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PG&E offers shot of darkness and light
By Carl Heintze
I've laid in a supply of candles. We are breaking up the furniture, one piece at a time and feeding it into the fireplace. I've got a shovel and a piece of charcoal and, like Abraham Lincoln, I'm going to do my checkbook calculations by firelight, writing on the blade of the shovel.
The energy crisis is upon us. There's too many of us and not enough electrical generating plants to give us heat, light and energy to run our millions of electrical motors.
No longer will I be able to punch the button and see the garage door rise slowly and magnificently on its own. From now on I'll have to hoist it myself.
We will spend the rest of the winter huddling in overcoats in front of the fireplace where our dwindling supply of firewood will be used to cook our meager meals.
We can hardly wait until daylight saving time returns so we can at least read in the backyard in daylight.
We'll miss TV, but not much. It was getting worse by the year anyway and most of it was aimed at a much younger audience. Now they'll have to find something to do in the evenings besides laughing at "Will and Grace" and "Dharma and Greg."
They could read books, but I suspect they won't even do that by candlelight.
The world is going to be sorted back into darkness and light and, like our ancestors, we are going to get more sleep, perhaps more sex, and we certainly are going to have to do without a lot of things that General Electric keeps telling us we need.
General Electric may bring good things to life, but the current energy crunch is not one of them.
We may use more physical energy--mainly to keep warm--but we aren't going to have much electricity or gas or oil or whatever, with which to run our vast array of machinery.
How did this all come about?
And why did it happen so suddenly and without warning?
PG&E and Southern California Edison would have us believe it just all sort of happened.
One year we had all the electricity we needed and the next it had all disappeared. Well, it didn't actually all disappear. It just cost a lot more. Or we used more. Or we underestimated how much we would need.
Or something.
Somebody was literally asleep at the switch.
PG&E, which has never been known for its forthright answers, says it's all our fault.
There are just too many of us and we are using too much power for too many things.
But it seems to be a little more complicated than that.
It all began when PG&E had sold off all its generating plants (for profit of some sort, one would assume).
That took both PG&E and Southern California Edison out of the business of generating power. They didn't really want to generate power, so they said. They just wanted to sell it.
So PG&E had to buy power just as we did.
They seem not to have figured out that someone might charge them more for the power they were distributing to us than they wanted to pay.
Anyway, that seems to be what happened. Instead of being a producer, PG&E suddenly found itself in the middle and, unlike Lucky Pierre, that was not a good place to be.
(Although in the long run it may be better than being just a consumer.)
So here we are. PG&E says it is powerless. (In more ways than one.) So powerless, in fact, they don't have any more money and may go bankrupt.
Someone--those shadowy outfits that now own the generating plants--are making big bucks.
And, as usual, the ratepayers (that's you and me) are going to get stuck with the bill.
To put it another way, PG&E would have to pay more to get the power they sold off in the first place when they sold the plants with which they were generating power.
They seemed to think this blunder (I can't think of anything else kind to call it) is not their fault.
Rather, it is us dumb ratepayers (who didn't see all this coming when we agreed it was fine to separate utility distributors from utility generators), who should pay the difference. Or so PG&E and the California Public Utilities Commission seem to think.
One wonders why all those high-priced executives in the utility companies--who are supposed to be keeping an eye on power requirements--didn't see this coming.
Either they were out to lunch or they weren't burning any midnight oil or they concluded, perhaps rightly, that ratepayers (that's you and me) are just plain stupid.
And they may just be right.
Thomas Edison, where are you now that we need you?
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
