Some More News - SMN: The Perverse Incentives of Utility Companies

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Hi. Oh no! The quest for ever-growing profits has led to screwed-up priorities, corruption, and disaster in the U.S. energy industry! This is Part 3 in our series looking at how the Profit Motive creates bizarre and often grotesque incentives that push industries to do the opposite of what they should. Get your BETTER THINGS ARE NECESSARY AND POSSIBLE merch here: https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/20713359-better-things-are-necessary-and-possible Check out our new compilation series, CODY COMPS here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqFkH8uXvlJbGeJKUChW4VGxCMhKQ9cJ8 Please fill out our SURVEY: https://kastmedia.com/survey/ Check out our new series SOME THIS! - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkJemc4T5NYbcqTbNmyH3uqutwcj8fHf3 Support us on our PATREON: http://patreon.com/somemorenews Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews?ref_id=9949 SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh  Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gA4sEokJZ0ma4uA0WxK8IvnoGc0jDd-U-XZy9NCc6BE/edit We Should Start Incentivizing Better Things Get an immune-supporting FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit athleticgreens.com/morenews and try AG1 today. High-performance beauty and skin-care products made with clean, skin-loving ingredients. Right now, you can get 15% off your first order when you visit thrivecausemetics.com/MORENEWS. Wildgrain is the first bake-from-frozen box for artisanal bread. Plus they have amazing rolls, pastries, and even handmade pastas. Sign up at Wildgrain.com/morenews and, for a limited time, you can get $30 off the first box PLUS free croissants in every box. Prose is the healthy hair regimen with your name all over it. Take your FREE in-depth hair consultation and get 15% off your first order today! Go to Prose.com/morenews for your FREE in-depth hair consultation and 15% off.Support the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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CircusVloggers.com presents Profit Over Lives, Energy. Yes, we are talking about the energy industry and that's gonna be fun. What with all the zappy zaps and the oily oils. And if you're interested in energy, you should try Sick Daddy's Crystal Meth. It's a refreshing start to your day. Meth, rampage through life.

Just go to the Highway 40 underpass on 18th Street in St. Louis and ask for the Kyle Driver. Wow, we are not picky with our sponsors right now, but thank you for your support, the Kyle Driver. Okay, so energy, that's a broad word. Even if we narrow it down to the energy industry, we'd still be talking about fuel extraction, refining, distribution, power plants, electrical grids,

nuclear, cars, gas stations, and I guess technically meth and cocaine. Sick daddy's meth, get it before the cops do. Anyway, so we should narrow it down even more. After all, in our last videos, we talked very specifically about private prisons and insurance and hospitals. But I bring up the scale of this subject

because I think it's important to note that we will no doubt be omitting a lot of dysfunction in the energy industry as a whole and all over the world. But for this, we're honing in on industries that have been poisoned by a seemingly inappropriate profit motive, which is why I want to talk about utility companies. You know, our power grid, light switches, hot bulb action.

You could argue that much like healthcare and our prison system, utility companies aren't something we opt into having. We don't get a choice in what utilities we pay for. They're just a thing we have, or rather need for our vibrators and probably some other stuff. That isn't to say we need prisons, of course, but my point is that like the other things we covered,

this is an industry where the pursuit of profit seems obscene and contrary to the goal of that industry, which shouldn't really be called an industry in the first place. We need power to survive, and also the vibrators I mentioned. So it's super weird that someone would make a lot of money off of that.

But before we get elbow deep into this cash cow, let's start with how our energy systems work right now. To start with your cherished vibrator, the charger wire goes into an outlet, which of course gets electricity from power lines that lead to a substation. Substations take high voltage power and turn it into the manageable lower voltage power

pumping into your home. That high voltage power comes through high voltage transmission lines, running directly over the crying police detective, all the way from a power plant. That power plant is of course generating power, either by burning coal, oil, or natural gas, or nuclear. And of course we have solar and wind.

But overall, we get 60% of that power from burning something. This is our electrical grid, a web of power plants, substations, and wires. The United States has three separate sections of this grid, one in the East, one in the West, and one, this is just Texas. And I am guessing you probably heard

about that Texas one lately, but we will get into that later. Just Google Ted Cruz plus Cancun. So when you step back from all of that mess, you see what a huge undertaking our power system is. And utility companies traditionally run everything from the power plants to the wires going into your home. I say traditionally because in the 70s,

Congress passed a bill that allowed non-utility power generators into the market as well. An IPP or independent power producer is a power generating company that sells their juice to a utility company. But because everything I'm talking about here, this massive and expensive infrastructure is extremely difficult to build and sustain, utilities are generally known

as natural monopolies, meaning that they are monopolies that exist simply because it's far too logistically complicated and expensive for there to be competition. Imagine if there were like 100 different power grids to choose from and the country was covered in cables like some kind of BDSM spider web. While that would be very sexy, it's not at all practical. Still, I'm surprised we don't have that much bondage fan art

of the United States map. Like if you Google US map rule 34, you hardly get much to work with at all. In terms of masturbating too, I mean, of course. Anyway, so instead we have investor owned utility companies, AKA private companies that act as public utilities. As of 2021, these companies served 67% of all customers through power purchase agreements with the government.

