I'm really sorry to have to be asking, but I really need help. My partner and I are about to get our water and gas shut off, as well as possibly our electricity. My bank account is negative and I'm running out of options. I'm disabled and lost my job because I couldn't keep up with the quotas. My girlfriend is disabled but still working full time, however, it isn't enough. I've been doing Uber Eats/Doordash almost every night for weeks now and can't find anything that will hire me when I can only work 15-20 hrs.
In total, in the next few days, I need $991.15 to get positive and pay these bills
Absolutely anything would help! And I would be beyond grateful!
Below are (in order) my Gas bill, Electric bill, Water bill, and my bank account:
If you can help us, we will be forever in your debt.
We need utilities to succeed now more than ever before. But the definition of success needs to evolve.
Excerpt from this Op-Ed from the New York Times:
To keep the lights on, many utility companies are proposing to build dozens of new power plants that burn natural gas. North Carolina-based Duke Energy alone wants to add 8.9 gigawatts of new gas-fired capacity — more than the entire country added in 2023. Using their own projections of soaring energy demands as justification, these companies are also pushing back on the climate targets set by their states and the Biden administration.
If state regulators sign off on these plans, they will be gambling with our country’s future. We need to electrify everything from cars to appliances to slow climate change, but we won’t be able to reach our climate goals if we power all of those machines with dirty energy.
There is a better way. But to get there, legislators will need to overhaul the incentives driving utilities to double down on natural gas, so that they can turn a profit without cooking the planet.
Companies like Duke, Dominion Energy and Georgia Power argue that they need more gas-fired plants to reliably provide power during times of peak demand — for instance, on a hot summer weekday afternoon when home cooling systems and data servers are all humming at maximum output, and the grid strains to keep up. But those peaks tend to materialize only for a few dozen hours per year, and there are ways to deal with them that don’t require a massive amount of new methane-burning infrastructure.
The real reason the utilities want to build these plants is quite simple: The more stuff they build, the more money they make. Regulators let utilities charge their customers enough money to cover what they spend on assets like combustion turbines and wires, plus a generous rate of return (up to 10 percent) for their investors. This longstanding arrangement incentivizes power providers to build expensive things whether society needs them or not, in lieu of lower-cost, cleaner options, and to invoke their duty to keep the lights on as a post hoc rationalization.
Fortunately, utilities have plenty of ways to meet this new need.
They include “virtual power plants” — when technologies such as home batteries, rooftop solar systems, smart water heaters and thermostats are linked together and managed via software to provide the same services as a conventional power plant. Utilities in Vermont, Colorado and Massachusetts are already using them, to quickly respond to rising demand at a much lower cost than operating natural gas combustion turbines. According to one estimate, virtual power plants could lower U.S. utilities’ costs by as much as $35 billion over the next decade.
Utilities could also accelerate efforts to replace outdated transmission lines with newer ones that can carry double the electric current and to bring more battery storage online. They can compensate customers for using less energy during times when demand is high and invest far more in energy efficiency, helping customers to adopt devices that use less electricity.
All of these solutions would save customers money and reduce carbon emissions. They could, according to a Department of Energy analysis, meet the entire projected growth in U.S. peak electricity demand over the next decade.
Utilities: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [source]
“John Oliver discusses the incredible amount of power we give electric utility companies, how weakly regulated they are, and why they get such bad Yelp reviews.”
Texas’s deregulated electricity market left millions in the dark last week. For the past 20 years, its consumers have paid more for their electricity than state residents who are served by traditional utilities, a WSJ investigation found.
On January 1, 2002, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature and then-Governor George W. Bush deregulated power generation, stopped using regulated power utility companies, and left its consumers to purchase power from retail power companies rather than a local utility. They called its new policy “customer choice,” and formally stated the reasons for the new law:
“The legislature finds that the production and sale of electricity is not a monopoly warranting regulation of rates, operations, and services and that the public interest in competitive electric markets requires that, except for transmission and distribution services and for the recovery of stranded costs, electric services and their prices should be determined by customer choices and the normal forces of competition.”
Republicans argued (as they typically do) that deregulation would save Texas consumers enormous sums of money, as the power of a free marketplace would force power providers to offer more competitive pricing.
Bullshit.
The recent winter storm caused widespread power, water, and heat loss across the state as a direct result of deregulation. At the same time, private Texas utilities jacked up their rates to the legal maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour. As a result, individual consumers accustomed to paying “around $30 for electricity” have been billed as much as $5,000 during a five-day period, and nearly $17,000 for the month.
Nevertheless, Texas Republicans are still claiming that the benefits of deregulation justify the occasional deadly risk, because Texans would supposedly have had to pay much more for reliable regulated power.
Again, bullshit.
“Deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities.”
Deregulation has led not only to disastrous power failures and astronomical prices in the worst possible weather, but also to higher prices overall. Exactly the opposite of what Texas Republicans repeatedly promised their constituents.
But hey, the private power utilities who collected that extra $28 billion dollars-and who won’t be held liable in any way for their failure to deliver power during the storm--are probably pretty happy about it.
Study: Utilities knew about climate change as early as the 1960s.
