UTILITY BLOGGER: I just caught Henry Gomez's very nice post at Tech Link last Wednesday about my "utility blogging". Coincidentally, I've been struggling for the last couple of days with a complicated entry about the big disparity in electric rates between northern and southern Ohio, and what I think public leaders -- Democratic candidates for governor and attorney general, in particular -- should be doing about it. That should be posted soon, but maybe it's time for a few prior words about my obsession with energy and utility issues.
The main source of my interest in this stuff is that I've spent a large part my adult life learning about it. I came back to Ohio in August 1976 at the invitation of some folks who wanted to start a consumer organizing project in Akron (does anyone out there remember Bob Loitz?), and immediately found myself in the midst of a grassroots campaign to pass four state ballot proposals for PUCO and utility reform. The issues went down in flames, of course -- I believe the utilities outspent the "Yes" campaign forty to one, or something like that -- but I got a crash course in the theory and politics of electric and gas rates in Ohio.
That was the beginning of a fourteen-year stint of utility consumer organizing and advocacy -- first with People Power, a neighborhood-based organization in Akron that led coalitions against Ohio Edison and East Ohio Gas rate hikes; and then with the Ohio Public Interest Campaign (now Ohio Citizen Action) where I was Energy Program Director from 1980 through 1989. I helped research, strategize and organize campaigns to keep nuclear plant investments out of consumers' rates; to block Ronald Reagan's proposed deregulation of wellhead natural gas prices; to protect households from winter shutoffs; to preserve and expand municipal electric systems in Cleveland and elsewhere; and to get utilities to invest in conservation and "demand-side management". (One small point of pride -- getting Amory Lovins to come speak in Cleveland way back in 1984.) Without getting into twenty-year-old war stories (summary: we won some, we lost more), I got to be pretty knowledgeable, for a guy without a degree in law or engineering, about Ohio's utility industry, the PUCO, the many enduring ways they work together to screw the rest of us, and the politics of the whole sick process.
After 1989, I left consumer organizing behind to work in neighborhood development, and later in community technology. But I still try to pay attention, and I still pay gas and electric bills. And working on community strategies for IT literacy and access has brought me back around to the arena of utility regulation -- this time, the emerging public utility of fast Internet access.
To an old utility geek, the territory looks depressingly familiar.
No, TCP/IP networks aren't all that similar to power lines or pipelines, and the economics of information isn't very much like the economics of heat and light. What is familiar, though, is the PUCO's (and General Assembly's) routine devotion to the financial interests of the companies it regulates, rather than the public interest it exists to protect. Also familiar -- the way money flows around Ohio's political process to reinforce and protect this special relationship between the regulators and the regulated. Also familiar -- the way not just consumers, but upstart technologies and providers (renewable and distributed power generators, wireless network innovators), are kept on the margins of the regulatory process, outside looking in.
Like schools, roads and taxes, utility regulation is always there on the list of big-ticket state government functions. But unlike the other three, utility regulation isn't mostly about public budgets, and it doesn't divide the broad public into competing interests. Instead, it's about billions of private dollars flowing, in small increments, from all of us to a handful of legally privileged private corporations.
It's not surprising that these corporations work so hard to dominate the policy arena. Nor is it surprising that policy makers -- elected officials as well as professionals -- tend to gravitate to the industry side of the table, where the grants, fees, jobs and campaign contributions are to be found.
But I do find it surprising that utility consumer advocacy is so rare among politicians these days. After all, there aren't many issues that unite the material interests of so many diverse Ohioans -- poor and middle class, urban and rural, business and resident -- against such a small circle of privileged insiders. There aren't many issues that make themselves so obvious on a monthly basis. There aren't many issues in which the nexus of power -- PUCO, utility lobbyists and legislators -- is so clearly understood and distrusted by the public. There is no other area (can you think of one?) in which private monopolies are still enforced, protected against economic and technological competition, and guaranteed profitability by state law.
So I really don't understand why some opportunistic Democrats (and Republicans, too) aren't raising hell about utility issues, both old and new. But they're not. So I figure I should.
Plus, as a northern Ohioan, my electric and gas bills are big enough to piss me off on a regular basis. What's better for blogging than that?