Don’t dump on NC ratepayers

Good article, very reasonable.
However, the above is not the conclusion of the article.
I agree that the shareholders should take a hit, but the customers as well as the officers of the company should as well.

 

ABSOLUTELY concur, but in the end it's gonna be the customer who pays.

Could be worse....
They COULD be PG&E customers!!

PG&E Fire Responsibility More Important than Shareholder Dividends, Says Judge

 

If they didn’t pass the savings on to customers, I agree, they are 100% responsible for paying to fix this.
As I understand it, energy producers rarely, if ever have a monopoly. They bid on providing power. Those that bid lowest, typically get the bid.
Utilities definitely have a monopoly in most cases, and some utilities are their own energy providers (although they still have to bid out their power on a regional level).

 

We have the same issue in Virginia. Lawmakers have decided to mandate coal ash sites be excavated and relocated to lined landfills in someone else's backyard, and they have allowed the utility (Dominion) to charge customers for the cost. Probably does not make sense to excavate all of these sites (Obama EPA only requested capping in place). But the public is demanding wastes be taken AWAY (wherever that is) and elected officials want to appease the public. My god if these people only realized how many Superfund sites were capped in place, if we decided to relocate all the waste we'd be relocating a million waste sites.

I wonder if there are enough truck drivers in the USA for that and road construction projects etc. Currently our trash company is cancelling pick-ups due to truck driver shortages.

 

That's different from who is 100-percent going to pay for it....which are:
*taxpayers - who always want to pay the lowest taxes
*investors - who always want to get paid the highest rates.
*rate payers - who always want cheap rates.

All of these people benefit from other people cutting corners.
Yeah.
You can scream at big business, force the utility into receivership, and make them change logos, stationary and company ossifers but in the end.......we still need electrification and the mess still needs to be cleaned up.

PG&E might be a good test case.
Fun fact:
If I'm reliably informed, they were ALREADY ON PROBATION from the last time they killed people, and the environmental bills from last summer's fires IN CALIFORNIA are going to have be paid....to say nothing of the lawyer's bills.
It's going to be BILLIONS...and forcing the company into bankruptcy isn't going to clean up the ground water or haul away the toxic sludge from the fire.

The only system that would be worse than the one we have NOW would be (IMHO) Socialism....since you cannot sue the government or.....(more importantly!!!) arrest them.
When you start seeing people up in the head shed getting arrested, then they're going to start seeing around corners and fixing some of this stuff...BEFORE the problem gets to be too big for a company to handle.

 

That's because companies don't want to pay truck drivers.

 

...could be...our formerly reliable trash disposal company was American Disposal Services, who recently got acquired by Waste Connections, and now service has quickly gone to pot.