Maryland Thought Deregulating Utilities Would Lower Rates. It’s Cost the State’s Residents Hundreds of Millions of Dollars.
Unscrupulous retail energy companies in Maryland and numerous other states often prey on the poor by offering special low rates, only to quickly raise them.
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Last year, on the day before Memorial Day, Bill Fields received a phone call around half-past noon from a caller who said he represented the verification department of Baltimore Gas & Electric, Maryland’s primary energy utility.
Fields is from Baltimore and a longtime BG&E customer. Because he’d paid his last six bills on time, the caller said, he was eligible for a $50 rebate. Not only that, he’d get shopping credits and monthly savings of $30 to $40, too. And if he gave the ID for his gas account, those benefits would double. But the ID for his electric account wasn’t needed curiously, the caller already had it.
Investment in electric grid infrastructure is critical to economic progress How public dollars can upgrade broadband and the grid at the same time
As the country enters a new era, it finds itself behind in the infrastructure that will shape its future: broadband and the electric grid. A lack of investment in the wires and cables we take for granted threatens our economic growth. Fortunately, we can maximize the impact of public dollars through coordinated upgrades of our electric system and broadband infrastructure.
Our electric grid is inadequate for increasing amounts of renewable energy and our broadband infrastructure is overcome by the number of us who depend upon it for physical and economic survival.
For a brief shining moment we were all connected
What could you do with $100 million? What could you do with $100 million in every state, plus more for poor or rural states, for broadband infrastructure and programs to reach every child trying to join Zoom calls with their teacher, to connect every harried parent trying to do to their job virtually while monitoring the home schooling in the kitchen, to bring a doctor to every senior or medically vulnerable person afraid to leave their house for fear of contracting COVID-19?
Elin Swanson Katz
That was the joyful, wonderful question those of us in the broadband world were asking ourselves for about 48 hours last week. After months of speculation about infrastructure money in the next stimulus bill, and weeks of rumor about a really big tranche of money for states to spend bringing high-speed broadband to every corner of every community, we saw it: a Wednesday night draft online of the Emergency Coronavirus Relief Act of 2020, the st