"Well, my familiarity comes with one of its predecessor companies, the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, which in the 1970's, according to records on file at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and in hearings before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, actually conducted a campaign, a tireless campaign, to knock Cleveland's own municipally owned electric system out of business. And they did it through many devious ways of stopping MUNI Light from being able to make repairs on its generator by interfering with the city council. By then, the MUNI Light couldn't buy power from other companies outside the state when they needed to do it. Leaving C.E.I. as being the only customer that MUNI could turn to where they then, in some cases, tripled the cost of power in order to run up the municipal system's debt. And the resistance of this campaign was when MUNI Light needed a transfer of power, C.E.I.'s engineers operated in such a way as to deliberately cause on outage on the MUNI system. I mean, this is a company that has operated a nuclear reactor knowing that it was defective. The reactor has a hole in the head, this is the one at port Clinton, Ohio. They have ignored safety precepts. They've basically had the regulators wink at them. And it's just kind of symptomatic to see them being involved in a massive blackout affecting 50 million people."
<snip>
"First Energy has consistently failed to invest in upgrade of equipment. Their emphasis has been on holding onto their cash so that they maintain the fiscal stability of their company while Wall Street is looking at it. I can understand that on the one hand. On the other hand they have laid off personnel that have been involved in maintenance. They have not adequately repaired their transmission lines for the point of where they could hold up under any kind of changes in power. And so, we have a condition right now where a company that has already been under close scrutiny for mismanagement of a nuclear power plant located on Lake Erie, deficiencies in a power plant that came close to creating a breach in the reactor vessel, and which came close to contaminating our lake, and the fresh water for the whole Great Lakes region. This company is now, you know, once again, under scrutiny, and frankly, it ought to be. And in a larger sense, Amy, this is symptomatic of what happens with deregulation."
<snip>
"Well, you know, the right of utility franchise is vested in the public. People don't always know that. They don't know that the utilities get their permission to operate by having a system set up at a state level, which gives them a permit to operate, franchise, in exchange for service and for a fair rate. Well, what's happened is, as utility monopolies have grown, they have been overcharging people for power and they haven't always had the best service. And we have a condition now where utility monopolies are gaining great power, no pun intended, politically, and are able to set the rules so they can keep growing, and, in effect, no public ability to be able to set the rules. I mean, the growth of Enron was a prime example, where Enron received help from the administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, being able to control wholesale markets and drive up the cost of electricity. I mean, what people pay for electricity is no small matter. And the government has a lot to do with whether the price is gonna be fair or not. And, you know, with this whole deregulation that happened ten years ago, we were told that this is going to decrease U.S. energy dependence through increased domestic production and conservation, while that hasn't-you know, we haven't seen the conservation. We were told that if they restructured the electric utility industry, it's going to spur competition. Exactly the opposite happened. And we were told that as they work to ease licensing for nuclear power plants that this is going to work to the American public's benefit. Well, actually, the easing of licensing for nuclear power plants at this point represents a threat to this country because the nuclear power plants that have been relicensed, and it's more relicensing than new licensing, have not necessarily been up to safety standard. So you have this whole energy system that needs to be transformed and it needs to be transformed towards renewable energy and sustainable energy and away from nuclear and away from all these nonrenewables, where these energy companies right now are just trying to drain these systems, run them into the ground, not make improvements and as a result, you get the kind of exposure to blackouts which occurred last week."
Full text at
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/18/1418203
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