That's a big difference than what I'm suggesting. I'm talking a few select industries necessary for society to function, and that's it. There are plenty of successful examples of community owned utilities, etc, providing wonderful cost effective services in the US. I would disapprove of the fat cats in DC having a say in CPS or SAWS that serve the local community, though.
Hardly crap. Like I said, personaly opinion. People who have been burned by socialism want capitalism, people who have been burned by capitalism want socialism. Basically when things are crappy, they want change.
A lot always depends on who's in charge.
That's a difference of opinion, PERIOD. I believe that certain industries primary responsibility is to provide for society, not make money. Or at least should be. Power and water companies who's customers depend on them for survival, for example, should be looking out for their customers, not trying to turn the biggest profit possible.
1. That's a defeatist at ude, which I refuse to adopt
2. My suggestion is GOVERNMENT MONOPOLIES on certain industries with no regulations on anything else, period. Which means the second half of that sentence is completely pointless to the debate.
For smeagol, socialism smeagol hates = socialism, while socialism smeagol likes = not socialism, so smeagol can continue his self-deception that all socialism is evil.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.co...art-one-today/
If Public Libraries Didn't Exist, Could You Start One Today?
http://www.kaapeli.fi/~fla/flj/topics/socialsm.htm
Public Libraries: relics of socialism?
Dude, give it up!
Public libraries are not an example of socialism. No matter how many links you bring to the table.
Utilities are not free market industries. They are laced with nearly endless regulations because of the monopoly, monopsony, or oligopoly market they have.
The military is a necessary evil, and one of the few concepts covered in our cons ution for the government to do.
It works fine until you get the right mix of corrupted individuals who change it. What normally happens over time is the people in power start exchanging favors.
CPS Energy isn't as green or cheap as you imply. They are the cheapest among the top 10 cities:
1 San Antonio
2 Phoenix
3 Chicago
4 Los Angeles
5 Dallas
6 Houston
7 Philadelphia
8 San Diego
9 San Jose
10 New York
but only the 37th in size by metropolitan area and shouldn't be compared in the top ten. Prices tend to rise for utilities as the populations they serve increase:
1 New York
2 Los Angeles
3 Chicago
4 Dallas
6 Houston
13 Phoenix
17 San Diego
30 San Jose
37 San Antonio
123 Philadelphia
Where I live is 23rd in metropolitan size with a regulated utility operating in a monopsony system, and my rates are cheaper than CPS' 2006 annual report claims. Eight of the nine cities they are compared against are larger in metropolitan size.
Sorry, I don't buy it. I've seen too many bad examples.
Now as for their green rating. Where I live, they cannot count hydroelectric power for a green rating. CPS is a 40% owner of a large nuclear power plant. The state of Washington would be the greenest for power generation if they did, with Oregon I think in 3rd place.
I prefer Liberty.....facists and socialist aren't that different.
Quite true. Another reason to completely absorb it.
Did I say it wasn't? I said it's size was one of the factors.
That's the same for any system of government. We've seen it in our mostly capitalist society. There wouldn't be much difference in that in a more socialist form. Either way, the government needs stricted limits on authority, IMO.
23 is portland, which would be PGE, correct?
According to their website, PGE collected a little over $1.5 billion in revenue on about 19,431,102 MWh for a collection of $78.22 per MWh.
According to CPS's financial report, they collected a little over $1.5 in revenue (on electric service only) on about 22,100,711 billed MWh for a collection of $68.58 per MWh.
Residential rates: PGE: 8.29 cents per KWh, CPS (as of my most recent bill): 6.52 cents KWh (including fuel and regulatory charges).
Granted, that's winter rates for CPS and I'm assuming yearly average (if they adjust for seasonal demand) for PGE. Since I don't print out my bills, I can't really check the summer rates of any recent years.
I'm not sure what numbers you were looking at.
In addition to that, CPS provided over $235 million last year to San Antonio's budget and employs 3,800 or so people (significantly more than PGE).
There's bad examples of everything.
One of the largest retail nuclear plants in the nation which has filed the first application for a new reactor in decades. They also are a huge investor in wind power, have plans to build one of the 3 cleanest coal plants in the nations and upgrade the coal plants they have, and they are now processing landfill gasses as well. A lot of that has to do with pressure from enviro-nut groups in the area.