Basically, those are contracts where a private company agrees to produce power for an extended period of time, often decades. Now there's like 3000 of these companies in the United States. And so in most cases, these private companies are heavily regulated on either a state or federal level. After all, having a natural monopoly

can go very bad very fast. And so you'll probably be happy to know that these companies are generally kept on a short leash. For starters, there's the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates the power purchase agreements and oversees stuff like oil pipelines, hydroelectric dam licensing, and company mergers.

There are also state-level public utility commissions which oversee things like electric bill rates. In fact, did you know that utility companies don't make money from selling you electricity? We'll get into how they do make money in a moment, but in terms of your electric bill, those rates are set when the utility sends a request to the Public Utility Commission,

which then uses a formula to decide if that rate is fair. This is based on the general costs for generating power and the transmission and distribution, which often changes with the seasons. During the summer, we're using a lot more juice to keep our AC running, and so the rates will understandably rise. On the other hand,

there's always a minimum rate during the winter where even if you're not using that much power, you still have to pay toward the overall infrastructure and equipment. These rates don't usually change depending on how much power you personally use. However, some companies have a tier-based system where you can be charged more if you use more electricity.

This is all to say that the regulators design these rates for the utility companies to break even. It's called cost of service regulation. And on paper, it makes a lot of sense. We need electricity, which means we need to pay for generating it and maintaining that system. But nobody should get rich from it either. So geez, why am I doing a video about it?

Are we done talking about this? Well, no. Yeah, that's what I figured. Now it's time to talk about how utility companies do make money. This is probably best outlined in a two-part paper by a nonpartisan energy and climate policy think tank called You Get What You Pay For,

Moving Toward Value and Utility Compensation. It's a real banger in terms of utility literature, if that's something you're into, and I know you are. As they explain, while utility companies can't make a profit from selling electricity, they are still private companies that need investment money. But no one invests in something without making a profit. So the way cost of service regulation works

is that utility companies are allowed to make money from other areas, specifically, anytime they build new infrastructure, like a power plant or transmission wires or a pipeline, the utilities make investments in new structures while keeping track of the costs, then present those costs to regulators who approve the costs and then pay them back,

plus an extra rate of return on that investment. That rate is usually about 10% of those costs. So if for example, building a single telephone pole costs $1,000, an investor would front that money. The regulators would approve the costs and then pay the investor back that $1,000 plus an extra 10% for them to keep. So like,

like a thousand more dollars or however math works. This structure makes a lot of sense when you consider when it was first implemented, which was the build and grow era of the 1920s and 30s. We wanted to expand our nation's electrical grid. And so it makes sense to incentivize utility companies to build new things during that time. And while that still seems innocuous, it's important to note that this is still the only way

a profit is made, not from selling the electricity and not from doing maintenance or investing in innovation. In other words, for these companies, it is more profitable to let a substation or piece of equipment fail than to pay to repair it. And I think you already see the problem there because when profit is involved,

that is going to motivate every decision these companies make. In other completely unrelated news, we have to cut to some more ads, but first I'm being told to inform you that you can now get even more Some More News with our brand new streaming service, Some More News Plus, Plus Max, Premium News Plus, featuring exclusive new shows like The Cody Hour, The Cody Minute, One Second of Cody,

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I'm getting automated text alerts on my phone from something called MaroYank.com saying their bone van is 20 minutes away. Also a text from Katie that simply says, cocaine and zero G, no punctuation. So let's keep going here, preferably fast, but probably not. We were talking about how the only way

that utility companies make money is by constructing new things, power lines, plants, substations, et cetera. There's also something called a construction work in progress that if the state allows, lets these companies charge rate payers for future power plants that they are still building. I bring that up because it ties into the first

of many stories of inevitable utility corruption, specifically the failed construction of two nuclear facilities in Fairfield County, South Carolina. The 2008 project, which was initially estimated for a budget of $9.8 billion, was funded by rate increases by South Carolina Electric and Gas brought on by the Base Load Review Act.

Spoilers, that state law would be swiftly repealed and these facilities would never get built and would be abandoned in 2017 after the price tag had ballooned to $25 billion. At the time, the reactors, which were seen as a renaissance for nuclear power, were only 40% complete. So what happened?

