| The rate hike seems absurd in a vacuum, but this is what happens when you put caps on what the energy companies can charge consumers for a number of years, forcing the power companies to sell electricity for less than it costs them. If this had been a 3%-4% rate increase a year for the last ten years, it wouldn't look so awful. When the population increases as much as CA has the past decade, with the requisite increase in engergy demands, while simultaneously preventing any new power plants of any type from being built, you finally run headlong into what could have been a preventable crisis. To go along with this, the atitude of the consumers in California has been a little irritating. When informed that the cap on rates was finally going away, quite a few stated that they wouldn't pay, instead merely sending in the amount that they were used to sending. The desire to receive something for nothing ran squarely into supply versus demand. That said, I'm firmly behind the fule cell technology, and look forward to it being available residentially. I'm merely pointing out that these prices increases are artificially inflated due to many years of zero percent increases, along with increased demand. Truthfully, I shudder to think about what kind of outages will occur on the left coast come summertime. |