There's a lot of improvement CPS could make in that area, and they are indeed trying, but they are already recognized as being accomplished in that area.
I disagree. It may work well for CPS and I would say that's the exception. Not the rule. I'll bet it's a conservative area. Get liberals controlling it and see what happens.
When you have a corporate utility with government regulations, you have adversaries at work. When you have government on both sides, the decisions become biased and unchallenged.
Remember, Texas is primarily a red state. I'm in a blue state. Watch those utilities take a dramatic increase should the liberals control it.
I'm under PGE, but there is another. I think PP&L.
That looks about right for my rates, but I haven't broke down the bill for a while.. The power is actually rather cheap. PGE used to be a satellite of ENRON, and I believe part of the extra money we pay is due to that fiasco. There is some pretty big debt being paid off over that still. Still, part of the debt is the building of new power generation, like the Biglow Canyon Wind Farm. PGE currently has more than twice the liabilities as it has net assets. The rest are taxes and fees. Liberals tax the out of things.
I was using the annual rate from the PDF I liked. Assuming your data is correct, note I didn't compare it to MWHours or customer rates. My usage would simply be lower than the average San Antonio rate. Different climate, different average.
Similar to taxes and fees from a utility. So what. As for the people... I just say the number... about 2300(?) people. Still, the area is shared with Pacific Power. We are a larger metropolitan area, and by nature should be more costly.
These things are fine. We have green projects going on too. For that matter, between the dams and wind generation, PGE has 628 MW of it's 2449 MW capacity as green power. That's 25.6%! When the Wind Farm is completed, it's capacity will grow from 125 MW to as much as 450 MW.
I think on the green rating, it's because Hydroelectric power from the NW dams is shipped to California. However, most of this is under the BPA. This is our cheapest power, but decades back, converter stations with 30 foot mercury vapor diodes were built to convert the AC power from the power generation units to DC power. There is in place power lines to ship this power to Los Angeles. I think they get what should be our green rating. Power from the dams is shipped to California rather than other power production because you cannot ship AC power that far without dramatic radiated line loss. In our case, this affects the price they charge because we end up being in compe ion with the California market.
I am against government running utilities. Besides, you cannot compare th value of such things for the jist of this thread.
Our water is sold to us by the city. We have what is possibly the cheapest, cleanest water to get into the system nation wide. It comes from the Cascade Mountains. By the time we pay through the nose for city water, it is far more expensive than it should be. Time and time again, Portland has tried to take over electrical service. Every time, the voters say NO. This is because of the history the liberals controlling Portland have with taxes and fees.
Anarcho-syndicalism FTW
San Antonio is split about 55-45 usually. Not as conservative as many parts of the state, but significantly more conservative than Austin up the road.
That's one of the great things about how CPS is set up. For the most part it operates as a separate en y with heavy regulations such as price controls. They make their own business decisions and most of what comes up for city council votes is rate increases and zoning issues with land they wish to use.
It's why I said the government should act as proxy shareholders. They should not have much influence on how it is run (leave that to the business men you hire for it), but should have authority over large rate increases and enjoy the profits from it.
You also have to remember that CPS is both gas an electric. It looks like Portland has a separate gas en y. Over 2/3rds of CPS's customers have both gas and electric service, which is why I broke out the revenue per MWh.
What kind of taxes? It looks like this past year PGE paid income taxes of 87 million (I'm assuming combined federal and state), and they likely had to pay property taxes as well, which CPS doesn't being municipally owned. I doubt the total taxes and fees exceeds CPS's contributions to City of San Antonio, and much of it probably goes to places that have no relationship with PGE.
CPS does share the market with another minor electric company or two, but they tend to work around CPS.
And you are correct. There's also the fact that even besides being a larger metro area, you also flat out have a higher cost of living. It was you who said your rates were lower even though you were larger, so I pointed out the fallacy in that.
That's a nice percentage. CPS get's about 19% from nuclear, 5% from wind, and a slight amount from landfill gasses (a total of about 1324MW of 5501 capacity, about 24% from so-called "green" sources). Their goal is 15% renewable by 2020, though, which is wonderful, considering the at ude towards the oil and coal industries in Texas.
Anyway, neither of us is going to change the others minds, but this has been a fun discussion.
I don't know the breakdown, but I'll bet you are right on the differences.