Well, it turns out that South Carolina Electric and Gas had a parent company called the Scana Corporation. The CEO of Scana was a man named Kevin Marsh. And it turns out that Kevin Marsh very much enjoyed money. And so in 2016, when Kevin Marsh was informed that the nuclear plant project was going to be delayed, Kevin Marsh kept that information to himself. You know, just a little whoopee fraud

so that Scana could keep collecting on those increased utility rates without the money actually going to a construction project. What followed was a series of lawsuits and resignations that eventually led to South Carolina Electric and Gas being bought out by another company. And this is all from a utility monopoly that is supposedly designed to not

fuck over their rate payers, somehow finding a way to absolutely do that using the one source of profit they have. Anyway, thank goodness this is the only case of a utility company doing something shady to make a profit. Now watch as I cut to a totally unrelated clip. Can't we just get a reliable modern power plant? During the storms, we've had so many outages.

A modern power station would be kind of an insurance policy in a city where the electricity is cut off so often. I am in favor of the power plant. I keep hoping New Orleans would turn a corner. I want to see us start earning wages that are livable. I am for the power plant. I believe it will improve the economy, create jobs. After our last flood, I spent two days with nothing but a bucket and a shovel cleaning out a storm drain in front of my building. I'm doing my part. I ask you to city council to do your part and green light this

power plant. What good will the pumps do if there's no power to run them? I do not mind paying a few extra bucks for my utilities if it's gonna bring me comfort in knowing that I will not be without power during a storm. Oh, wow. Those people sure seem passionate about Nolans approving a new power plant. As they put it, it's not only going to create jobs,

but strengthen the power grid in case of a new hurricane. This is a video from 2017 when the Entergy Corporation proposed a new natural gas plant in the face of opposition, pushing for a more renewable option. Ultimately, the new plant was approved by the council, at least in part due to the many honest citizens of all ages who showed up in support of the plant. And of course, by honest citizens,

I mean actors who were paid by Entergy to pretend to love power plants. Who would have guessed that the young woman from the clip didn't actually care about a utility construction? That's right, Entergy simulated a grassroots movement in favor of their profit-making project. When exposed, Entergy claimed they used a third-party PR firm and had no idea there were paid actors, a claim that was almost immediately proven false when a report found

emails and text messages from employees discussing the tactics. Ultimately, they fined the company $5 million and the world kept spinning with the addition of one new power plant approved through corrupt methods. Fun epilogue, you know how those paid actor clips involve them arguing that the new power plant will prevent blackouts after the next hurricane? Well, it turns out that wasn't true. For after Hurricane Ida hit,

Nolans found itself asking Entergy why the new power plant wasn't used for this purpose. But at least they made a lot of money from taking a percentage off the construction costs. So yeah, turns out that as long as there's a sliver of a profit motive, companies will use that to exploit the system. And of course, this ultimately comes down

to all of us footing the bill, literally, as the extra cost often gets put into our utility rates. And if you're wondering where all the regulators are in this, well, sometimes the corruption comes from them as well. Surprise? Most of this comes in the form of city officials awarded contracts in exchange for bribes,

which is what happened not too long ago in San Francisco. But ultimately, none of this is what I really wanna talk about. Corruption can happen in any job, in any industry, except for us at the Showdy, where our only desire is to bring you the news in exchange for paying off our massive legal debt, which is why it's so important for you to subscribe to Some More News Plus

plus Max Premium News Plus. No, what I want to show you is how this system, even when working properly, results in horrendous decisions, especially in states that have deregulated the energy market. Right, that's a thing. The supposed benefit to an un- or deregulated market is that it allows for a little competition within the energy supply.

This is meant to challenge these natural monopolies and in theory, make the companies compete with lower rates and innovation. Of course, in the last 20 years, the result has been exactly the opposite. As states with regulated utilities have consistently had lower utility rates than the deregulated ones. Weird how when we let corporations do whatever they want

in the name of innovation, it always ends up bad. But despite this very weird thing, there are currently 29 deregulated states that lean both conservative and liberal. And in the interest of brevity, we will focus on the two poster children for each side, Texas and California, Calexisornia.

If we're gonna use the celebrity couple name, which I think we are, because they're in love and we're rooting for them. In terms of comparing these two unregulated markets, there are a few interesting differences. On average, Texas has lower energy costs than California, likely due to that state having a larger reservoir of natural gas.

They also have the highest in wind power, where California on the other hand, has the largest in solar. Neat. But what makes these states very similar is that they both happen to be home of the two largest utility-related disasters in recent news. You know the ones. Fire investigators are now looking into whether another utility, PG&E, was behind the nation's largest fire so far this year. The record-setting cold in Texas might be bearable if people still had heat and power. The thing is, there's no end in sight right now. More than four million customers woke up to a second day without electricity,

left to warm up in their cars or by the fire. Ah yes, the tag team between climate change and power companies threatening us all. Both the California wildfires and Texas snowstorms resulted in a substantial death count. And in both cases, they were at least in part caused by a perceived failure of the utility companies in these unregulated markets. Except, here's the thing.

While people might label these as failures, when you look at the system in place, there's actually nothing anomalous about what led to these disasters. They were in fact the product of everything working the way it was designed to work. I mentioned earlier that Texas has their own separate power grid.

