Thursday, February 6, 2014

Electricity 

Our electricity providers have coined money over the years by not spending adequate amounts of it on preventing outages. Montgomery County reports 62% of Peco's customers have been negatively affected and many are still without power. I bet, if someone investigates Peco's high level corporate records, they would discover that Peco figured tree trimming efforts should be curtailed to improve the bottom line. Corporations are ultimately in business to make a profit, Peco, it so happens, produces electricity to make its profit. 

Being a monopoly granted by government, electricity providers should be required to do more to assure customers that they will not have their power interrupted. 

Evaluate this suggestion : Have government require energy providers install home generators for their customers on an "at cost basis". The cost would be legislated to be the lowest possible triggered by large volume purchasing and installed by competitive bids of sub-contractors. 

Certainly this is not a universal remedy since most customers couldn't even afford the "at cost basis" charge. But, still, many customers who could take advantage of the opportunity would no longer be subject to the outage problems inherent in the power grid. 

As a society we believe that turning on a switch always results in electricity being activated. The cruel fact is, this is becoming a greater fallacy rather than a truism. The enormity of the piecemeal constructed electrical grid makes it subject to failure, think of the brown outs of past years. Within the year in California there was an episode of sabotage which had a possibility of bringing down the entire national electric grid. We are living on a precipice, teetering on its edge, caught without a parachute.

Ronald C. Downie

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