Upset about FirstEnergy's pricey, hand-delivered light bulbs? You ain't seen nothing yet -- Kevin O'Brien
By Kevin OBrien
October 08, 2009, 3:59AM
There was a time when you and I could be trusted to change a light bulb.
In those days, powerful people who made weighty decisions understood that if a light bulb burned out, even the dimmest of us common folk would know enough to remove it from its socket, choose a suitable replacement and install it.
Apparently all of the weighty decisions have been made, because powerful people have now worked their way down to telling us what kind of light bulb we will use -- and even bringing some to us, apparently fearing that even the brightest of us common folk might botch the job.
How is it that an act whose very simplicity spawned a genre of humor, based mostly on ethnic, sexist and sectarian slurs -- 'How many (insert your favorite target for tactless, insensitive, mean-spirited, stereotypical humor here) does it take to screw in a light bulb?' -- has suddenly become a complicated, labor-intensive, expensive, public endeavor?
The old jokes have given way to a new one, with a reworked setup for the punch line:
'How many public officials and utility big-wigs does it take to -- well, you know -- every FirstEnergy Corp. customer?'
In just a few days, people dressed in green T-shirts and green caps will begin the rather enormous task of delivering two 23-watt, warm-white, compact fluorescent light bulbs to every residence FirstEnergy serves.
They won't ask whether you want them. They'll just leave them on your doorstep, in a bag that will also contain a brochure called 'More Than 100 Ways to Improve Your Electric Bill.'
They won't ask for payment, though. As you might expect with an electric utility, that's already wired.
These whiz-bang new light bulbs -- which cost FirstEnergy $3.50 each, and which you could buy all by yourself at any number of stores for even less if you were still trusted to do that sort of thing -- will cost you $21.60 for the pair. You'll pay it off over the next three years, at 60 cents a month added to your electric bill.
The bulbs you would buy at the store might come from China, like FirstEnergy's do, but they wouldn't come with delivery vans, or brochures, or paid bulb valets clad in green shirts emblazoned, 'What's the Big Idea?' -- a slogan that just couldn't be more ironically appropriate.
Those little customer-service extras add up. But they're not the Big Idea.
'Providing energy-efficient light bulbs is just one way we can help our customers save money while also helping the environment,' FirstEnergy's Web site proclaims.
Except that FirstEnergy really isn't 'providing' them. You are. FirstEnergy is just inflating your cost tremendously by having them brought to you.
And, by the way, the $21.60 you'll pay for those bulbs also includes a little assessment to cover the cost of the electricity that FirstEnergy won't be selling you because you use those bulbs. Think of it as paying money to save money so FirstEnergy won't lose money.
Thus, saving customers money isn't the Big Idea, either.
So why would FirstEnergy go to all of this trouble? And why would the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio sign off on it?
Here's where the powerful people who make weighty decisions meet the Big Idea.
This is all about global warming, of course. Or to be less specific, climate change. Or to be more nebulous yet, greenhouse gases.
The General Assembly passed a law last year requiring Ohio's utilities to reduce their customers' energy use by 22 percent, and to shift 12.5 percent of their power production to 'renewable' energy sources -- solar and wind, for instance -- all by 2025.
The Great Light Bulb Boondoggle is the leading edge of an energy-reduction effort to comply with commands the government of Ohio has issued to the tides of technology.
Those commands -- to foist immature and inefficient generation methods on consumers and push aside less expensive, more efficient power sources, like coal -- will be enforceable only at great expense to the public.
People are upset about FirstEnergy's light bulbs, as folks with sore ears at the PUCO will attest. But let's keep this in perspective: $21.60 is nothing, compared to the expenses we'll pay if the greenshirts drop a bag full of cap-and-trade taxes on our front porches.
So forget the PUCO. Call your senators and your congressional representative instead. Tell them you've had enough of command-economy enviro-thuggery. And invite them to put cap-and-trade in a place where a solar array would be both impractical and painful.
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bbc2
Posted by bbc2
October 08, 2009, 6:25AM
Great spin from corporate greed to insane environmental mandates. There's definitely an alternative reality and you are living it.
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oldmopar
Posted by oldmopar
October 08, 2009, 9:21AM
BBC2 how do you figure corporate greed? If any is living in an alternate universe it is you.
They added the cost of the bulbs, plus the money it takes to pay people to deliver the bulbs, drive to each location the bags that the bulbs come from are all added costs, include in that the money that they lose because they HAVE to reduce their energy consumption by 22% MANDATED by the state.
Of course a 3.50 bulb is going to cost 7 dollars each. That's what HAPPENS when the GOVERNMENT interferes with our lives by mandating these idiot laws.
We would not be dealing with the if the DEMOCRAT Governor that is a SLAVE to unions and Environmental wackos would not have signed a LAW DEMANDING First energy drop their consumption and production of electricity by 22%.
