Eversource is regulated.
They really can't be ''cheated''.

They get paid basically to make the investment to deliver the power that others generate.

If you put in solar tied to the grid... you might think you are selling to Eversource as they do the billing and transmission, but really you would be selling the excess power to your neighbor.

Using a Solar Dryer...
 

When I use the "solar dryer", I pick a windy day.

Clothes--but especially sheets--get that nice "outdoors-clean" smell. :coolsm:

(Clothes will dry even if frozen).

Helpful hint: I knew someone years ago who would take his electric meter out, turn it upside down, and plug it back in. The four prongs on the back make that easy to do.

His claim was that he would let his meter run backwards for a week and doing that would take two weeks off of his electric bill. Interesting theory.

My uncle happened to manage the General Electric Meter Division in Dover, NH. Several years later I told him the story. He was very excited to tell me that they had fixed that flaw and if you inverted your meter now it would run twice as fast forward.

A large restaurant owner in Saugus, MA paid someone to take his meter apart and change the internal gears so that it ran at about 1/3 the correct speed. That went on for many years until he was caught and convicted.

Posted for informational purposes only. Don't try this at home! :)

A long time ago I had a neighbor who was an electrician and decided it was a good idea to bypass his electric meter. He got caught, had to go to court, paid thousands in fines and all the electricity he stole plus interest. He was a nice guy, but a crook is still a crook at the end of the day.

Translation of "cheat Eversource": foil Eversource's plan of increasing their profits at consumers' expense by using as little electricity as possible.

It doesn't work that way.

Eversource is guaranteed a return on investment.
They no longer generate electricity.

So they get paid for billing, and a guaranteed return on investment for transmission.

While paying their CEO 14 million a year, and quite a few others mid 6 figures and higher. They are guaranteed to make money, guaranteed to be able to set rates that are profitable, allowed to write down assets for tax advantages regardless of whether the taxpayers paid for them or not. Truly awful company IMO, as was PSNH before them.

Meters are locked and sealed with a lead disk which has a code pressed into to reveal tampering but in the world of today many places have smart meters that no humans read so tampering might not be discovered but I would guess for those, unplugging it would be detected by the system.

My dad worked for NH co-op for many years and caught a few meter shenanigans

We have an empty house and I saw the electric dept there one day so walked over. She said we haven't used any electricity and was wondering why. So I think after a while if you don't use any power they check. Of course you still pay the customer fee and service fee and all that but no KW charge.

The tank type electric heater has 2 elements.
Which should be changed on a scheduled basis.

This is much overlooked, along with draining tank sediment. I helped a friend change his water heater a while ago and we were shocked how heavy it was. cut it open and it was 1/3 or more full of basically cement in the bottom.

They don't set rates. That would be the PUC; based on investment and government required operating costs.

If they could set rates, free of that authority, they would be much higher.
The money paid to the CEO, et al, is ROI that is lost by the investors.

If they paid the CEO a $1M, then the investors would get another $13M.
The loss is not to the consumer.

The consumer cost increase due to the demand of increased infrastructure costs... basically building new capacity in areas that didn't need it in the past and building that capacity in such a manner as to have lower impact as publicly desired.

Thus we, as a collective, increase the cost.

It is like when people do not realize that the increase in traffic congestion in Meredith is partially the result of increased home building in Moultonborough.

I93 is a main trunk... like the big transmission lines... but each of the smaller branch roads have to be redeveloped to handle the increase in usage.

Eversource is having the same issue. It must increase its infrastructure even for the part that runs from the generators to NHEC or other smaller regional grids. That cost a lot with the shortage of supplies and labor we currently have.

If we cut back on the use... the need to increase the infrastructure is offset.

The system would quickly detect no load and trigger a response as if your power had gone out.

John, you are very knowledgeable in this area and I very much respect that. Maybe I'm wrong about some of what I'm saying, but in my opinion, defending Eversource is not a great position to be in.

The NH PUC, hardworking and trying their best to do what is right for NH residents, have been steamrolled over the years by PSNH/Eversource. Northern pass, thank goodness it was stopped at least for now, was a blatant attempt at a money grab by a public corporation, with massive spending on a PR campaign and legal wrangling.

I do understand the way a public company's finances work, including salary to upper management. It doesn't make it right for the leader to make 280 times the salary of the workers on the lower rungs.

Again in my opinion, when a company has a revenue stream that is set by the PUC in a manner that insures they can't lose money, insures they recoup all investment in infrastructure, there should be some limits to profitability at the expense of ratepayers. Don't we all wish we could run a company that can't lose money, can simply request more revenue and in nearly every case get it?

Stopping Northern Pass made you more dependent on the price of natural gas.