What that means is that unlike California, they are not only deregulated on a state, but also a federal level. This grid is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. ERCOT answers directly to the state's Public Utility Commission. It also manages the price and flow of power on the grid,

a grid that is occupied by hundreds of utility companies, all competing for customers based on the rates that ERCOT sets. By design, they have something called an energy-only market, which is a fairly unique system. While most states have capacity markets, or markets where energy suppliers are paid based on future energy they commit to generating, energy-only markets only pay the suppliers for the energy they have already produced.

While that sounds like a small difference, paying suppliers for future energy ensures that they are prepared to supply power. It pays for readiness. Energy-only markets, on the other hand, are based on supply and demand and scarcity pricing. Scarcity pricing is when supply becomes limited and the price of the thing goes up.

For example, electricity during the air conditioned summer season. And so ERCOT raises rates during those times in order to allow utility companies a window to make a profit. Remember, Texas or no Texas, this is all about incentivizing utility companies to provide power using the profit motive.

Otherwise, we'd have to do some kind of whack ass system where power is provided by the government for free. Imagine that. So what this all amounts to is a system designed to reward scarcity. Texas power companies don't get paid for the power they will generate. So they only produce just as much power as is needed.

Then they make their profits by these moments of high demand that occur several times a year. Fun aside, remember how I said Texas has a lot of wind energy? Turns out that wind power creates less of these scarcity moments that utility companies need to make a profit. I wonder why the GOP are so quick to blame wind energy

for all of our problems, he mused aloud. You probably know where this is all going, which is a massive winter storm blackout that killed hundreds of people thanks to a number of factors like Texas having an isolated grid and their energy-only market giving companies no reason to prepare for disaster.

And as those people were dying, gas companies made 11 billion fucking dollars thanks to that scarcity pricing. What was seen as an embarrassing failure resulting in tragedy was actually, at least for these power companies, a profit boom. It's the system working as it was designed to work, which is probably why all of the efforts

to prevent this from happening again have fallen flat in a state that prides itself on deregulation. The most they've done is generally manage the power grid to be a bit more reliable, specifically paying power plants to remain online even when there's no demand. But this, as well as the surge in natural gas prices,

is now making utility rates skyrocket. Although, to be fair, it's still cheaper than what people are paying in California. And in fact, if you are a California resident smugly watching this video right now, I have some extremely humbling news for you, me. This is the hook that killed 84 people. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company pleaded guilty to starting the campfire and to killing 84 people the day the town of Paradise burned down. Yes, California, where since 2015, five of the 10 most destructive wildfires in the state

were directly linked to the electrical network of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, or PG&E. This includes the deadliest fire in California history, known as the Paradise or Camp Fire. That fire resulted in 85 civilian deaths and the destruction of more than 18,800 structures. And it was started when a PG&E power line broke free from a tower that was 25 years past its replacement. More specifically, it was this steel hook

holding the wire that broke. A hook that, an investigation revealed, PG&E absolutely knew had severe wear on it months before it failed. But despite it going against their own maintenance policies, they did nothing to replace the hook and other tower parts because remember what I said policies, they did nothing to replace the hook and other tower parts because, remember what I said about how these companies make money?

It's not from maintenance, is it? And so since there was no profit incentive to make the repair, they didn't do it. After all, what's the worst that could happen? A massive wildfire resulting in scores of deaths? Yes, yes, that is the worst that could happen. And this is just one instance of PG&E's long ass history of failing to maintain equipment

at the expense of human lives. Remember that movie, Erin Brockovich, the one about the true story of the woman in the 90s leading a class action lawsuit about contaminated water between 1952 and 1966. Guess who that class action lawsuit was against? Just one year after that massive settlement, PG&E would be found guilty of 739 counts of negligence

for not trimming trees and ultimately causing a wildfire in Nevada. Because again, maintenance doesn't pay a profit. After that, the Matrix came out. Some other stuff happened too, but mainly the Matrix. Then in 2005, Pacific Gas settled another suit brought on by a massive outage due to a substation fire. One that could have been easily avoided.

They went on to pay for a 1999 wildfire caused by lack of tree maintenance. Two more forest fire settlements after that. In 2005, one of their electrical transformers exploded and burnt a woman all over her body. She was literally just walking down the street when a fucking fireball hit her like she was getting mugged by Liu Kang.

It blew a manhole cover 30 feet into the air. The explosion was caused by water eroding their equipment and no one noticing. Then in 2008, they installed the incorrect gas pipe during a repair, failed to respond when a leak was reported and caused an explosion that injured five and killed one person on Christmas Eve. See what else?

Oh, here's a story where a power line from the 19-fucking-20s caused an underground fire resulting in a massive outage. Here's a pipeline explosion that killed eight goddamn people and destroyed 38 homes. I repeat, eight people died and 38 homes were destroyed. The cause being that the pipeline, when first installed in the late 50s,

was improperly welded. It was then incorrectly marked as being seamless and then never inspected for the next 50 fucking years. Then a valve malfunction pumped too much gas through it and ruptured it. It then took the company 95 fucking minutes to shut off those valves, thanks to them having no automatic shutoff system.