Which is FORCING THEM to FORCE us to drop our consumption.
HOW do you propose that everyone reduce their electricity consumption by 22%.
Next it will be remote controlled thermostats that the DEMS want for us to control our house hold temperatures.
Or how about targeted blackouts to help FE comply with this LAW.
Bottom line is this is what you get when you force people to comply with STUPID laws.........
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thurgood
Posted by thurgood
October 08, 2009, 9:31AM
So now Kevin O'Brien is that unnamed professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics? What next KO? A perpetual motion machine?
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lndep1
Posted by lndep1
October 08, 2009, 2:17PM
thurgood:
For someone who claims you are 'an ex-reader of the PD' (posted by thurgood, August 27, 2009, 12:24PM), you seem to find a way to read Mr. O'Brien's column every week.
Instead of reacting to your attack on Kevin, let me share with readers one of your statements from about six weeks ago:
'It would be no exaggeration to say that Sen.Ted Kennedy is the greatest Senator, ever, period...his achievements are too numerous to be listed'.(posted by thurgood, August 27, 2009, 11:53PM)
Readers, do we need to know any more about where thurgood is coming from?
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raleigh33
Posted by raleigh33
October 08, 2009, 9:34AM
oldmopar is right. We all may not agree with how FE handled this issue, but it goes way above and beyond FE's higher ups. I'm glad someone in the media finally has recognized that. Our government thinks that the more they make us do, the better off we are. Great article Kevin.
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smartthanu
Posted by SmarterThanU
October 08, 2009, 9:43AM
This article is exactly what one would expect from a dim-bulb like O'Brien. As truthful as a three-dollar bill and as contains common sense like a sieve contains water.
This is pure corporate greed. FirstEnergy is a cancer upon America. This isn't a right vs. left issue. It's plainly a large monopoly taking advantage of their captive customers. If you want to complain about something O'Brien, why don't you complain about the de-regulation that empowered FirstEnergy to it's un-touchable, do-whatever-they-like status? Oh, that's right, because the myth of de-regulation is a right-wing wet dream. And lord knows you won't ever say something against your Party....
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kevino
Posted by kevino
October 08, 2009, 1:27PM
SmarterThanU,
This is not pure corporate greed. It's not pure anything.
It's the kind of thing that results when people in government require something that people would not support on their own.
That is NOT a reference to the CFL bulbs. If they save consumers money, and the stats say they do, then consumers should come to the rationally self-interested point of view that, all other things being equal, they're worth buying and using.
What I see here is a play for corporate advantage that uses as leverage the government's power to compel consumers to do something other than what they perceive as desirable.
But let's not have any illusions about who is driving the bus. The outcome of the CFL delivery program is designed to be what government ultimately wants (an artificial decrease in the public's energy consumption), not what FirstEnergy ultimately wants (to make as much money as it can by selling as much electricity as it can).
So to get what it ultimately wants, government cuts a deal to shield a corporation from the full effects of government policy by allowing it to skew the market for CFL light bulbs, one pair at a time, in the corporation's favor.
Corporate greed in a marketplace where consumers have the power to decide what, when and how much to buy isn't much of a problem. It's regulated by the marketplace.
Corporate greed is most likely to flourish in a marketplace that is influenced or controlled by the government.
Other government commands will skew the marketplace for electicity much more in years to come. The more the government gets in ahead of consumers to pick winners from among energy-generation technologies -- something the government of Ohio has recently begun to do in a big way -- the more skewed the market will become and the fewer choices consumers will have.
