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What Consumers Want is Most Likely Not What They'll Get

By Harvey Wasserman

In Congress, Rep. Kucinich's bill embodies most of what green consumers want. No stranded costs. Community choice. A Renewable Portfolio Standard to guarantee that a growing percentage of our energy comes cleanly, from the sun. Consumer privacy. Protections for low-income working people, the elderly and the young. A blueprint for a clean, safe, equitable energy future.

As word has spread, state-by-state confrontations are increasingly fierce. In Pennsylvania, a consumer revolt took billions out of the stranded cost bill. In Texas and Ohio, bitter statewide battles erupted over stranded costs, community choice, renewables, cogeneration, unionization — the whole gamut.

With a strong green-consumer movement and deep divisions between the utilities and industrials, grassroots advocates forced a Republican legislature to make Ohio the second state with strong community choice options. It failed to win a Renewable Portfolio Standard. But Ohio's green consumer movement did get guarantees for low income consumers and a range of other popular measures. In the century-long tradition of northern Ohio utility arrogance, FirstEnergy of Akron threatened to sue.

Meanwhile Florida and some 25 other states hang back, waiting to see how things sort out.

A wise move. Amidst the global-warmed summer of 1999 (the hottest on record), widespread breakdowns and blackouts led the New York Times to warn of "deepseated problems at the nation's largest electric power companies." The Times reported on its front page that the nation's big utilities were grappling badly not only with deregulation, but with "Aging and long-neglected equipment, new and sometimes confusing transmission networks and unprecedented demands for electricity to power the technology behind a booming economy."

In short, having devoted a century of greed to cutting comers and resisting public control, and 50 years to beating back renewables and efficiency, the IOUs have stuck the nation with a poorly maintained, dangerously unreliable and increasingly inadequate infrastructure, poised at the brink of catastrophe.

At very least, because of cost-cutting at our remaining hundred-odd commercial reactors, deregulation increased the odds that such a catastrophe could be radioactive.

As the millennium dawns, the only firm guarantee about electric deregulation is that IN final resolution is uncertain — and years away. The U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately have a say. But legally and politically, as always, the business and politics of moving electrons can be counted on only to shock and transform us.

Solar and wind are still officially scorned as marginal. Fuel cells and photovoltaics are dismissed as fringe players (though far less so with each new rolling blackout). Efficiency is shunned by utility operators now back in the business of selling all the electricity they can.

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From the forthcoming book, The Last Energy War: A People's History of Electric Deregulation. Reprinted by permission of the author and Seven Stories Press, 140 Wafts St., New York, NY 10013.