Power Schtruggles Continue

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. – G.K. Chesterton

This has been an eventful week: CT scans, echocardiogram, MRI, blood labs, oncologist and then infusion day on Thursday. Thursday, incidentally, started with the loss of power at 4:30 AM, lasted for 3 days and required an unplanned and undesired visit to the nearest Holiday Inn B&B available – which was 30 miles away. We are told the outage was due to a “historic” ice storm here in SE Michigan; historic only if you’re under 5 or have a very bad memory. The only thing historic about it was the extent to which utility companies have been allowed to shirk their most fundamental responsibility of providing adequate, reliable service.

I certainly understand force majeure. But I also understand that when you spend your time chasing the dual unicorns of wind and solar “alternate” power to make your government overlords happy it’s a fool’s errand. What kind of an idiot encourages their customers to use less of their product? So while you look for places to stick more solar cells (in Michigan!?!) and Cervantes windmills while simultaneously decommissioning coal and nuclear power plants you allow the existing infrastructure to rot in place because the alternate energy crap keeps the Public Service Commission off your back.

Funny then how you get more, bigger and longer outages when weather does happen. 

I could rant on for pages, having spent my career working for utilities and energy companies but I won’t, life’s too short. Suffice to say that today’s energy companies have made their deal with their governmental devils in order to maintain as much of their business model as possible.

The regulatory compact which grants  monopoly access to customers within a geographic territory in exchange for the utility promise to provide reliable, nondiscriminatory power at lowest cost has become a complete farce. Even where unbundling and deregulation took place before ENRON’s demise brought it to a screeching halt the benefits haven’t been realized. If anything, government regulators and energy company providers and distributors symbiotic relationship has grown tighter and more nefarious. Along with everything else that’s wrong with the world today add the regulation of utilities.

But I digress, I was going to give you an update on my health. Obviously my eyes are getting better, for which I am so grateful you can’t even know and I can’t thank you often enough for your prayers. My scans and echocardiogram were all ok but my brain MRI was “inconclusive” so I’ve been referred to a neuro-oncologist for further evaluation. Your prayers have proved positive in the past and I will appreciate them ongoing as the schtruggle  continues.

Earth: a global warming “fixer-upper”