AEP & their ongoing fuckery about power outages.

[Backseat Driver]

3. What does a Dem do about Issue 35 in Hilliard, OH.

Last edited Wed Oct 26, 2022, 05:35 PM - Edit history (1)

My community wants to be a "green community" and authorize local suburban city manager/leaders to choose an aggregation process in which a specific "eco-friendly" corporation will provide 100% alternative energy as a group for ALL residential electricity payors of Hilliard at a "best rate." I thought this choice was already offered on a per-residence basis to the state's citizen payers via PUCO's approved list of providers. Why would they negotiate a lower cost?

I've been signed up, opted in, for a 100% provider serviced by AEP as approved by PUCO on their site for several years. If Issue 35 is approved, my city leaders will automatically move our household at some undetermined date in the future to the aggregated plan they've contracted with for what they've decided is the lowest cost to ALL resident payors. NOW (or later), I'd need to OPT OUT of their choice for this on a publicly available open database list. Evidently, the size of population in the city to be aggregated is important for negotiating the cost involved. No date of implementation has been decided, if ever! So forever more, they can vote and implement, when and if they want to do it.

To be sure, this is a power struggle of some kind...and so reminiscent of the RW refusing to follow mask mandates for the personal and public good or the SCOTUS reversing Row and pitching it to States' myriad rules. We have heart beat rules with some exceptions I like my personal freedom to choose my current 100% sustainable provider over AEP's infrastucture and billing because it's mine, but it's still based on the approval of PUCO - Who doesn't trust PUCO to do it's research into approving "good" providers, if they are indeed. Can aggregating get significantly lower costs from a provider, or is this just a vanity thing to be an "eco-friendly" town. I'm pretty sure PUCO also tracks the location statistics about who uses their site to select a provider whose corporate address, costs, terms, and whether or not "perk points" are given on associated energy-saving products. Do they also do research on which communities to target because more people DON'T sign up and choose to go with AEP's costs that also use fossil-fuels as a source, coal which runs AEPs plants, including AEP's several functioning nuclear power plants?

Do DEMs have a position on this issue?

I wasn't aware AEP had mandated repair/maintence time constraints to fix outages, IrisBlue. Our lines are underground, and we rarely have outages, but they've installed the smart meters capable of other shenanigans.