Electrifying CT and the Unintended Consequences
The Law of Unintended Consequences haunts us all, but most especially in politics. Because we hold elections for our public officials every two to four years, their vision of the future often does not go beyond the term of office in which they are governing. So when they propose and enact legislation, rarely do they contemplate the long term consequences of their actions.

Nowhere is this lack of concern for long term consequences becoming more evident than in the management and provision of the State of Connecticut’s electric power. No matter what scheme is proposed to ensure that the state will have an adequate supply of electric power, it is becoming painfully obvious that we are going to buy our way out of this mess.

Now hundreds of politicians in Hartford and Washington just love to make the evil power companies the scapegoat for all that has gone wrong. Chris Powell of the Journal-Inquirer has written eloquently about that subject, so I will not go into that. They’ve made their share of mistakes, to be sure, but, frankly, they’ve only been operating in the environment that government has structured for them.

And now we say that we want more power plants to be built, but, over the past forty years, state government has sent this industry nothing but signals to the contrary. We here in Connecticut, through the people that we have sent to Hartford, have painted ourselves into a corner with layers and layers of rules and environmental regulations built up over years and years of political posturing. We are about to reap this harvest, and the unintended consequences of all that posturing are coming to light.

Forty years ago, it was possible to build a power plant in this state that would have been fueled by coal, the nation’s cheapest and most abundant fossil fuel. Now it would take so long to obtain the permitting and the scaremongers would be in such full throat that the companies in the business of building such plants find this alternative out of the question. So scratch coal-fired power plants to provide electricity to us.

And nuclear plants? Have you ever talked to anyone involved in this industry? In the name of “safety” these builders and operators have to document the purchase, installation and maintenance of every nut, bolt and can of paint used in the entire plant, whether or not it has anything to do with the actual nuclear reactor. And all this is not for safety. It is the product of successful lobbying by environmental activists who figured that if they couldn’t kill the industry outright, at least they could hobble it with regulations to the point where it would be uneconomical to construct the plants. And they have succeeded. What a victory. So that economical power source is out.

Next the oil-fired plants came under fire. Remember all the howling two years ago about the “Sooty Six” and how proud our leaders in Hartford were to have successfully demonized these power sources? And how proud they all were that the owners of these plants would be required to spend umpteenine millions of dollars refitting these plants with new gear, not one dollar of which will be used to produce so much as one electron of power? And how they preened before the cameras at how they had all saved us from environmental Armageddon? It was nauseating. But they did succeed in taking another power source off the table. Good work.

And now we are down to this: the only fuel found to be “acceptable” is natural gas; the most expensive fuel alternative of all those available. And….and….we don’t want to allow LNG docks to be built in Long Island Sound to make sure an adequate supply (and thus lower prices) exists!!! I guess we expect this fuel to just magically appear at the plant site from who knows where.

So grab your wallet and hang on tight, because we are in for a rough ride. No one in government will look farther down the road than the next sound bite, and the unintended consequence of this lack of foresight is going to cost us all a pile of money.
- posted by Steve Knight @ Saturday, March 11, 2006