Why does my office smell like french fries today? It must be because I'm camped out at McDonald's... again. The number and duration of electric outages has been increasing lately.
Over a cup of camp stove coffee this morning, I was treated to front page quotes from my favorite useless FirstEnergy flack:
"We have multiple disciplines for multiple different jobs just ready and waiting to go," Meyers said. "I know you'll begin to see them move into certain areas. Exactly where and when, I can't tell you, because we still need to see where the need will be, but we're pretty confident that we'll be in need."
"Pretty confident that we'll be in need?" That's probably because continued scrimping on system maintenance has once again caused outages, and those outages are accepted and expected by the utility.
FirstEnergy is charging you money every month under the guise of maintaining their system. But if they don't spend the entire amount they collect, it gets added to the corporate bottom line to increase quarterly dividends. FirstEnergy will whine that they spend more than they collect every once in a while to repair storm damage. But, is anyone keeping track of this to true up what's collected with what's spent? No, of course not. And when a storm causes extensive damage, FirstEnergy will go and whine to the WV PSC that they need to collect extra to cover their storm expenses... and the PSC usually grants their request.
Therefore, FirstEnergy increases profits and shareholder dividends by failing to spend money maintaining its system, and maintenance failure causes unnecessary outages. FirstEnergy is throwing consumers under the bus in order to bow and scrape at the throne of profit.
P.S. My power is back on. I guess Todd didn't want to stop by and help us eat our melted ice cream after all.
Over a cup of camp stove coffee this morning, I was treated to front page quotes from my favorite useless FirstEnergy flack:
"We have multiple disciplines for multiple different jobs just ready and waiting to go," Meyers said. "I know you'll begin to see them move into certain areas. Exactly where and when, I can't tell you, because we still need to see where the need will be, but we're pretty confident that we'll be in need."
"Pretty confident that we'll be in need?" That's probably because continued scrimping on system maintenance has once again caused outages, and those outages are accepted and expected by the utility.
FirstEnergy is charging you money every month under the guise of maintaining their system. But if they don't spend the entire amount they collect, it gets added to the corporate bottom line to increase quarterly dividends. FirstEnergy will whine that they spend more than they collect every once in a while to repair storm damage. But, is anyone keeping track of this to true up what's collected with what's spent? No, of course not. And when a storm causes extensive damage, FirstEnergy will go and whine to the WV PSC that they need to collect extra to cover their storm expenses... and the PSC usually grants their request.
Therefore, FirstEnergy increases profits and shareholder dividends by failing to spend money maintaining its system, and maintenance failure causes unnecessary outages. FirstEnergy is throwing consumers under the bus in order to bow and scrape at the throne of profit.
P.S. My power is back on. I guess Todd didn't want to stop by and help us eat our melted ice cream after all.
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