Well, Pacific Power actually does compete with some customers, which is unusual for a utility. I don't have a choice, but much of downtown Portland does. They are not a minor en y. My guess is they are about equal in size or larger than PGE considering CPS has about twice the capacity as PGE, yet PGE's coverage could serves more than twice the population as the San Antonio metro area if they were the only electric utility.
Yes, we ar a bit larger, and Portland is a very high cost of living area. I pointed that out because the data I saw indicated CPS as #1 in low cost, but used misleading facts to support that position.
Those numbers are promising. Shouldn't someone build solar collectors in western Texas? Wouldn't that be a good area?
As for Nuclear, PGE used to control/own(?) something like 2/3rds of the Trojan Nuclear Power plant. It was shut down some years back, but is still a cost carried by PGE. This doesn't help our cost of electricity any. It's part of the huge liability that PGE carries.
If our five city council members were on the board of CPS, you would dislike the changes made, and agree with me I bet. Without seeing the disasters these elitists have caused, you don't have the same reference viewpoint as I do.
I consider it a bit off topic anyway because it's hard to consider a regulated utility as today's capitalism. Part of the accepted understanding of today's capitalism is 'supply and demand' in a 'free market' economy. The primary idea is still the owner(s) being able to profit from their work, which in turn gives incentive to create and build more. Without compe ion, en ies are not working to improve their profit margin, which in turn develops new technologies, jobs, etc.
From probably my first posting, I never indicated I was for strictly only capitalism. Some industries need to be regulated. Because of unethical practices that unscrupulous people will exploit, even more laws and regulations are needed to some extent to protect the general welfare. I am completely against any unnecessary restrictions on the free market and capitalism. The question that is difficult for me at times is what restriction, regulations, etc. are reasonable, and which are unreasonable. The area of gray is vast in some cases.
Didn't mean to insinuate the levels of compe ion were equal. I saw that Pacific Power is a large company (1.6 million customers according to their website) over a large area. It was a poorly conceived anecdotal tangent.
Yeah, everybody misleads. CPS also like to tout how large it is, but downplay all the qualifiers (they are the largest municipally owned utility that provides both electric and gas apparently, which is just way too specific if you want to boast about it).
West Texas is good for wind as well, which is why it's being turned into a giant wind farm. Many places in Texas are good for solar. There's been an on-again-off-again push to convince homebuilders here in San Antonio to install solar roofs, and several experiments have been made regarding solar and selling excess back to the network, etc.
Carrying dead weight would raise the cost.
It's like I said before. When things go bad, people want change. When things go good, people want more of the same. I've had wonderful experiences with government owned utilities and bad experiences with privately owned, so I want more to move under government control.
Just the way things work.
The gray area is extremely hard to navigate at times.
So true. It makes you wonder what kind of convoluted reasoning allows those two positions to coexist in one individual.
It's called stupidity.
Socialism is great on paper. Everyone living equal lives, in unity. Things don't work out that way though. The govt. takes advantage.
A Democracy has shown to be the best form of govt. so far. There was an actual experiment on this.
Socialism does not preclude democracy.
Socialism competes with capitalism.
Democracy competes with republic (which is what the US is), fascism, dictatorship, etc.
You could easily have a democratic socialist country like much of Europe is trying to do.
There have been capitalist non-democratic/republic countries as well.
Well seems that the activist are opposing the CPS rate hike
for a couple of reasons. One it will hurt seniors, secondly they
don't want money used to study added nuclear generation of
electricity.
Here is the story for the out of towners.
Residents oppose bigger CPS bills
Web Posted: 03/26/2008 12:00 AM CDT
Vicki Vaughan
Express-News
Opponents of a rate increase proposed by CPS Energy far outnumbered supporters at a public hearing Tuesday night, with most objecting to the part of the boost that would fund a nuclear plant study.
More than 30 residents spoke at the hearing at La Villita Assembly Hall, which came less than a week before the CPS Energy board of trustees is expected to vote on the rate increase proposal, which could go into effect in May.
CPS Energy officials said the nearly 5 percent increase for electricity and natural gas customers would add about $6 to the average residential monthly bill of $135. That's a revision of an earlier estimate by the city-owned utility that bills would increase by almost $7 a month.
CPS Energy has said that only a small percentage of the increase would fund a controversial $206 million study on the expansion of the South Texas Project nuclear plant near Bay City, southwest of Houston.
