For the 6 months being reported, it sounds like Belco wasted $783,000 worth of fuel due to outages that required them to resort to using inefficient plant and machinery – and this in turn reduced their profit (because they used more fuel than the fuel adjustment covers).

What they omitted to mention is the fact that they don’t have to pay for the excess population and greenhouse gases they emit by running old equipment. The public picks up that tab!

This is what happens when you operate inefficiently and pay high dividends to share-holders for years rather than re-invest in your plant….. so suck it up and make better choices going forward.

What do we want…..Energy Reform
When do we want it… NOW!

BELCO was never investing in its infrastructure even when we had many more workers here. Was the BELCO plant taken better care of when they had more customers? No. When they instituted the facilities charge a while ago, they said it was because they needed to upgrade the facilities – well. why would you not upgrade when you had more customers and times were good? Instead they kept the profits to themselves, with dividends to shareholders now and then. It seems BELCO really needs to look at its business model rather than blaming everyone else for its problems.

The key sentence here is the decline in population – for every home/apartment/commercial building not using electricity, that means that the cost needs to be shared amongst the rest of us. If the cost to Belco is $10,000, then sharing that between 100 homes is $100 each; shared between 200 homes is $50 each. We need more ResPop – not just to rent our properties, but to reduce our electricity costs!