To quote a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, how did they get to the point where they have all of these deficiencies? I'm baffled that these conditions could remain in the system for so long. Ultimately, the Public Utilities Commission concluded that the company was specifically more concerned with profit than safety.

They were fined $1.6 billion and had to put out ads detailing how many turds they sucked. We are deeply sorry. We failed our customers in San Bruno. In a 60 second ad that started airing on TV today, PG&E is apologizing for their negligence in the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion. The explosion and fire killed eight people. PG&E was convicted of

six felony charges. Those felony charges resulted in a San Francisco judge sentencing PG&E in January to the advertising campaign. Also part of the sentence, PG&E had to take out full page ads in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal admitting their guilt. That happened in the papers on Tuesday. Boy, nothing gives you confidence in our utility system like a court ordered ad campaign apologizing for exploding a bunch of people. You know, I'm not even done listing horrific shit

this one company pulled. Here's another gas explosion they did that destroyed a home. And of course, here's another wildfire caused by the company failing to maintain their equipment. I'm almost bored of these now. Anyway, if you see anyone with a Pacific Gas logo, please do not hesitate to call the police because they may explode you.

They've literally pled guilty to manslaughter. The very key takeaway from all of these stories is that they all mainly happened under different leadership. If you Google the phrase PG&E CEO steps down, it is clear that the company cycles through more masters than a cursed dog or like an indecisive sub. Either one works, pick one, don't tell me which. Because this grotesque history of maintenance failures

isn't the work of some dastardly villain, but rather an unregulated system our government put in place where the utility monopolies, incentivized by profits, ignore vital tasks because they don't pay out. The result is that just between 2010 and 2020, Pacific Gas and Electric has been directly responsible for 117 deaths. That's more than most serial killers.

And during that time, regulators discovered that they had made $224 million more than their authorized revenue requirements, while their operations and maintenance expenditures were $43 billion lower than expected. This is, without hyperbole, an evil company. And yet they are an immovable product of a much worse system.

And so they just continue to make obscene profits in an unregulated market with very little competition. Hey, other companies, the field's wide open for you. Simply make ads about how you're not a murderer and you weren't court ordered to do ads about how you're not a murderer and you weren't court ordered to do ads about how you're not a murderer. Just this year, PG&E are continuing to raise their rates and they haven't learned anything from their past litigation.

In fact, in the wake of the deadliest wildfire in California history, you know, the one PG&E caused, the company had to clean up the burn site so that they could rebuild their infrastructure. And even that effort became immediately marred by scandal when the company awarded millions of dollars in contracts to a sketch ass waste management company in exchange for bribes.

These motherfuckers simply cannot do anything right. Unless you count exploding people. Oh wait, one thing they actually do right is that they know exactly who to make deals with. Along with being a natural monopoly, PG&E has spent tens of millions of dollars on campaign donations, or to be more precise, 900 campaign donations over the last 10 years.

After they filed for bankruptcy in 2019, the company reached a deal with Governor Newsom where they could exit bankruptcy if they actually paid wildfire victims the $13.5 billion they were owed. Except half of that was delivered as PG&E stock for some reason. Thanks for that. We love owning stock in the murder utility, don't we folks?

In short, this company flat out terrorizes its customers with high rates and fucking wildfires, nearly goes under, but then find some kind of slimy political orifice to squirm out of while simultaneously screwing their victims. And again, this is all part of the system working, a system where utility and power companies are incentivized to let their equipment fail, be it a power generator in Texas

or a transmission wire in California in order to make a profit. And now I'm being told that our sponsor fear is dropping us for being too dark. Wow. We haven't even gotten to the worst stuff here because this model not only kills people in the short run, but is designed to kill even more people in the long run.

So let's talk about that now. Looks like there's unmarked vans parked outside. Got a bunch of syringes and drills. Why are they clowns? The boat clowns are coming for you, Cody boy. Why are they clowns? Why are they clowns? Hey there, snappy pants.

It's Cody. Are you tired of dipping your bread in soups or feeding it to birds? Well, I've actually come up with a brand new way to enjoy bread, which is to take two pieces and then put a bunch of meats and cheeses and sauces between them. I call it dry Cody pie and it's mine.

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Hello, do you know what's a true thing being said by me right now? Everyone's hair is different! Some people have very curly hair, or very straight hair, or dry hair, or oily hair, or even snakes for hair! We can't expect some off-the-shelf hair care product to address everyone's hair. But now, there's Proz. Proz makes custom hair care products based on a personal consultation. They customize everything from shampoo to supplements so you can keep your snakes healthy. So like, okay, so you just, you go on their website and let's say, for example, you have snake hair.

