Mercury News: Businesses blast electricity rate-hike proposal. The idea that businesses would carry the expense of the energy crisis on their shoulders has left some fuming and others screaming for a real-time pricing plan that would reward those who conserve during high-demand hours and penalize those who don’t — both on the residential and business levels.
It’s one thing to tell industry to pay more, on the principle — a correct one — that the largest users of power can more easily move to alternatives and conservation than residential customers. But it’s another to pretend, as the state Public Utilities Commission is doing, that putting almost all the burden on business is going to work.
Don’t take seriously the scare stories that droves of businesses will load up their trucks and flee Silicon Valley. Still, you have to ask if the PUC really thinks businesses will just eat the rate increases. Do these regulators think the higher business rates won’t come out in lost jobs and higher prices?
California has yet to even begin dealing with this crisis in a realistic way. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see what will make it happen, because politics and truly ugly business practices are getting in the way.
Even so, the PUC’s power plan is nuts. This is one case where “protecting” residential customers is going to come back and whack us, hard.