As we are beginning to realize, there was a great deal of cynical misdirection in the way deregulation was positioned, and the resulting ugly mess was predictable. Utilities are stretched so thin, and are so bent on profit, that outages are becoming a year-round phenomenon. In 1997, when we started this project, we expressed doubt about the promises of nationwide energy wheeling. Wanting to make the sale, bought politicians and utility apologists assured us that costs would go down, like they did with telephone deregulation. We pointed out that this makes a logical jump that doesn't land in reality.
Telephones move information, but power lines move energy.
Information gets cheaper to process every day, but energy sources get scarcer, and consumers are doing very little to lighten the load. As we predicted in '97, the political promises are being broken, and cynical utility profiteers are ramping up the costs. Already, the cost of cooling far outweighs the cost of heating in the U.S., but this is due in large part to terrible building design. The Solar Utilities Network believes that the first step to sustainable energy usage is a thorough and wide knowledge of the costs and alternatives, and that starts with a working knowledge of who pays how much for what amount of heat and cool. Since this is a little more complicated that looking at the bottom line of your energy bill, we hope you'll take the time.