Although CPS Energy told the crowd of about 120 that CPS has the lowest electricity rates in Texas, that didn't comfort Consuelo Pedroza, who spoke in opposition to the rate increase.
"It's not fair to compare our rates to other cities, because wages in San Antonio are lower," she said. A senior citizen on a limited income, Pedroza objected to the proposed expansion of the nuclear plant, saying she's concerned about nuclear waste disposal.
CPS Energy deputy general manager Steve Bartley said that "there's no silver bullet for meeting our future demands" for energy. The utility has worked hard to achieve a balanced portfolio that includes renewable sources and conservation, he said.
But many speakers insisted that CPS Energy isn't doing enough to boost sustainable energy sources.
"Did you really consider all the safe, clean alternatives? I think not," said Loretta Von Copponelle of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club. The decision to spend $206 million to study expanding the nuclear plant "was a wrong one."
But Richard Perez, president of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, said the chamber supports the proposed rate increase. "I urge you all to move forward; the plan is very sound."
Howard Rogers, a member of the San Antonio Manufacturers Association, said he supports the use of renewable energy sources, but new plants must be built to handle future energy needs. "The (rate) plan as currently presented strikes a nice balance," he said.
CPS Energy officials said the increase would be the first since 1991 and that the utility needs to raise rates to pay for a number of major projects now under way, including the completion of a coal-fired plant at Calaveras Lake to be completed in 2010 and a detailed look at whether the utility should add two reactors to the South Texas Project nuclear plant.
CPS Energy's board last year approved spending $206 million to study the feasibility of the nuclear plant expansion.
The utility joined NRG Energy of New Jersey last fall in filing the first application to build a nuclear plant in the United States in almost 30 years. NRG has estimated that adding two reactors to the South Texas Project could cost $6 billion to $7 billion.
If CPS Energy trustees approve the rate increase Monday, the City Council must then approve the measure.
[email protected]
Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/business...S.3d01050.html
And the link is above.
We prefer Socialism.
We prefer Socialism.
"why does obama have a black body, he's just as white as he is black. awhh!!" -Tpark
That's an ill informed statement. Nuclear energy is extremely safe. There's been what, 1 US "disaster" and estimates say it affected only a handful of people, and that was a fluke with both the main and redundant backup systems failing at the same time as the sensors that told whether they were working or not. Everyone just latches on to Chernoble like that has ever had any relation to US plants.
It also happens to be the cleanest we have that can be used for mass production of energy here in San Antonio. And the cheapest.
Would she rather they build 4 or 5 new coal plants? That's really the only other option to increase capacity they way they want to.
Actually, socialism competes with everything. It's relationship with capitalism is that in socialism the government is the capitalist en y, and the people rank below that.
I prefer the USA.
Socialism does not limit the form a government can take. It describes how the government interacts with businesses and consumers.
You can have a true democratic socialist state, a socialist republic, a socialist dictatorship, etc.
In fact, the very core of socialism, is the working class controls everything, meaning it leans towards a democratic state. This actually leads to a fault in socialism when applied to large countries/areas because the further away you get from the working class, the less ideal the situation.
Lennin's version of socialism believes the working class needs an elite group of leaders, which led to the idea of an elitist single party government in the USSR.
Socialist think government should control everything,
they say the working class, but they mean government.
Cradle to grave government programs to take care of
the "people". But the problem is they don't/can't
do a very good job of it. Socialism is probably the
most prejudicial form of government, since the premise
is all should share in the re-distribution of wealth,
except, you have few producers and many consumers of
that wealth. Government creates no wealth, they only
confiscate wealth. Producers soon tire of being the
worker bee and assume the role of the "gimme" crowd.
Nice of you to know what every socialist on the planet is thinking.
The Marxist ideal IS the workers controlling everything, period.
Other forms of socialism actually don't apply it to government at all. The workers control the businesses and the government is separate. Basically every business is run as a co-op.
Here you are thinking of mostly USSR style communist socialism. It's been fairly proven that the Lennist theories are crap.
The guiding principal of socialism is that workers control production. Socialism does not require equality of wealth through direct or any other government interference. It only requires that the workers share in the wealth they create by being the owners of the production.
Again, some people here are using socialism (and its many versions), Soviet communism and regulated capitalism as synonimous words, when they represent very different economical and political systems.
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