This Ohio utility was for deregulation before it was against it

[ksen]

This Ohio utility has an innovative plan to save coal power: force customers to buy it

A power utility in Ohio is attempting to shaft its own customers in a manner so shameless as to defy description. Yet describe it we must, for it represents everything backwards and perverse in the electricity sector and reveals that the interests of the institutions that provide electricity have come fundamentally out of sync with the interests of the citizens that depend on it.

Plus it's pretty funny, in a morbid sort of way. You almost have to admire the chutzpah. But to understand it takes a little explaining. Here's the TL;DR version:

• FirstEnergy, a power company that serves 6 million customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, owns a handful of big nuclear and coal power plants that are no longer competitive in power markets. Rather than shut the plants down, the company is asking Ohio regulators to force customers to buy the plants' power for the next 15 years, an enormous subsidy that would ensure FirstEnergy shareholders a steady, predictable profit even as its ratepayers get hosed.

Another example of free marketeers attempting to keep profits private while shifting losses to the public.

Good luck Ohioans!

 

[Tom Sawyer]

If the ratepayers didn't want to get shafted in order to ensure steady and predictable profit streams to the power company's shareholders, they should have picked their fat asses up off of the couch and offered their own bribes to the politicians in charge of making the decisions. Their laziness and lack of desire to take action is their own problem and the proactive members of the power company's board of directors shouldn'tbe the ones getting put out due to the ratepayers' mistakes.

 

[Axulus]

This Ohio utility has an innovative plan to save coal power: force customers to buy it

A power utility in Ohio is attempting to shaft its own customers in a manner so shameless as to defy description. Yet describe it we must, for it represents everything backwards and perverse in the electricity sector and reveals that the interests of the institutions that provide electricity have come fundamentally out of sync with the interests of the citizens that depend on it.

Plus it's pretty funny, in a morbid sort of way. You almost have to admire the chutzpah. But to understand it takes a little explaining. Here's the TL;DR version:

• FirstEnergy, a power company that serves 6 million customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, owns a handful of big nuclear and coal power plants that are no longer competitive in power markets. Rather than shut the plants down, the company is asking Ohio regulators to force customers to buy the plants' power for the next 15 years, an enormous subsidy that would ensure FirstEnergy shareholders a steady, predictable profit even as its ratepayers get hosed.

Another example of free marketeers attempting to keep profits private while shifting losses to the public.

Good luck Ohioans!

What free marketeers?

This seems to shed a lot of light on your past posts: an incorrect assumption that business owners and employees involved in a highly regulated industry has anything to do with them being free marketeers.

By the way, when is the Michael Moore documentary about the devastation wrought to American blue collar towns on the closing down of all these coal plants in similar vein as Roger and Me coming out?

 

[lpetrich]

What free marketeers?

This seems to shed a lot of light on your past posts: an incorrect assumption that business owners and employees involved in a highly regulated industry has anything to do with them being free marketeers.

They are not True Capitalists. Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo.

 

[ksen]

This Ohio utility has an innovative plan to save coal power: force customers to buy it

Another example of free marketeers attempting to keep profits private while shifting losses to the public.

Good luck Ohioans!

What free marketeers?

The ones managing (or attempting to manage) FirstEnergy.

This seems to shed a lot of light on your past posts: an incorrect assumption that business owners and employees involved in a highly regulated industry has anything to do with them being free marketeers.

Management pushing for deregulation of their highly regulated industry shouldn't be considered free marketeers?

Then who should?

By the way, when is the Michael Moore documentary about the devastation wrought to American blue collar towns on the closing down of all these coal plants in similar vein as Roger and Me coming out?

I don't know. You could email him and ask him.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Ah yes. First Energy. So Ohio passes a law saying energy companies must use less energy. So the solution is that Ohio Edison makes people pay for CFL bulbs... whether they ask for them or not (I had already purchased them for my home years previously... my 15 year old bulbs are starting to die off now). So your bill is amortized to slowly pay for CFL bulbs. Whether you ask to receive them or not. So this isn't a surprise. First Energy are pretty crookish. Large balls to propose this. Of course, the "over regulated" PUCO which is in charge of letting the utilities do whatever will certainly say no... right before blurting out in laughter and signing off on it.

This Ohio utility has an innovative plan to save coal power: force customers to buy it



Another example of free marketeers attempting to keep profits private while shifting losses to the public.

Good luck Ohioans!

What free marketeers?

This seems to shed a lot of light on your past posts: an incorrect assumption that business owners and employees involved in a highly regulated industry has anything to do with them being free marketeers.

Heh, heh. He said Ohio has a highly regulated utility industry.

Oh, regarding near the end of the article about pausing cleaner air standards, while technically just frozen, until the Dems take the House and Senate in Ohio, it isn't likely going to be unfrozen until a new bill is passed which eliminates them all together and forces Ohioans to spend more money to help support Big Utility.

 

[skepticalbip]

]Heh, heh. He said Ohio has a highly regulated utility industry.

Well, to be fair, he didn't say it was regulated by highly intelligent politicians who understood anything about power or that cared a whit about the general population.

Meaning that it was highly regulated by a typical bunch of politicians.