MANIPULATIVE GIANTS

Eversource is the name of  the largest New England power company. It is a bastard of many unholy alliances between corporate entities. It has a logo with green in it. However, judging by its massive fleets of various trucks, its huge lighted company parking lots and its gaseous generation plants, green is just another color used by its graphic designer. 

Here in Massachusetts, we have been granted the privilege of choosing our own electric generation company. Eversource both generates and distributes electricity, so it competes with the various other generators of power. Electric power is a casino of variable rates and slight of hand. If you take the time to actually download and examine your monthly electric bill, you will most likely suffer a degree of eye strain. It is badly designed and hard to decipher. It is the penultimate tribute to Ronald Reagan's privatization. Sleaze covered by mandate and euphemism.

I recently chose a green energy generator, a small company which consolidates power generated by wind and solar from across the country and offers it to consumers through the distribution chain maintained by monsters like Eversource. It's like streaming video channeled by independent producers through one streaming service. My green energy would be the video. Eversource would be Roku, Google, Comcast, etc.. 

My electricity bills where I now live are astronomic. We live on the 4th floor of a 10-year-old apartment building in a large complex. It is corporate and misrepresented, in my opinion, as luxury living. We have climate control, a necessity on the top floor of a building where our neighbors beneath insist on leaving sliders and windows opened on 90-degree days. Some of them leave their unit doors opened on hot days and suck the landlord's air-conditioning (and ours) from the hallways. It's a lovely crowd here.

Eversource refused to accept the green energy generator's request to alter my account. The greens' electricity is actually cheaper than Eversource's own generated electricity. Imagine that. Eversource told the green energy company that there was no functioning electric meter at my address. I was informed of this in a letter from the green energy company after several other mailings which seemed confusing. Finally, I confirmed the authenticity of this information in a phone call to the green-energy's company representative. That representative was audibly horrified when I told her I had monthly electric bills of metered use from Eversource dating back three months. I suggested a fraud investigation. 

Today I received an Eversource mailing which says we two old gentlemen are using 58% more energy than our neighbors in similar units. Imagine that. We are aware that many of the nearly three hundred units in this complex contain more than two adults and some also contain several children...in the same square footage as our unit. Climate control aside, I am sure these units have lap tops, televisions, tablets and phones sucking power off routers, chargers and cable TV boxes (which we do not have). I assume these other tenants eat, do laundry and dry clothes in the supplied electric washer-dryer set in each unit. And so on.

Comparisons are indeed odious, but really? There is something rotten in all this. 

When I moved into the house I recently moved from, I hired a congenial plumber to update its heating system. The plumber is an older master, near retirement age. One day as we chatted he told me his wife was then a senior employee of Eversource. He enumerated the many benefits she brought from her job to their life. They were impressive. He summed it up by saying he could easily retire at any time because their future was guaranteed  to be fat by his wife's job. I am sure he was being truthful. I am not sure that Eversource's statistics on our use of electricity are as truthful.