The wife and I have been looking into many ideas on how to lower our ever-skyrocketing PG and E bill. since the installation of a smart meter, my bill has more than doubled. From a tad under $100 in the non A/C months, and $300-$350 in the summer, to $200 plus in the cooler months, and 7-$800 dollars in the summer….OUCH!
We looked into whole house fans. They seemed to be the answer, until July and August comes around, when they cannot be used.. We are currently looking at upgrading our appliances to highly efficient models. We also looked at solar. A friend of mine told me of an outfit that had a program where they leased the solar panels to you, with no out of pocket maintenance, all for a small fee, with a promise that electricity bills will go down substantially.

I had a salesman come out to give me an estimate. Boy, he sure did talk a good game….forked tongued devil. He wanted us to sign a contract. I told him I needed to read it first. It seemed that he didn’t want to leave it. After he left, I continued to call him about the contract. I finally hounded him enough to email me the contract.

Sure enough, buried on page 8 of a 12 page contract, the amount of money the solar company would charge me for a KW/h of electricity starts out at Tier 3 pricing? That is almost 30 cents. My household used almost 15,000 KW/h last year. Now that might not sound bad, the cost, to you, but there was more information. this price, the almost 30 cents per KW/h was scheduled to go up 2.9 percent annually, for the length of the lease, which was a minimum of 20 years.

I ran it through a calculator, and was floored when I found out I would be paying almost 55 cents per KW/h , almost double the rate of tier 5 energy prices.

This solar outfit is starting to make PG and E look like a bunch of saints!

This is just a heads up for those of you that are looking into solar.

The presumption that the market will “take care of itself”, “find compromise”, and settle at fair market prices is predicated upon the belief that markets consist of fair minded people trading for reasonable profit..

Unfortunately, markets are manipulated by greedy speculators and others who are not motivated by virtue, but by the quest for “whatever-we-can-get” super profits way above and beyond “fair” market values.

In today’s business model, there is no need for “backroom” collusion when there is a tacit understanding and agreement prevalent that prices of goods and services can be artificially escalated to outlandish levels beyond the normal levels of supplyand demand without a crime being committed.

Essential commodities are traded in “exchanges” or casinos where paper-pushing players who provide absolutely nothing gamble and push prices far beyond their “true” or “fair” value.

In the healthcare industry, providers regularly rape the public with mind boggling ripoff prices for services and associated supplies and medications.

With the exception of McDonald’s hamburgers and a couple other markets where there is real competition, I could go on and on and on with examples of various markets polluted by greed. But all you need do is consider what has happened to electricity costs since deregulation was sold to the sucker public by political hucksters at the bidding of powerful lobbies, selling the pie-in-the-sky idea that the deregulation would cause competition that that would result in lower prices.

The only absolute marketing tenet is that greedy scammers will take control of unregulated markets and screw everyone they can for as much as they can at the expense of the suckers who have nowhere else to go for electricity or gasoline and essential commodities.

There will be no fairness in the energy industry, especially as long as you are forced to buy your energy from the only game in town.