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Hold on. Okay, that's better. Hey folks, they gave me a bunch of pills to help with the pain and make me more fun. I'm fun now. Also they took some more blood, so that's my bones and my blood and my beard. All the bees are gone. Also they said they'd be back in an hour

to quote, finish the job, but I thought the job was finished, but I guess it's not finished. Did time reset? I don't feel correct. Did I pee? Hold on. That's better.

Hey folks, they gave me these pills to help with the pain and make me more fun. I'm fun now. Ooh, it's better. Hey folks, they gave me these pills to help with the pain and make me more fun. I'm fun now. Ooh, it's from Katie. Just landed. As an estimate, how many fingers and toes do you think you really need? Let me know soon, thanks.

And then an emoji of a saw. Hey folks, they gave me these pills to help with the pain and make me more fun. I'm fun now. For more fun, be sure to check out some more News+, Plus Max, Premium News+, and then choose the Premium Plus Diamond Price tier to get minimal ads. And we were talking about how we created a system

that incentivizes utility companies to risk the lives of their customers in exchange for profit. Specifically, because they primarily make money off of building new structures instead of repairing old ones. Or in the case of Texas, allowing power consumption to go to the brink of disaster in order to raise rates. This is generally speaking, a wildly unsustainable model. And I use the word unsustainable very carefully

because now we're going to talk about how this system also creates zero incentive for utility companies to pursue renewable energy and in fact, fight against it. In other words, for utility companies to pursue renewable energy, and in fact, fight against it. In other words, these utility companies are actively helping to push us towards a climate disaster. At first glance, that might seem odd considering everything I've already said about how these companies only make a profit

from constructing new things. If that's the case, then why wouldn't they want to construct a bunch of solar and wind farms? Unfortunately, or at least unfortunately for this situation, solar and wind farms aren't very expensive to build. It's currently cheaper to build and operate in a renewable energy plant than simply maintain an existing coal or gas powered plant.

That's a good thing. You know, unless you make your money off of a percentage from construction costs, which is how utilities work if you recall. Then the incentive there is to choose the most expensive project, otherwise known as not a renewable project. And I really can't stress this enough.

This is the system we designed. To quote an article from Grist, which perfectly sums this up, if as leaders of publicly owned firms, utility executives are obligated by law to maximize profits within the law, and if maximizing utility profits means building more infrastructure and selling more power,

and if distributed energy solutions like rooftop solar, home energy storage and management, and efficiency have the effect of reducing the amount of power infrastructure needed and the amount of utility power customers buy, then utility executives are obligated by law to oppose distributed energy solutions. Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing their fiduciary duty.

And yeah, that is absolutely what's happening. Whether it's a regulated or unregulated market, renewable energy is seen as a threat to the profits of utility companies. And combined with how often they exacerbate recent climate emergencies, it's almost as if they are working with climate change from some secret, very hot and windy back room.

As I noted before, wind power brings down scarcity pricing. And of course, rooftop solar threatens the very need for these utilities at all, especially when you consider things like microgrids and community storage. But the broad promise of rooftop solar is that it would fundamentally change the way we think about power distribution,

because instead of energy flowing from one power source to a bunch of homes, rooftop solar would make every home a power source. And so much like the way the internet changed the flow of media and information, for example, me right now, making this video from my doorless floorboardless home, solar would change the flow of power distribution.

And of course, we're already seeing that, as many solar powered homes are now being paid by the utility companies for their extra juice. You know those ads that say doctors hate this one simple trick. Well, this is one simple trick that utility companies hate, and it's called net metering, the process of selling off your net power

from solar back to the grid. Seems like a good way to make money, perhaps better than selling bone marrow and advertising meth, but what do I know about business? And they do very much hate it. You know how gas companies famously killed the first version of the commercial electric car? The same way fuel companies delayed that technology

that Elon Musk totally invented, so too are utility companies now going after rooftop solar because fucking of course they are. They've known about the threat since at least 2013 when a utility lobbying group called the Edison Energy Institute put out a paper outlining what they saw as various disruptive forces to their industry,

honing in on commercial solar power as having the potential to drive customers off their grid and quote, raise the potential for irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects. Fun fact, one of Edison Energy's chief executives was a man named Brian McCormick, who in 2014 would team up with a Koch brothers funded group to write legislation designed to move states away

from net metering. He would then go on to be the chief of staff at the Department of Energy for Rick Perry. Yippee. Real quick, any thoughts on Rick Perry? Rick Perry, watch him. He's a comer. Thanks, had to.

But O'Brien is but a single cog in a much larger machine designed to kill renewables. One that's very much focused on eliminating net metering. After all, the fewer incentives you give people, the less likely they will be to use solar. Funny how this is literally the profit motive of big companies trying to squash the profit motive of individual homeowners.

