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Originally Posted by SailinAway
I entirely agree with you! The utility companies go out of their way to obfuscate how much you're paying, for what, and what another plan or company would charge. It used to be the case that Fairpoint would outright lie about plan charges to get you to sign up. That appears to have improved. Not everyone has the ability to research all of this and to be assertive with these companies to get better rates. The phone industry has become impossibly complicated.
There should also be more support for helping people reduce their energy usage and downscale their needs for other things. When recycling was still possible (before China rejected our garbage), my town provided recycling bins. That shows that strategies can be implemented town-wide to reduce waste. If a town can buy and deliver recycling bins, it could also buy and deliver rain barrels. If Eversource wants to double its supply charge, the logical response is to teach people to cut their electric usage in half, as I've done. People's smartphone addiction has led to wasteful consumerism for both the phone itself and phone service. We need to move in the opposite direction, toward basic phones and basic phone service. We're aware of severe environmental problems around things like water and we're acutely aware of inflation right now, but we lack imagination in how we counter these problems. Solutions need to be enacted at the national, state, and local level so that everyone, regardless of their education or access to technology, can take simple steps to reduce their usage.
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Smart phones are here to stay, only to increase in use, that one is a complete dead end for most people, myself included. From an energy use standpoint it's not a huge user, I think the larger problem is the huge expense to a family to keep say 5 phones and the cell plan, that expense didn't exist 30 years ago.
Imagine if we could say "gee, my expense for eggs and milk and beef and rice have gone way up, so hey Eversource, I'm going to pay you less for energy this month, just deal with it". To me that's what they do to us in reverse, there is no scenario where Eversource can lose money, they just ask for rate hikes and NH PUC rubber stamps them. They were allowed to shut down and write off losses on plants that ratepayers paid hundreds of millions to upgrade just a few years ago, then they tell us that rates have to rise due to demand. It's madness. I agree totally with you that we need to, in return, reduce their revenue by conserving where we can.