Privatized electric company shenanigans

I read the Chronicle story last week about the latest electric company shenanigan: hiding the real cost per kilowatt-hour inside a fine-print contract and then demanding high cancellation fees once the deception is discovered. It’s embarrassing to watch companies treat people with deliberate contempt.

The privatization of our electric service has been one embarrassing shenanigan after the next.

In the beginning, we were told that our electric bills would go down. Everybody knew the legislature was lying, but we were forced to sell our ownership without public referendum. The electric utility belonged to the public, and it was worth billions and billions in future money, yet nobody let us vote yes or no. Naturally electric bills immediately went up.

And what did the public gain from the sell-off? We heard that our electricity owners were not following state guidelines for pole replacement. The electric companies decided to replace fewer poles despite knowing that old poles are likely to break during storms and are the leading cause of power outages during a disaster. Obviously electric companies are keenly aware that public dollars will be spent to replace broken poles following a disaster.

Next in line was the state website, powertochoose.org. The state hired a contractor to run the website and naturally the company took payoffs to steer customers to ‘preferred’ providers. After discovering the website shenanigan, the state removed the contractor to ‘restore integrity,’ but how much integrity has been restored when electric companies promote contracts with hidden fees?

Electric companies are being sneaky. Recently we heard about customers who were not notified that their electric contracts expired. Quite naturally, if a customer doesn’t renew their contract on time, the electric provider assumes the customer wants the highest possible rate based on peak-usage rather than offering courtesy and common sense.

The highest-possible-rate brings up the next issue. We are told that the electric grid has bottlenecks during peak-usage, and this causes rates to spike. This means there is a shortage of transmission capacity. Ok that makes sense for a moment, but why do we still have bottlenecks when our electric bills have been so high for so long? Evidently bottlenecks create money, which means private enterprise benefits by never fixing the bottlenecks.

These electricity guys are flush enough with our cash to run ‘feel good’ commercials on TV, so with all that money why don’t they stand up and tell us how they’re going to fix the bottlenecks so we don’t have to pay peak-usage prices?

This brings up another embarrassment. T Boon Pickens wants the public to build power transmission lines from his windmills in west Texas. He wants the public to guarantee his profit, yet Mr Pickens has water rights worth billions of future dollars. It’s embarrassing to see a rich man pay for expensive TV advertising begging for public tax dollars after we’ve taken a shellacking over privatized electricity. For crying out loud what would the public say if oil companies demanded tax dollars to build a pipeline?
 
The final shenanigan is this: I want to buy electricity from a provider in Louisiana because their rates are lower than the free-market electricity in Texas. Oh, but I can’t buy electricity from Louisiana because the Texas legislature sold my contract to privateers. I belong to a company in Texas. And they bought the right to treat me any way they want while I don’t have free choice to buy cheaper electricity or more integrity somewhere else.

Free market electricity in Texas has rankled public trust, yet nobody from the statehouse has opened a dialog with the public. Nobody has asked me what I think. Instead, our government continues to believe the free market will solve all issues. That’s false. The free market brought us the overpriced, under-serving health care system. Are we to expect the same outcome from free-market electricity? All indications are yes, and the proof is the amount of money being spent to woo customers with feel-good ads rather than face-to-face town meetings about our future bills.

Privatization of electricity is an embarrassment simply because nobody let us decide if we wanted it, and now the public is powerless to ask a hard question or reign-in the shenanigans.

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Has the Republican legislature admitted the Free Market doesn’t work?

Five years ago, the Republican legislature privatized electricity ‘so free market competition would lower prices.’

Prices went up.

But the legislature said that higher prices were necessary to spark investment in more power plants.

No new plants were built.

What was the money used for? The power companies bought each other so there was less competition.

Next the electric companies wrote customer contracts with hidden terms. Some customers got caught on technicalities that caused their bill to triple.

The electric companies said that triple-prices were necessary because of bottlenecks in the distribution network.

After that, we heard how electric companies cut their budgets for capital improvement: Meaning that bottlenecks would be preserved and equipment replacement deferred until the next hurricane when the public helps pay for repairing damage.

Just when you think it can’t get worse, the free market rolled out a publicity campaign wanting public money to build transmission lines to the private wind-power industry.

What an embarrassment. Billionaire T Boon Pickens put his face on expensive TV ads to tell us wind-power was free, all we had to do was give him billions in guarantees and he would give us free electricity.

How stupid are we?

Well, the electric companies have invented a new poll showing that Texans favor free choice in electricity. Actually there’s a shred a truth here because I want free choice to get electricity from Louisiana or San Antonio where prices are considerably lower.

Now, after five years of double-pay and double-speak, the legislature wants to regulate electricity prices. Hopefully, they will also pass regulation to force capital infrastructure investment and disclose executive pay and end gotcha-contracts.


Gene Haynes