I’ve been doing a little online wandering since getting back from our early morning walk.
First I noted a Seattle Times story on electricity prices, and learned the city is served by a public power company, City Light. That’s public as in “part of the city government,” not public as in “publicly traded corporation.”
It’s interesting to read through the history of City Light, now more than a century old, and wonder whether Hawaii–or at least Honolulu–would be a different place if our power grid had been developed by a public entity with public investment rather than left in control of a corporate monopoly.
I couldn’t help noticing one little item:
Seattle City Light has been lighting up lives in the city we serve since 1910, but our roots go back to the very beginnings of electricity. The light bulb was just seven years old in 1886 when the Seattle Electric Light Company launched the first incandescent lighting system west of the Rockies.
For the next 13 years, Seattle was served by a variety of “neighborhood electric companies,” since the direct current then in use could be transmitted only short distances. New alternating current technology soon made it possible to serve larger areas and by 1900 the small, competing companies were consolidated into the Seattle Electric Company. Rates were 20 cents per kilowatt-hour— six times Seattle’s current residential rate.
Can that be true? Perhaps it was written a while back and not updated? Honestly, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the rate info provided by City Light. Perhaps you can figure out what basic rate Seattle area residents are paying.
While thinking about “what if”, I stumbled over the budget proposal developed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Highlights can be found here and here.
So, while checking things progressive, I found the progressive agenda developed through a series of community discussions by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the legislative agenda of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group. It’s always interesting to see what other progressive groups have on their agendas.
And speaking of progressives, anybody know why the Progressive Democrats of Hawaii Blog went off a cliff in January and hasn’t been updated since?
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It is an interesting question whether a municipal bureaucracy would better serve a city than a regulated corporate monopoly.
One issue might be size. A local student who worked part-time with the City government in Honolulu swore to me that City workers were helpful and energetic, in sharp contrast to State workers. The City bureaucracy is smaller. (Another kamaaina told me that when custodial workers first work for the State, for the first month they are furiously hardworking, but after one month they adopt and slow-motion way of walking and acting. They assimilate.) It’s the same type of worker from the same culture, but the work environments are different because of scale. So whether a utility is public or private might not be as important as size. A large public bureaucracy might be as unresponsive as a large corporate monopoly (e.g., Microsoft).
Kauai has a utility cooperative, not a corporation. Perhaps they can do that because of their smaller size. Deservedly or not, they are considered to be more responsive than the local monopoly. HEI, by contrast, is multi-island, and owns a major local bank, and has a reputation for sluggishness. Which comes first, the large scale, the profit orientation, or the sluggishness? Of course, Seattle’s City Light might be even bigger, so the mystery deepens.
I have read a little on Seattle’s history. It was always known that Seattle would become an industrial powerhouse because of its abundant water power. In fact, hydroelectric dams and plants were being built as far back as the late-nineteenth century, even before there was any demand for such power. This is why Boeing is located in the region, because aluminum-based manufacturing requires vast amounts of cheap electricity. According to the City Light site, almost 90% of their energy comes from hydro, the infrastructure of which was laid long ago.
http://www.seattle.gov/light/FuelMix/
Seattle has a politically progressive tinge from its radical labor history. In fact, people used to joke about the “47 states and the Soviet Socialist Republic of Washington”. That also affects the business and government culture in an ironic way, which in Washington supposedly has a very professional and honest quality. East coast racketeers would move to Seattle to infiltrate the unions, but the racketeers would simply “disappear” thanks to tough union organizers. So the union-based political culture of Seattle evolved in a way very different from that of Hawaii’s union-based politics. (There is also a Scandinavian presence in Seattle, which also lends the city a certain vibe of mildly quirky but clean, bland, rational professionalism, an aesthetic that Apple and Google have adopted.)
Seattle’s power source is over 90% hydroelectric which is why it is so cheap.
Honolulu has the capacity to power the rail system with it’s own, expanded H-power plant. It never made sense to wholesale electricy to HECO (through Covanta) and then buy it back at retail. The rail line will have its own distribution system built in, so you only need one line to light it up.
I’ll be at the HIProgDem meeting this evening and will ask wassup with their blog and will report back to you by tomorrow morning.
In the SF Bay Area, a number of municipalities own their own utilities. In general, residents of those municipalities enjoy lower rates than those served by PG&E.
If the C&C owned the electric utility, then perhaps we, the ratepayers, would also own the generation plants and infrastructure, rather than paying for their cost but having them owned by HECO.
Since directors of HECO, like all corporations, have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to earn a profit or risk being sued, it seems clear that a well-run publicly owned utility would mean savings for ratepayers.
Then there are decisions made to insure profitability in the long term that would be unnecessary.
Then there is all the campaign cash that wouldn’t need to be paid.
Until recently, aides in your own state Senators and Representative offices were often on paid leave from certain major entities who will remain nameless.
Small steps…
A relevant blog entry by Henry Curtis:
http://www.disappearednews.com/2012/05/what-could-possible-go-wrong-with.html
What I am getting from the media is that there is a subterranean debate going now on whether HEI/HECO needs to be broken up the way Ma Bell was, and its various parts either made into county agencies or privatized.
The system we seem to have with this utility in Hawaii is neither capitalism or socialism, it’s really corporate welfare. In fact, it’s monopoly welfare. The energy monopoly in Hawaii is protected by law, but its not run to minimize costs the way public utilities are meant to, but to maximize them. Moreover, the purpose of a PUC is to tightly control a utility that has been granted a monopoly, but in fact in Hawaii the energy monopoly through its various enterprises (banking, real estate, shipping, insurance) seems to control the political system.
As far as I know, Hawaii is the only place in the US with this situation.
(The richest man in the world is perhaps the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who built an empire of successful businesses throughout the western hemisphere based on his monopoly of cell phone service in Mexico, which is his personal cash cow. I am not sure how honest his cell phone empire is in relation to the Mexican state. HECO seems to be the perfect model for his business strategy.)
Also, this situation exists because people don’t protest against it. People in Hawaii might grumble in private about their energy bills, but they never take action the way people in democracies typically do. In fact, there is the possibility that people in Hawaii actually like this monopoly arrangement, that having a monopoly exploit and even abuse them gives them a certain kind of feeling of security, much like the peculiar relationship between a prostitute and her pimp.
So the real problem with HECO might not be economic. The bigger problem is how it has contributed to distort the thinking of the population. It’s not just the policies and their practical consequences that matter, but the way it reflects dysfunctional thinking and, in turn, keeps the society from growing and diversifying.