Power companies, despite their pandering protests, love these mandates. Since they are a government controlled monopoly they are guaranteed a “reseanable” return on their investment. Every government diktat from any level is a way of raising costs that results in a return on a larger base.
After Decades Of Doubt, Deregulation Delivers Lower Electricity Prices
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/10/13/after-decades-of-doubt-deregulation-delivers-lower-electricity-prices/
More than two decades ago, federal and state governments began dismantling electric utilities’ monopoly on generating electric power.
...After a decade of doubt, it has done precisely that.
The trouble is that while wholesale power prices have fallen dramatically, retail power prices have soared. This dynamic may drive a second and more aggressive era of deregulation.
Before deregulation, power was expensive and the grid was cheap. Today, the converse is true. Power is cheap. The grid is not....
“Power companies, despite their pandering protests, love these mandates. Since they are a government controlled monopoly they are guaranteed a “reseanable” return on their investment. Every government diktat from any level is a way of raising costs that results in a return on a larger base.”
Depends on your definition of ‘power company.’ Places like PG&E, yes. Individual power plants, no. It’s the utilities raking in the bucks.
Having a husband that has been at a coal fired power plant for 35 years, they do not love these mandates. These recent mandates have caused the retiring of 80,000 megawatts from the power grid. Have caused the closing down and loss of jobs at numerous power plants. One of these mandates costs the company that my husband works for 17 million a year at 1 power plant to remove the amount of a bushel basket of ping pong balls filled with mercury amongst a entire cooling tower full of ping pong balls in one year. That’s also not factoring in the cost of 1.2 BILLION dollars to put the system in to place..... So multiply that times the number of power plants in the country that had to do this? Who do you thinks going to pay for it? That’s a lot of money and to top it off, it took a reuseable by produce of flyash, to be used in concrete and now it’s stored in landfills, because the mercury turns the flyash a dirty color, so the concrete is not attractive and they don’t want to use it. SWEET.