Death panels - Granite Grok

Death panels

Check his pulse...
Check the pulse…

In this morning’s Portsmouth Herald, Representative David Borden, Chair of the House Committee on Science & Technology – the committee of oversight for the Public Utilities Commission – writes of a ‘disturbing’ report regarding the health of NH’s only non-nuclear utility with electricity generating capacity.  He writes that ‘PSNH has lost all of its commercial and industrial clients to other electric suppliers. This is possible under the state’s partial deregulation program.”

What he fails to write is that PSNH has lost ‘all’ of its commercial and industrial clients’ because the burden of regulatory compliance under which PSNH is forced operate has made its fuel and operating costs so shocking high that they have made the cost of producing electricity shocking high – and seriously unattractive – as well.

What he fails to write is that the Committee on Science and Technology has been complicit in forcing astonishing and unnecessary environmental legislation onto PSNH, the huge costs of which are allowed – by law – to be recovered from customers.  Anyone who remembers the economic debacle that was the ‘fire sale’ of the Seabrook nuclear plant will also remember the term ‘stranded asset cost’ – investment costs incurred by regulated utilities at the behest (and with the blessing) of the Public Utilities Commission, but costs still needing to be repaid, costs not recovered through the bargain-priced ‘fire sale’.  Costs we paid on our electric bill for years and years, costs made the obligation of customers, not of the short sighted regulators and legislatures who allowed them to be incurred.

What he fails to write is that what could have been the sale of ALL of PSNH’s generating capacity during the 90’s was stopped mid-stream, abandoning them to try to compete with utilities whose only remaining plant and equipment consisted of poles, wires, switching and substations; utilities whose “electricity’ is all purchased at wholesale.

What he fails to mention is that while the “partial deregulation’’ permitted PSNH’s industrial and commercial customers to buy their electricity from those de-regulated utilities, it left PSNH in the unenviable position of having to recovering all of its costs from residential customers who, until only the last few years, were not allowed to purchase their electricity from de-regulated companies.

What he fails to mention is that the Committee on Science and Technology relentlessly pursued placing the blood-sucking leeches of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and Renewable Portfolio Standards on the near-cadaver that was PSNH in order to fund a politically-correct program of handouts – using even more fees and taxes piled on the bills of the remaining captive customers – to well-connected “environmental” groups and pals whose sole purpose in life is to end fossil fuel generation as we know it, doubling down on increasing PSNH’s cost of compliance while working to move any remaining customers to unreliable, overpriced forms of “alternative’ energy.

Now he is worried about ‘The viability of New Hampshire’s economy’ which, ‘in part rests on our ability to provide prospective high-tech manufacturing companies with a well-trained work force and low-cost and reliable electricity’?  Now he is worried about “… how to assure sustainability for our largest electric company’?

Do I oppose deregulation?  No, but what the legislature and the PUC did – and is still doing – to PSNH bears no resemblance to deregulation, it’s more like a slow and deliberate strangulation and then being shocked when PSNH starts gasping for air.  Is it too late to fix it?  Maybe, I don’t know, but I do know that after nearly 40 years in the energy business, I have no faith in the ability of any regulatory scheme to find a real-world, economic-based solution.

But don’t worry, Representative Borden, I’m sure that all that burgeoning, high-priced, sustainable, politically-subsidized wind and solar and biomass and rainbow and unicorn power will bridge the gap.  However, you and I may just not live long enough to see it.

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