the meter at my house and your office. If WIS and the utility companies do not do this kind of analysis now what will WIS and the utility companies do when China or India via Wal-Mart starts selling power units for the individual homes and businesses that will enable people to come off the power grid. This will mean that the utility companies will have even fewer rate payers to pay even higher rates. Or the utility companies will be using WIS and politicians to make the sale of power units to allow folk to come off the grid illegal. We do not need to wait until we get there if we ask the questions and do the investigations now. This is an award winning investigatory reporting journalism story that does not have to be an anti utility companies story. This is only asking series of simple questions that ought to be answered just so we all can take a look into the future. This is what the utility company says they want to do as well in order to plan. WIS is in the ideal place to ask and report this story and this can help everyone.

Reply to these comments to Dr. Curtis J. Way-Email: Spoonbooks1@AOL.Com

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