And while this is a national lobbying effort with tons of examples, the arguments these utility companies are making are all suspiciously similar. Outdated Florida laws are forcing FPL customers who don't have rooftop solar to pay extra every month for the few who do. We support all kinds of solar, including rooftop, but paying for someone else's private system is just not fair. Value counts, and we're on track to reach our goal to install 30 million solar panels five years early for a third of the cost of rooftop.

That means lower bills that are fair for everyone, giving Floridians the most green for the least green. So the argument here put forward in this ad by Florida Power and Light is that rooftop panels punish people who can't afford their own solar because it drives the individual rates up for everyone else. We see this argument everywhere, except it should be noted that a study

by the US Department of Energy found that the rate increase being described here is quote, negligible. Not to mention that there are ways to, for example, subsidize solar for low income homes and other workarounds to this very minor problem, which should very obviously not stop us from trying to harness the awesome power

of the giant free battery that lives in the sky. But going back to that ad, that was concerning Florida measure HB741, a bill designed to slash the rates in which solar panel owners would be paid by utilities. The bill was passed by a Republican-controlled Florida Senate that just so happened to be heavily lobbied by Florida Power and Light.

In fact, the bill was fucking drafted and delivered to the Senate by the utility company. It was a powerful corporation pushing their own law in order to make more of a profit. And if that isn't bizarre enough, there's actually some good news here, which is that the bill was eventually vetoed by none other than Ronald DeSantis.

Ron, the fascist Trump sequel who fist fights wokeness and who wants to put Starship Troopers into our children's schools. He single-handedly saved the solar industry in Florida. Ron DeSantis, only slightly better than a utility company. There's no promo code, he sucks. Unfortunately, we're not all lucky enough to have Ron DeSantis running our state.

Jesus fucking Christ. And so we're seeing this exact battle happen all over the country. In places like California, regulators are getting behind the idea of cutting these incentives to rooftop solar and are of course being lobbied into it by our favorite utility company, PG&E.

Oh, and by the way, thanks to a loophole, the money they're using to lobby is probably coming out of your utility bill. This is due to a percentage of your bill going to trade associations, which it turns out are just lobbying groups by another name. So I guess thanks for that, or you're welcome for that, something for that, depending on who you're talking to.

It's fine. Another thing your utility bill can go toward, shitty bailouts. In 2019, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed a bill that gave bailouts to failing coal and nuclear plants owned by First Energy. These bailouts totaling $170 million per year until 2027 would be paid for by increased rates

in residential and commercial electric bills. In other words, our money, or rather the money of people living in Ohio. So formerly my money. They had to pay for a bailout to keep shitty coal and nuclear plants instead of that money going toward, I don't know, renewable projects or maybe a really long zip line

or something. Hey, neat detail to this. It turns out that First Energy spent a million dollars on DeWine's election campaign. A few years later, we learned that Larry Householder, the speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, took millions in bribes from First Energy in exchange for this specific bailout.

And now, as we were writing this episode, it seems that people are discovering a direct connection between Householder's bribes and DeWine. So that's gonna be a fun development. Seems like a lot of people need to go to super jail. As for that bailout bill, well, DeWine sort of had no choice but to repeal a lot of that bullshit,

but still somehow managed to preserve the part that dismantled Ohio's renewable energy mandates. And so ultimately, First Energy got what they wanted, specifically to fuck over their clean energy mandates. And so ultimately, First Energy got what they wanted, specifically to fuck over their clean energy competition. Good for them, everyone's a winner. As long as you don't count everyone. Right, important thing to stress from all of this, we're talking about the future of the planet here,

literally the air we breathe and water we drink and the wellbeing of our grandchildren facing in many ways the biggest existential threat to humanity in our recorded history. And yet we can't even focus on that threat because of how lucrative it is for a bunch of corporations to ignore it in favor of immediate revenue. And that's fucking fucked.

And again, aside from the corrupt methods, the goal of these utilities to snuff out renewables falls directly in line with the profit motive the government gave them. This is capitalism working. Solar panels don't make their investors a profit. Fucking pipelines do. Pipelines that we, by the way, don't need

and that don't make oil cheaper. But they get built with a little help from some lobbying toward our elected officials, thank you, Joe, because they make these companies a fuck ton of money. You know, once they get all those pesky indigenous people out of the way. They're like sharks, you see.

And if you put a shark in a tank with only one or two fish, then guess what will happen to those fish? One fish, two fish, dead fish, et cetera. Similarly, if you regulate the company to have only one or two sources of profit, then they are going to exploit the shit out of those methods no matter how many people they poison, explode, or exploit along the way.

And they will keep doing it for as long as we allow them to, just draining our resources, stripping us bare for every penny we are worth. Text from Katie, I assume. She says, fingies, fingies, fingies. That is ominous. Look, there are solutions here, ways to break this cycle. And until we abolish money,

it has to be through regulating the way utilities and healthcare companies and prisons all do business, perhaps not treating them like a business, but in the meantime, putting those profit incentives towards actually good things until we can eliminate them completely. And in terms of utilities and our power grid, there is absolutely something we could do.

