In my area we have had excellent and consistent service from NS power up until last years hurricane. Yet here we are a year later with winds far less than last year and power is out. But this has been consistent for months. Small storms and bang power gone. How does ns power keep justifying price increases when then apparently have no intention of actually fixing things and making them better? Maybe Mr. CEO and other managers shouldn’t be getting any bonuses and investors should not be getting payouts. Privatization is such a scam.
Because spending money to maintain the grid removes money available to pass back to the shareholders and as the CEO is held to account by shareholders, less money for shareholders means the company is not doing as well.
I hope those shareholders get to sit in the dark for a week without power. Maybe they’ll get the hint.
The trouble is that the shareholders are mostly not local investors or even individuals at all. They are institutional or corporate investors. In fact, I bet a lot of the shareholders are members of mutual funds that have no idea what they hold shares in.
Justify? Lol, it’s a monopoly.
Even if they were making an appropriate attempt to meet the future needs of the always-growing power grid, and granted they’re probably nowhere close, it takes way more than a year and a modest price hike to make a large scale power grid redundant and reliable in the face of escalating natural disasters. It’s going to need massive investment. Like wartime, drop everything we used to do or think was important and pivot the whole economy levels of investment; when you start considering all the things that will need to be built, redesigned, or upgraded because climate change keeps happening and is going to keep happening. We’re going to have to make efforts to not only:
- Start to change the current trend to make it stop happening eventually but also
- To deal with the already happening results of what has already happened to the climate and
- Prepare for things that are going to continue to inevitably get worse for a long long time because we’ve already changed ongoing trends beyond our realistic ability to reverse
No government, no utility is going to wave their magic wand and fix this. Reality doesn’t care about your power bill. Reality doesn’t care about the power company’s equipment and infrastructure. Reality doesn’t care about any of us. And reality is coming. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to change the way we live. It’s going to change our financial systems. It’s going to change the way we organize our society. This is just a mild sample of what’s to come and if you want it to stop you’re going to need a time machine, not some CEO to listen to your plea nor government intervention either. In a few decades, the idea of whining about power reliability and price is going to seem quaint and outdated, either because we somehow pulled off a miraculous turnaround despite all the odds or because we’ll be in a modern dark age (maybe literally) that makes the great depression look appealing by comparison.