Excerpt from this story from Grist:
America’s electric utilities were aware as early as the 1960s that the burning of fossil fuels was warming the planet, but, two decades later, worked hand in hand with oil and gas companies to “promote doubt around climate change for the sake of continued … profits,” finds a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
The research adds utility companies and their affiliated groups to the growing list of actors that spent years misleading the American public about the threat of climate change. Over the past half decade, oil companies like BP and ExxonMobil have had to defend themselves in court against cities, state attorneys general, youth activists, and other entities who allege the world’s fossil fuel giants knew about the existence of climate change as far back as 1968, yet chose to ignore the information and launch disinformation campaigns. Recent investigations show the coal industry did something similar, as did fossil fuel-funded economists.
But while the role Big Oil played in misleading the public has been widely publicized, utilities’ culpability has largely flown under the radar. So researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara began collecting and analyzing public and private records kept by organizations within the utility industry.
The authors analyzed public reports authored by utility companies or their affiliated groups between 1968 and 2019, as well as collected documents from watchdog groups. They found 188 external and internal documents referencing climate change from utility companies, research groups, trade associations, and other organizations closely linked to the industry. Two of the affiliated groups, the Edison Electric Institute and the Electric Power Research Institute, which authored or distributed most of the documents in the study, are the utility industry’s main trade group and research arm, respectively.
Emily Williams, a postdoctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the lead author of the study, told Grist that the documents provide a sense of when the utility industry’s climate denial began — and how it has evolved over time. The takeaways are stark: Utilities became aware of the dangers of burning fossil fuels in the 1960s and ‘70s, and acknowledged the risks it posed for the industry. “If [climate change turned] out to be of major concern, then fossil fuel combustion will be essentially unacceptable,” an article by the Electric Power Research Institute stated in 1977. But for the next two decades, those same utilities promoted false doubt about humanity’s role in climate change and tried to delay action. An article from the Edison Electric Institute published in 1989 said that, “any plan calling for urgent and extreme action to reduce utility CO2 emissions is premature at best.”
Here’s the link to the Sierra Club report about electric utilities, their progress toward renewable energy and their climate “pledge.” The report is entitled, “The Dirty Truth About Utility Climate Pledges (Version 2)” dated October 2022.
Excerpt from this story from Sierra Club:
The next decade is critical to averting the worst impacts of the climate crisis and transforming our economy to run entirely on clean energy.
Studies show that unless utilities retire all their coal plants by 2030, abandon all plans to build gas plants, and aggressively build out renewable energy resources, we risk destabilizing our livable climate. Despite this pressing deadline, utilities are either not moving fast enough toward these goals, or not moving at all.
Dozens of utilities may have pledged to become “carbon neutral” by 2050, but research conducted by the Sierra Club in its inaugural Dirty Truth Report showed that nearly all utilities in the United States lack the plans needed to move toward clean energy in the time frame needed to avoid the worst of the climate crisis. In an update to that report a year and a half later, Sierra Club found that most utilities have continued to drag their feet, making little progress in the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.
PG&E has a plan to avoid setting off more wildfires by putting 10,000 miles of powerlines undergournd. But it's currently burying 70 miles of lines a year.
A few years ago, we experienced a fire resulting from a storm that knocked down a giant tree which pulled down power lines. The live wires were dancing over our neighbor’s house, and the house started burning. The fire fighters were doing their best to contact the local utility (Exelon/Commonwealth Edison), but it took the utility several hours to turn off the electricity feeding into the neighborhood. In the meantime, the fire spread to our fence and was charring our garage, in which were our cars (meaning gasoline). By the time that was all sorted out, we had incurred thousands of dollars of damage and the neighbor’s house had to be completely renovated. As a consequence, the utility erected utility poles that are much taller and sturdier and have bundled the wires together using these huge clips, which theoretically strengthens the overhead power lines. We’ll see. Since then, no trees have yanked down the lines. Moral of the story: yes, bury the lines.
Excerpt from this story from Grist:
On July 18, California’s Pacific Gas & Electric revealed that its electrical equipment might have sparked the Dixie Fire, a blaze that has since become the second-largest in the state’s history, torching 700,000 acres and destroying more than 1,200 structures. Three days later, PG&E, which emerged from bankruptcy last year after amassing some $30 billion worth of liabilities from wildfires, announced something more surprising: To prevent future blazes, the state’s largest utility plans to rip out 10,000 miles of overhead power lines in high fire risk areas and bury them underground.
The plan caps a years-long push by utilities to bury more power lines in the face of worsening weather and rising risks from climate change. According to PG&E, it’s the largest such effort ever announced by a U.S. utility: Pattie Poppe, the company’s CEO, described as a “moonshot” on a call with reporters, But whether PG&E can turn its announcement into action is a big “if,” as the utility has not estimated a timeline for the project, and it’s not clear that the benefits will outweigh the multi-billion dollar cost.
PG&E’s announcement, nearly two years after its equipment sparked the deadly Camp Fire, was “a clear recognition that something has to change,” said Julie McNamara, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But if this is not part of a holistic plan that is clearly reckoning with all of the challenges afoot, then this is a distraction.”
Burying power lines isn’t a new idea. The majority of electrical distribution lines, as well as the larger, higher voltage transmission lines that carry electrons over longer distances, remain overhead, said Sadrul Ula, an energy infrastructure researcher at the University of California, Riverside. But utilities have long buried lines in city centers, as well as parks and recreation areas like golf courses, largely for aesthetic reasons. Even though it can cost as much as ten times more than installing power lines overhead, utilities are now burying an increasing number of new lines. That includes power lines serving nearly all new residential and commercial developments in the U.S. They do it to meet customer preferences, help keep the lights on, reduce maintenance needs, and to protect against the growing threat of extreme weather.