The state of Hawaii, being an island in junk, pays around three to four times the national average for electricity. This only went up once Russia invaded Ukraine. So instead of like selling school children's feet to bail out a coal plant or whatever, the regulators there tried a different approach, actually attempting to solve the problem.

And they did this with solar. Back in the simpler days of 2021, Hawaii's Public Utilities Commission introduced something called a performance-based system, otherwise known as a PBR or PAPST. What this PAPST did was actually reward utility companies for connecting their grid to rooftop solar and battery systems.

In their own words, this system is designed to transition away from cost of service regulation. Remember cost of service? It was the thing that allowed utilities to make their profit from new construction. But in Hawaii, utilities are paid for promoting energy efficiency. Literally just bribing them to do the right thing.

And while that sounds weird, how is it different or worse than anything I've talked about today? It's certainly better than causing massive wildfires or blackouts during snow storms, but there's more. Because while Hawaii completely ended net metering as well, they made up for that by offering up to $4,250 to homeowners if they install batteries

with their solar systems. Those homeowners then get to enjoy a drastically lower utility bill and the utility companies get to tap their batteries during peak demand hours. And so both the homeowners and the utility companies are happy and in fact need each other to survive. How about that?

And so along with community solar grids, which sure would be useful when and or if society collapses, there are ways to solve this issue that would also make these utility companies happy. Because money is, you know, it's kind of fake. And the government could just give money out to people or entities if it meant that those people or entities would then stop trying

to fuck people over for money. And the government could regulate them so that they make money but aren't tempted to make way too much money by cutting off the avenues they can exploit. It's not impossible. It's actually pretty easy. In theory. Right, good point, it's actually pretty easy. In theory.

Right, good point, there is a snag, which is that money exists. And as long as utility companies are making more money from the system we have in place, they will fight to keep that system around. Much like the prison system or healthcare, or really a bunch of other industries that should be free and regulated,

we really fucked up when initially creating the utilities in this country. And now we have a web of jobs and lobbyists and CEOs all working very hard to make sure they stay comfortable at the expense of so many people and things. And what's really fascinating is that this is all from a design that was specifically made to limit profits.

And yet, thanks to that one stream of revenue from new constructions, we got a flood of greed and corruption. It's like a spaceship with a needle-sized hole. Doesn't matter how small, the entire thing will implode. And that really shows you how devastating the profit motive is to the wellbeing of the people these industries claim to serve,

and how the only way to actually make a change is to break the cycle. But sadly, that only happens when we are pushed to the brink. Only then are we able to say, no, no, I will not be exploited for money. I will not have my blood removed and my beard cut and my bone marrow and fingies taken.

No, Katie, I am taking a stand. Where's my phone? Has anyone seen my phone? I've been using it this whole time as like for the bits and stuff. Here we go. Okay, I'm calling her. 1-800-KATY. That's how you remember it. It's ringing. It's ringing. Holla at your boy! I'm done, Katie. Okay.

Who is this? You know who it is! It's Cody. John's- Oh, hey! How you been? Shaven and Woozy, listen here. I am done being mined so that you can go do whatever it is you're doing. You know, I'm starting to doubt it's even research related. I've given my blood, my beard,

all my bees, and so I'm not giving you my fingers. Where are you right now? Crash landed in the Amazon or fucking Canada or whatever. Big stupid fire. Ate some guys.

So, wow, you actually did all that stuff. Man, I was just messing around. Messing around? Yeah, yeah, friendly ribbing, you know? Like, if a house was lit by gas and a guy kept making the gas lights dim and brighten to

make his wife think that she was losing her mind. Fun stuff like that. Wait, so did you really lose all your bees? Yes! You said that Core Civic was suing us and we needed the money. What? No, no. I said Thor Mythic was barbecuing for us.

He's that DJ I met at Tomorrowland. He wanted money for, like, sausages. You absolutely did not say Thor mythic. Cody, I want you to really listen to me right now. Okay. I just need one little thingy. I'm hanging up. Okay, well, looks like this all got wrapped up. The blood stuff, the sponsors, the beard,

none of it actually mattered. And I think we learned something today about how money corrupts or whatever. And the value of friendship in that it costs a lot of your blood. I think that's the lesson. It's hard to brain through the pill fog. Point is everything's looking up for Cody from here on out. Yeah, bottoms up for Cody.

All right. Things are great. Silazine with dual Kolax. Sounds fun. No. These are sunflower seeds! Wow look at all these pills! So thanks for watching, I hope you liked it and will literally like it with the button on the YouTube interface. And subscribe and hope you are doing well.

We've got a patreon.com slash some more news. We've got a podcast called Even More News and this show as a podcast. If you wanna listen to it again without seeing me. I don't know if there's anything else to say. without seeing me. I don't know if there's anything else to say. Merch, we got a merch store. Warmbo's there. Bye.