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sicily726
Posted by sicily726
October 08, 2009, 3:30PM
Um, excuse me. Without rules, somebody will get hurt. Without rules and enforcement of GOVERNMENTAL nuclear regulatory regimes, FirstEnergy would have continued operating the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant with a gaping hole in one of its reactor towers, and would not have made the necessary repairs and safety improvements mandated after regulators discovered the hole in FE's Davis Besse nuclear reactor tower. Deregulation of the banking and financial services industry brought us the near collapse of our entire banking and financial system. As a result of deregulation of banking and finance over the course of about the past 30 years and the lack of enforcement of those rules that remained on the books during the Bush years, the banking and financial industry engaged in excessive greed and risk-taking, sowing the seeds thereby of its own destruction--and brought down the rest of the economy with it! When there are no rules, dire consequences result. If there are no traffic signals, red=stop, green=go, etc., terrible consequences follow, e.g., car crashes, losses, injuries and death. So, too, with everything else. FirstEnergy does not want to stop relying on burning coal to produce electricity, and instead wants to place the burden of reducing greenhouse gases solely upon consumers all while protecting its profits. All parties must take responsibility for reducing greenhouse gases--consumers as well as powerful utility monopolies like FirstEnergy (BTW, monopolies like FE defy the 'free market,' neoliberal economic theory gone ideology gone fundamentalist religion--esp. when it wants government to subsidize the coal industry upon which it relies). Wind and solar technologies work, and wind would be particularly successful here in NE Ohio (it's pretty darn windy here) for producing electricity all while eliminating the production of greenhouse gases in the process. It's been so windy the past week or so, FE could have captured that free energy and sold it to consumers at a healthy profit. But FE does not want to do what is right for the environment because the cost of converting from coal burning to wind and solar would (temporarily) cut into its profits--never mind the fact the government would give it tax credits for converting to green alternatives like wind and solar. Our air and water and thus our fish is dangerous to eat due to mercury from coal burning power plants--that's where our mercury poisoning is coming from, not light bulbs. Spare us the rhetoric of the neoliberal economic theory gone fundamentalist religion that even Alan Greenspan himself admitted while testifying before a Congressional committee last fall had flaws; specifically, he told Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, 'We've found a flaw' in the theory. The banking and financial crisis that begot the economic crisis provides overwhelming evidence that Milton Friedman was wrong. Those countries whose banking and financial systems had tighter rules and regulations, such as Canada and Sweden, avoided consequences as dire as those we here in the states and the UK have faced, and provide evidence that the Keynes was right. Try an Economics 101 course (both micro and macro). It might help 'illuminate' reality for you.
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bills16309
Posted by bills16309
October 08, 2009, 9:45AM
I already have these bulbs in my house (with the exception of my dining room which is on a dimmer switch). I switched years ago and have a supply that will last me for some time. They have dramaticaly reduced my energy bill, true. But if I want more, I can get them myself. This is ridiculous!
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tremonster
Posted by tremonster
October 08, 2009, 10:03AM
I'm hanging a sign in my porch window...Beware of Light Bulb sniffing dog...lol...look here, I don't care if they charged a penny extra, it's wrong KO is right, I called my representitives yesterday...
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sameolds
Posted by sameolds
October 08, 2009, 10:36AM
THIS IS GOVERNMENT GREED / CONTROL! You are all nuts if you think it is not. All this Puco and energy garbage exhists to make you feel good while the GOVERNMENT mandates what is happening. I guess you do not need to worry about manufacturing comming back to Ohio with the mandatory energy CUTS. DO YOU UBDERSTAND THAT? your Democratic / Liberal party wants us to become poor like all other 3rd world countries. That way we do not pollute! The manufacturing jobs are NEVER coming back due to these policies. First Energy just tried a slick move as will anyone who cooperates with government. Many of your energy choices are subsidies of the larger companies. They give you a little lower price for a specified time, but in reality the price is still going up. and up. But you feel like you got a deal as the government and these PUCO organizations laugh all the way to the bank. REMEMBER it is not PUCO, it is the Government that sets these rules for these organizations to exhist and make you feel better. DID you know limits were set to your consumption by the OHIO general Assembly? Were you upset they were setting them? Or just after you start paying for the effects. Healthcare, Cap and Tax, Illegal amnesty, once it is passed there is no going back, just more and more CONSUMPTION and increased PRICING. deport 20 million illegals and cut energy consumption, save on government program subsidies, reclaim jobs for Americans, it can't be done? But yet you believe the government can do everything else. There is much more GOVERNMENT GREED than Corporate GREED. Not much different between repub and Dems these days.
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sotregirl
Posted by sotregirl
October 08, 2009, 10:45AM
First Energy is a business and a very profitable one at that. You can't blame them for wanting to continue being profitable, though even I'm impressed at the hubris of charging customers for electricity that they DON'T use.
The real culprits here are PUCO and all legislators - Republican and Democrat and Independent, because they ALL do it - who pass laws and enforce laws without doing their homework about the impact of those laws and the many ways companies like First Energy can use the law to screw customers and make money.
Without that law, we all could have switched to energy-efficient light bulbs, saving ourselves $100 per year if we use them in 10 light fixtures, and First Energy would have had to suck up that loss. Instead, they get to make us pay for being energy efficient.
The best way to fight them is to switch to CPP if you can, and if you aren't in CPP's service area, conserve as much energy as possible. Of course, then First Energy will raise their delivery rates to cover the cost of the energy you're NOT using.
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chuxtable
Posted by chuxtable
October 08, 2009, 11:10AM
The PUCO, while involved, is not to blame. [De-regulation was not the idea of the PUCO, or even FirstEnergy. It was the idea of several large corporations (notably Canton's Timken Company) who thought they could get lower rates. Despite warnings that this would not happen (it didn't) they pressed and pressed until they got some state legislators (notably Wooster's Amstutz) to push the issue.] I would encourage everyone (whether you are a FirstEnergy customer or not) to write or call your state rep and state senator. What you need to know is that FE president Tony Alexander did not advance up the corporate ladder because he knew a lot about how to produce, deliver, or market energy. He is president because he knows how to influence politicians. And the poor guy had to take a pay cut this year and will barely make over a million dollars. Let the government know that you will make your own purchase decisions.
