The power was out at my house for so long that I fell asleep and never got around to writing about how terrible Connecticut Light & Power & Excuses was, and how its momma doesn’t dress it very pretty, and how we should all drive on up to the Yankee Candle store and illuminate that way, because it is cheap and reliable and it smells good.
It’s too late now. All the good jokes have been written and it would sort of seem like kicking a puppy.
But, unlike some utilities, I have many resources in reserve; which is to say, my load forecasting skills are such that I can write a column about something I’ve already decided not to write about, if the deadline looms and it’s time for lunch.
Here are the Top Seven Reasons Electricity is So Expensive in Connecticut, Even When We Turn Off the Lights As We Leave the Room.
Aha, you say. Another stinging indictment of Big Electric, which probably conspires with Big Pharma and Big Banking and Big Newspaper Publishers to ruin our lives.
No, no what fun would that be? The following is a ringing defense of Big Electric in Connecticut. I see what happens when they turn off the juice. I don’t want to make them mad.
1. Not enough coal. Coal is cheap, in its dirty, efficient fashion, but the Connecticut utilities are being bludgeoned into shutting down the last few of their coal-fired plants, to be replaced by something Barack Obama invented in his kitchen sink, which will save the environment, but cost about $867,000 per quart.
2. If you live in a state with a rising income tax, healthy property taxes, a sales tax, a “tax the millionaires” mentality, a promise to state employees that they won’t be laid off, local zoning boards whose job it is to guarantee that normal people can’t afford houses; an “open space” instinct to protect rare squirrels and the unobstructed views of rich people, then you have a state that no one wants to move to. No residential growth means higher electric rates for the folks who have been tricked into staying.
3. Speaking of property taxes and other mysterious taxes and fees, the jokers in state government use the utilities as a secret little tax collector — who is free to pass the costs right along to customers, just as God intended.
4. No power-gobbling industrial growth. Most of the folks engaged in heavy-duty metal banging have moved to warm, happy, low-tax jurisdictions — and taken their electric bills with them. We’re stuck paying the tab.
5. Eat lobsters. They deserve to be punished. Environmentalists insist on “protecting” Long Island Sound and lobsters and stuff, no matter what it costs, how dubious the claims, and how much we could use access to supplies of cheap natural gas and LNG.
6. Your electric bill includes a few trillion dollars to pay for a big “put the utility lines underground” project in Fairfield County, because the rich, snobby people in Fairfield County just aren’t like you and me. The transmission system — one big, happy family of New England states — unraveled on this one. The rest of the New England states said, fine, if you want to pamper the investment bankers, you pay for it. We’re not contributing a dime.
7. BANANA. That’s what it’s called in Connecticut, where utilities have succumbed to expensive demands that all their plants and generators and such things be indivisible. BANANA. “Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone.”
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
