How convenient

[altivo]

Yes, very convenient for CommEd to have two bow echo storms pass through the Chicago area within a year (plus a tornado last month,) allowing shallow minded people to believe their story that the "smart grid" would improve service.

In reality, the "smart grid" is yet another scam by the utility company as it seeks to make taxpayers fund the maintenance and repairs that it has been postponing and avoiding for half a century. Deferred maintenance is the reason that there are so many electric power failures in CommEd territory, and one of the reasons that their profitability continues to rise even as their quality of service continues to decline.

If the "smart grid" is such a great idea, they should have been funding it themselves over the past twenty years, rather than trying to make taxpayers fund it for them. Unfortunately, American management has long been dedicated to maximizing short term profits without any investment in the future. We would have a "smart grid" today if utility execs had been planning sensibly and taking only modest profits over the past 20 years.

Still without power, no estimated time of recovery...

Comments

[avon_deer]

Privitising profits and socialising losses again, I see?

[altivo]

Yes, that's what they learn to do in "business school" now. It's the accepted mode of operation.

The utilities have enough state legislators in their pocket that they managed to pass a law this spring to make taxpayers foot the bill for fixing their bad network for them, without any kind of payback or interest. At the same time, they demanded and received another rate hike, even as the state executive branch is suing them to refund part of the last rate hike that they obtained "under false pretenses." They've been spending millions of dollars on advertising to convince the public that an "intelligent" power grid will reduce outages and keep rates lower. Neither claim is provable. Fortunately the governor has said he will veto the "smart grid" legislation.

[avon_deer]

This kind of thing happens here as well. To be honest though as I am getting older I am becoming less angered by this kind of corporate practice, and MORE angered with the lack of outrage from my follow consumers. It's almost like they are begging to be shafted and asking for me. Even governor King (of the Bank of England) mentioned a while ago that the LACK of public anger of the bank bailout and subsequent "business as usual" attitude is a source of bafflement to him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/mar/01/mervyn-king-blames-banks-cuts?intcmp=239

I wonder if it is because they are genuinely thick sheeple, or they just feel powerless to resist.

[altivo]

I think that happens here because so many people simply don't understand finance or economics at all. Heck, they don't even know how to prepare their own food any more, and are entirely dependent upon fast food and frozen microwavable packages. Their lives are focused on television entertainment that completely hypnotizes them, and in some cases propagandizes them as well into quiet and compliant sheepdom.

Wells was right about his Morlocks and Eloi, but he missed the guess about where the dividing line between the two groups would fall. The real Morlocks are wealthy capitalists, fat, blood-sucking spiders hidden deep in their fortified lairs and using the rest of us as their unending supply.

[hrrunka]

Hmmm... Your supply seems no more reliable than my mother's, and she lives in a third-world country where theft of copper and transformer oil is a growing crime...

Hope you have power back soon.

[altivo]

Well, maybe a bit better than some places, but vastly inferior to much of the US or Europe, certainly. You see, the problem in the US is that absolutely everything is in the hands of capitalist corporations who are allowed to allocate resources in just about any way they choose to maximize their own profit.

The consequence of that is that rural areas are vastly underserved and overcharged, while dense urban populations have many service options and competitive prices. This applies to telephone, radio, television, electricity and all other energy-related utilities.

The windstorm that blew through here yesterday morning (and was over in five minutes) left a total of almost 900,000 subscribers without electric power. As of this morning, only half of them were back on line, with the power companies saying that it might be several days before all are restored.

On my way in to work this morning, I saw one example of the cause, too. Power lines along River Road, just a couple of miles from my house, were snapped in several places and still lying on the side of the road. It only takes a glance at the old copper wire, green with age and missing much of its insulation, and the utility poles with old green glass insulators and gnarled an rotted cross-bars, to pass judgement on the utility company that has ignored these lines for probably at least 50 years rather than maintaining and replacing them as should be done.

The line breakage was not caused by trees or pole failures, either. The broken places were well clear of that risk. Mere wind pressure of a brief gust of 60 or 70 mph wind was all it took to snap the wires. The poles are still standing intact, the old insulators are still in place. The wires themselves broke in multiple places and are dangling from the insulators to the ground. This sort of thing is inexcusable, and especially so in an area where 60 mph wind gusts are a fairly frequent occurrence year round.

Telephone providers take the same attitude, running the same patched and repatched lines and substandard service in our area for decades with no effort to improve. They have "buried" cables that are exposed on the surface of the ground at the edge of our property. We have reported and complained about this repeatedly, but nothing has been done about it over a ten year time span.