Not to get all commie or Hugo Chavez on you but I don't really get the whole power company thing anyway. If any industry was crying out to be nationalized it is the utility companies. They make obscene profits and pass all the debt on to their customers, all under the winking eye of the PUC. And they are by nature a monopoly since you can't have dueling grids or sets of power poles on our streets.
The capitalist mantra is to socialize the debts and privatize the profits and they have it down in spades at Sempra and SDGE. All of their blundering on the fire, for the shutdown, all passed onto us. Install Smart meters that were supposed to lower costs, it has raised costs. They are even raising the price on their solar customers for supposed grid maintenance, solar customers who are already giving much more power to the system then they are compensated for.
San Diego Gas and Electric announced in September that they plan on raising their rates more than $1.5 billion dollars to their customers in the next four years. Must need to remodel those expensive dachas they built for the high level executives in Baja. This after three straight years of record profits.
Michael Shames at UCAN says that their costs should actually be going down and found that SDG&E had inflated their costs by about $142 million dollars. The PUC found another $200 million. But they are essentially in a competition free market and can do pretty much anything they want, especially with a toothless, rubberstamping, Public Utilities Commission. Must be nice to get fat on the citizens and not have any demonstrable downside, since you pass all your costs on to the ratepayers.
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