Commentary—

Electricity: Power To The Powerful

By William A. Collins

 Public utilities have long been fertile soil for robber barons. For seven or eight decades, railroads provided the basis of America’s cartel-dominated wealth. Today it’s electricity. You may have noticed that when Ken Lay and Jeff Skillings were convicted, it was only for looting their companies, not for looting the public. The latter practice still thrives every day.

Just to give you an idea of the profit potential, be aware that the right of foreign investors (us) to own Iraq’s power supply was one of the crucial paragraphs that the United States wrote into that sad country’s constitution. If peace ever breaks out, Wall Street is ready to make a killing.

It is already making a killing elsewhere. Avaricious foreign control over local power and water supplies has been a big cause of the leftward tilt in recent Latin American elections. Venezuela and Bolivia are already nationalizing their production, and other nations’ plans are in the pipeline.

In the United States, we’ve been much more docile. Roughly half the states have deregulated electricity to one degree or another, largely to their regret. California has the largest regret, but at least it offers a model of reform. Both Los Angeles and Sacramento own their own power plants and wires and have thus avoided all the corporate-caused trauma of skyrocketing prices. Self-help has been their blessed answer.

Federal regulators have been no help at all. In fact, in Connecticut they’ve made matters worse, granting an onerous surcharge on bills as punishment to us for not building more plants. But the excess profits gleaned from that charge go directly to the very power companies that have failed to build the plants. With that kind of incentive, they’re not going to be in any rush to start construction.

Other federal agencies cast a rheumy eye over nuclear energy, presumably to avert catastrophe. Luckily, nothing too bad has happened since Three-Mile Island, and we recently just dodged another bullet on that disastrously corroded containment vessel in Ohio (not discovered by the watchdogs). Further, whistleblowers are duly persecuted as necessary to preserve blissful ignorance about near misses with the atom. This allows us to stay calm in the face of permanently deadly waste piling up at a furious rate at all of our nation’s 103 nuclear plants, and then stored forever at the dead ones, including East Haddam and Waterford.

This artificial calm also allows GE, Westinghouse, Hitachi, and other purveyors of horrendously expensive and dangerous generating plants, to claim glibly that they are a major solution to global warming. Give me a break!

One real solution that’s gaining popularity is buying power cooperatively. A central agency, say the state, with huge combined purchasing power, could do battle with the cartel to negotiate the best available price for everybody. Both Attorney General Dick Blumenthal and Governor Jodi Rell have proposed this, though without much passion. As a working model, there already exists in Connecticut a small consortium of municipal power authorities that use just such joint action to very good effect. And by this time, there are plenty of individual towns around the country also opting to go it on their own. Indeed, the state just approved subsidies for 11 such town-owned plants. States (like ours) should take the hint for themselves and start building their own.

Actual state and local acquisition of power supplies has other advantages, too. It takes nuclear off the table and it would permanently scotch industry’s scheme to build 17 old-fashioned coal-fired plants in Texas. They’re aiming to get approved while there is still an administration in Washington that thinks global warming is fake. Government ownership would also increase long-range planning, which would more likely promote the latest coal-gasification with CO2 sequestration.

Unfortunately, our present system of privately owned power is about as wise an idea as privately owned armies.

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