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galt57
Posted by galt57
October 08, 2009, 11:13AM
If this CFL bulb program eventually goes through and the cost is added to our electric bill, the dollar amount should not be hidden and buried in the cost of distribution. The cost should be broken out in a separate line item and clearly labeled 'CFL bulb'.
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someveracity
Posted by someveracity
October 08, 2009, 11:21AM
Unfortunately, whether we receive the lightbulbs or First Energy is stuck with them, we are going to pay for them anyway as the price will be passed to us.
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sarap939
Posted by sara
October 08, 2009, 11:29AM
Oh Kevin, you almost had me! I was rolling right with you...until you turned this into a piece about cap-and-trade. Boooo! I totally agree this was a horrible idea--especially considering there is no way to insure customers will actually use the bulbs...unless they come in your house and screw them in for you! For a fee, of course.
But really, the thing that bothers me is, whether or not you agree that man-made toxic sludge and smoke is causing global warming, IT IS causing pollution. As in, bad stuff. As in, it's bad for our home, the Earth, and our health when the pollution ends up in our bodies. Certainly you don't disagree that we cause pollution?! And the bottom line is, much of it is not worth it; much of it could be controlled, reduced, eliminated--but ONLY if companies are forced to do so. Big corporations have proven they will NOT do the right thing (sometimes I wonder if these people have children and care about the world their future generations will live in?!). Why won't they do the right thing? In search for the glory and power of the almighty dollar!
Yes, some things are going to get more expensive if and when the gov starts cracking down. That will really make people think, won't it? It will actually have an impact on their lives, maybe finally get them to change their ways. What strikes me as the really, REALLY screwed up part is, we wouldn't need any kind of government involvement if we would do the right thing on our own. No big corp would have to cry and moan about the government hurting their business if they were busy adapting to (what should be obvious by now) a more concerned focus on the health of the environment by the people. And we wouldn't have to cry and moan if we started paying attention to just what we spend our money on--who and what we endorse with every dollar we spend--and started supporting those who do the responsible thing. Oh yeah, and were as outspoken on more topics as we are when little stuff like this light bulb thing happens.
And really, what are these anti-environment people trying to protect? The right to pollute?! The right to do business and 'make profit' at the expensive of the health and welfare of other humans and the planet? Sorry, we all share this place and I, for one, don't want it all mucked up!
I'm no fan of big gov, but don't forget, gov is not just some foggy entity, it is people.
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kevino
Posted by kevino
October 08, 2009, 1:25PM
Sara,
The skies above Cleveland and Pittsburgh today don't look anything like they did in the 1960s, when big, dirty industries weren't subject to anti-pollution laws.
Cleaning up the worst of it was fairly easy. All we had to do was close our steel mills, oil refineries and the like, and the biggest pollution problems disappeared (along with millions of jobs). I think it's fair to say that most Americans aren't unhappy with the results.
But we reached the point of diminishing environmental returns quite some time ago. Now, the most marginal improvement in air quality comes only at tremendous economic cost.
It's true that some things we do industrially are 'bad for the earth,' but we need to be willing to ask, 'How bad, compared with the economic and practical costs of not doing them anymore?' There is a balance to be struck. Environmental purists can't win them all.
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kbhret
Posted by kbhret
October 08, 2009, 11:33AM
ONLY AN 'OHIO' BASED COMPANY COULD SPIN AN ENVIRONMENTAL MANDATE AND TRY AND MAKE MONEY OUT OF IT AT THE EXPENSE OF PEOPLE WHO ARE ALREADY TAXED TO DEATH IN THE 5TH HIGHEST TAXED STATE IN THE U.S.
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plewis1956
Posted by plewis1956
October 08, 2009, 11:42AM
Kevin
You are so right. Corporations, particularly monopoly corporations, must be closely and vigorously regulated by the government (i.e the people) or they will continue to engage in the kind of rapacious conduct you have described. Thank God for the PUCO which has once again protected the people from capitalism wthout competition.
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william99
Posted by william99
October 08, 2009, 11:45AM
The lifetime of a fluorescent bulb is six times that
of an incandescent bulb. The ratio of candlepower
output per watt of input is four times greater
for the fluorescent bulb. I've replaced seven
incandescent bulbs with fluorescent bulbs and
I will save $210 over the next five years.
But it is altogether wrong for anyone to be
forced to do this.
This nasty little bit of compulsion is due to
FirstEnergy. That's a company in the private
sector. Kevin, I thought you held a
Manichean view of the world in which
everything good is a product of the
free market and everything bad comes
from the government. This case doesn't
fit your view"
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