Independent contractors, not PG&E employees, installed the SmartMeter at my house last Saturday and I am not thrilled about it. The whole SmartMeter program is simply a ruse by PG&E disguised as a benefit for the public in the form of both minimizing the ecological impact of electricity production as well as supposedly lowering the demand for foreign oil. Pouring honey in the ears of the people.
If it is a ruse, then what might its actual purpose be? The SmartMeter is the piece of infrastructure that PG&E has to have in place before initiating a new rate structure that will charge a premium for peak hour usage. A coincidental side benefit of the SmartMeter program for PG&E is it also gets to lay off all meter readers. Result? Another couple of hundred more good paying jobs disappear from the economy and revenue coffers.
I”m sure of two things. One is that when PG&E begins to sell this plan to the people there will be a slick and expensive Madison Avenue media blitz telling us how great it will be for the environment. The other is that PG&E will bend every statistic it can to try to convince us that while maybe peak-hour usage may cost a little more, off-peak production will cost less and whoever changes usage habits to accommodate the new pricing schedule will save a few dollars and be a hero to the Earth.
I do not trust PG&E for a second. I”ll bet you the average household utility bill will increase at least 20 percent the first year and another 10 percent two years after that.
What PG&E is doing is nothing new in corporate America. It is trying to repackage the same product it has been selling for decades as something new and better in order to get more money for it. Think bottled water. Even though most of it is merely filtered municipal water in a fancy single-serving bottle, it”s still just water, but bottlers get $6 a gallon for it instead of 80 cents. This is all the result of clever marketing. The advertising agencies know how easy it is to sell something to people these days if you can somehow convince them the product is good for the environment.
It”s my opinion that the green movement has morphed from a grassroots effort to raise awareness of the damage we do to our planet into a media juggernaut that is now powerful enough to make some people believe that methane from cattle production is melting the polar ice, which is raising the sea level and anyone who eats a steak is helping to drown all the people who live in Miami. Of course these people have no answer for why prior to the 1850s, the 750 million Bison that roamed the plains didn”t harm our atmosphere one little bit.
In open market competition, this kind of marketing is legitimate although somewhat underhanded, but PG&E should be held to a higher standard than any free enterprise corporation because it”s supposedly a public utility (a joke unto itself).
If I were somehow magically dubbed king of California, I”d take over control of PG&E and have it run it as a true municipal utility, not a publicly traded corporation. The top execs would make $200K, managers and top engineers get $100,000, office staff and workers get $60,000 to $80,000, all with the same benefits as all other state employees get. Nice high wages for good important jobs to help beef up the economy.
Suppliers will be subject to the same open bidding procurement protocol as any other state program and will be subject to independent audit to weed out sweetheart deals and kickbacks. Instead of paying tens of millions to top execs, giving away billions in industry discounts and paying way too much for sweetheart supplier contracts, that money would instead be the seed of an endowment fund that will provide for future equipment, maintenance and upgrades as well as a reasonable research program, all of which would be subject to independent audit, the results of which will be public record.
Electricity rates will be a simple matter. True cost of production and distribution per unit, plus a fixed percent for infrastructure investment, divided by number of units used equals cost per unit. Cost per unit times number of units used equals amount due.
SmartMeters would be an unnecessary expense. (I wonder how badly we got fleeced on the SmartMeter hardware and distribution contracts? We”ll never know, but we would under my plan.)
I am willing to bet that with this fiscal agenda, household utility bills drop 25 percent, industry still gets all the juice it needs and the new “California Public Power” company easily covers its overhead, pays into its future endowment funds and adds a reasonable margin to cover ups and downs in operating expenses, which would be a fixed percentage that would take a ballot initiative to increase. All financial audits except private individual salary info would be posted quarterly to a public website where all it takes to gain access is your customer account number.
To me, this is the way a “public utility” should be run. It should be run like it answers to the people and not run like a publicly traded for profit corporation that answers to its stockholders. Ya know, the way PG&E is currently run.
Anyway, my point is that the SmartMeter program is nothing more than a way for PG&E to repackage thier same old product to sell at a premium price, disguised as a benefit, exactly like the fat and juicy (for the stockholders, I mean) bottled water industry does.
My humble opinion, of course, but you”ll see.
James Bone
Clearlake
