Annual Penalty OK'd For English Station Mess

Excellent points made by everyone. Thank you General Tong. UI should be banned from passing the buck to consumers by raising its prices. I totally agree with Heather especially on this point “ Public utilities like electricity, and home heating fuels, water and sewer should be owned and maintained by the government for the public so they are protected from exploitation from corporations whose main focus is profits on utilities that nobody should be without”. This needs to happen all over the country, but there’s no reason why it cannot start with Connecticut. Also agree with Benny that well the penalty is a start. It is not hefty enough and should be doubled every year they neglect full clean up.

Wallingford has a public electric company. There’s no reason why CT couldn’t have a state wide public electric company authority, and public water and sewer authority, that operated by and for the public. They could mandate and incentivize solar and wind installations wherever possible, where it would have the most environmentally friendly and least negative impact on green spaces, plant more trees to increase carbon capture and reduce temperatures, require light colored roofs, buildings and paved surfaces to reflect heat, bury electrical lines to protect against more intense storms due to global warming (thereby avoiding storm related fires and power outages,) reopen our nuclear energy plants around the state, negotiate energy purchases for whatever we can’t produce ourselves, and do our own repairs, maintenance and installations with CT employees, creating thousands of jobs in state. Then maybe sell excess energy if we generate more than we could use, once we got all the solar arrays and wind turbines up on top of every building, parking lot or garage we could possibly install. We could expand public water and sewer service, create a desalination plant for additional drinking water, remove storm water from the sewer lines, incentivize rainwater capture from buildings and hardscape for irrigation, replace old cast iron pipe fittings with the current pipe materials, etc. We could put up e-bike and vehicle charging stations with solar arrays and battery array storage stations all over the state. We could increase the electric bus and shuttle service routes destinations, and reduce the costs, and expand service schedules to accommodate workers, students, and other travelers using mass transit to get all around the state at all hours. We could become green energy and global warming champions, reduce our utility costs, and lead the way to the future without corporations putting profits over people and the environment.

Heather, there are about 12 billion reasons why CT is not going to have a statewide public utility. UI and Eversource have about $12 billion in state-recognized rate base, i.e. the transmission and distribution facilities they use to ship power to customers. The state would have to pay about this amount to acquire these facilities. That is more than $3,400 for every child, woman, and man in the state.FWIW, while the Wallingford municipal utility has low rates, it has done very little to promote sustainability. Its customers do not pay into the funds that are used to support conservation and renewable energy programs.Burying electric lines has real reliability and environmental benefits. It makes a great deal of sense for new lines. But undergrounding existing lines is extremely expensive. More than a decade ago, when I was staffing the Energy Committee of the CT legislature, the cost estimate was about $2-4 million per mile in New Haven. (UI has about 3,500 miles of distribution lines.) And in urbanized areas, undergrounding requires either tearing up streets for extended periods or tearing down street trees

As " the land of steady habits ", CT is the land where new ideas fear to tread. The ideas you quote are being done elsewhere; not here. Underground utilities sound good till you know the cost of the project. And remember all those underground cables? How much is torn up looking for a break will be astronomical. .Look up the cost of reflective coverings and you will be stunned.. all these projects are great but massive and we need all tax our money to fund wars and the Military contractors. Not much is left for our people