PUBLIC POWER FAILURE: In the midst of the blackout frenzy, we got our August electric bill yesterday. It said we used 645 kilowatt-hours in the July billing period, for which we owe the utility $80 and change. That's 12.4 cents per kilowatt-hour.

If you read this blog on Monday you saw a link to the PUCO's Ohio Utility Rate Survey for July, wherein we learn that the average cost of a residential kwh in Dayton this Summer is about ten cents; in Columbus and Cincinnati, about nine cents; in Canton, about seven cents. Of course the private utility corporations serving those cities are selling the same product -- 110 volt AC power -- that we get here in Cleveland, and making a profit doing so. Somehow they manage to do it a lot cheaper.

But okay, you say, we already knew that First Energy bills are ridiculously high, especially CEI bills... what's your point?

Well, you see, my bill didn't come from CEI. My ridiculously high bill came from Cleveland Public Power. Good old "Muny Light".

That's right, children. Cleveland Public Power is now one of the highest-priced utilities in the state. In the summertime, Muny Light bills are right up there with Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison, though still a little cheaper than CEI. CPP's Winter rates are a penny lower than its Summer rates, but averaged over the whole year the cost per kwh still tops eleven cents.

That's for a utility that generates none of its own power -- so when First Energy's surrounding grid went down Thursday, CPP's voltage went to zero in an instant, and stayed at zero until First Energy came back on line. That's for a city utility that wasn't even able to provide emergency power to the city's water system.

Over twenty years ago, Dennis Kucinich destroyed his mayoralty to preserve Muny Light as a competitor to CEI. Conscious of the large voter majority that supported Muny then, and continued to punish its enemies in subsequent City Council races, all mayors since Dennis have been vocal public power supporters. They renamed the system Cleveland Public Power, pushed a bond issue to expand it to the Southeast Side and the airport, sold its discount service to big commercial users as well as residents, and bragged about how much they were saving us. They also beefed up CPP's interconnection with "the grid", successfully pursuing a Federal case to force CEI to provide transmission services for power bought elsewhere -- from Niagara, from Kentucky, from downstate utilities and then from CEI/First Energy itself. CPP -- once the third rail of Cleveland politics -- became a consensus issue, a sacred cow.

There were flurries of controversy in the '90s over blackouts in CPP's decrepit West Side system, and some Councilmen made a stink about one modest increase in base rates. But for the most part, CPP receded from Cleveland's political consciousness. Which probably suited CPP's managers just fine -- because nobody was watching as their bills started climbing, and climbing, and climbing.

I'm proud to have been part of the fight to save and expand Muny/CPP many years ago, and I'm as committed as anyone in this city to the idea of a competitive public power system. But I think the time has come -- is, in fact, way overdue -- for a serious airing of CPP's operations and strategy. Why are the bills so high? Why is the system still totally dependent on expensive purchased power, with no baseload generating capacity of its own? Does this system have a plan for the future, and what is it? And how is it going to benefit the city's consumers, for whom the whole point of municipal power is to keep electric service reliable and affordable -- as opposed to vulnerable and expensive?