That would be a market line... and not a government required upgrade that could be recouped by transmission rates.

Quebec, and Eversource - since they were the only ones large enough to handle the build out of the transmission line all the way to a point in the grid that could handle that level of generation - gave you an out to at least a partial offset of the current increase in the actual cost of electricity that is based on market fundamentals. You chose no. Now you get to live with the choice you made. It was a collective choice... but one we may live to regret.
It also meant that we now have to pay more for the transmission upgrade to the Coos loop. That will allow the biomass plant in Berlin to run at full output even when other generation sources (wind/solar/smaller hydro) are seeing high output.

Everything except conservation and downsizing has offsets.
Also the arguments made by the opposition are going to have increased costs in the infrastructure going forward that will be significant. No neighborhood near an existing generator now feels that when transmission lines are to be replaced that they should be above ground in large overhead towers.
But it could go even further down... Laconia has a tower on the Eversource public launch site that runs to a tower at Opechee Point, and then to a tower on the North Main street side. What if Eversource had to place that one under the lake and charge it to all the customers... even those not next to Lake Opechee? Instances like this happen all around the State. So we could be looking at a much more costly line charge as we go forward over the next several years.

What a company pays its workers is up to a mix of the market demand/labor supply and what the investors/board are willing to forgo in return on their investment for that labor.

Whenever you invest in something, there are costs... you determine if those costs are valid in relation to your ROI.

I have the floor combination a/c heater with two large-diameter hoses going out the window. This eliminates hot air sucking into the home. They are great but hard to find. Common in Europe.

Exactly. Whatever the specifics, the whole thing is so obviously corrupt to enrich a few who take virtually no risk with a guaranteed revenue stream and ROI. The head of Eversource should make a few hundred grand as a "public" employee.

Why?
My bond fund manager takes a percentage of my return and isn't subject to me considering him a ''public'' employee.

I have the option to divest... so the investors at Eversource feel that the CEO is worth what is being paid... or have the option to divest.

Does your bond fund manager go to the SEC and say "please make sure the market conditions dictate that our investment choices for our clients can't lose?"

John, you are completely missing the point. Of course a company can choose to pay people what they want to pay them, and in the case of a public company the board/shareholders can make those choices. Of course the board/shareholders of Eversource love their CEO and want to compensate him/her for pillaging the ratepayers through bullying, high powered legal methods, lobbying, and thus virtually guaranteeing profitability.

It's not that Eversource can't choose their own path, own CEO, own compensation levels, it's that Eversource isn't John Deere Tractor, making a product and competing in the marketplace. The rules should be different for these entities IMO.

BTW John on your comments about Northern Pass, interesting take and would enjoy discussing at some point but that subject seems to need a thread of it's own.:) So I decided to stick with my "Eversource sucks" comments and leave NP out of it for now. But I did note your insightful take on it.

You can't lose with a bond.

And as I stated... the CEO pay is not tied to rates.
The CEO pay is directly paid from the return that the investors would get.
The more they choose to pay the employees and management, the less they get on their return.

Same as a bond fund manager.

And the rules are different... John Deere does not need to ask permission to set the price of their product.
If they were the same... Eversource would charge so much more.

You can absolutely lose (relatively speaking) with a bond strategy, and managers advise on strategy and quality and timing as well as simply selling the bond.

So you are saying that higher rates which pad the profitability of Eversource are not what makes the company more profitable, encouraging higher pay for their CEO? And lower rates, reducing profitability, would not suggest to the board a lower pay rate?

Respectfully, you need to not simply argue semantics at the cost of missing the concept.

No. You can't.
Once the bond is purchased it will pay the dividend for the life of the bond.

You lose with a ''trading strategy''. You pay the manager for the trading strategy. Sort of like the Eversource investors lost with the ''trading strategy'' of the Northern Pass.

They cannot get regulated returns on items that are not part of the required regulatory process.

Higher rates are due to higher rates of investment. The higher rate of investment is because they are building out new infrastructure, and replacing infrastructure that has reached its capacity limit.

The same happens at an individual level when you change the amperage in you home from a 60 to a 100, and then to a 200 or more.
You pay the panel upgrade.
It also occurs when the panel fails and needs replacement.

If I want to ''bond'' it, I can... but I just pay.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/c...rce-energy/roi

Every bond has an expected rate of return at the time of purchase. If you buy a long term bond when inflation is expected to be 2%, and then inflation jumps to 10%, your return is destroyed and you lose--the money you get back in coupons is less than the rate of inflation. The only way to get out of this trap is to sell the bond...at a loss.

But staying on topic--it's one thing to argue for the free market to set compensation in a competitive situation, but it's silly to assert free market capitalism is fair/appropriate when we're talking about a government controlled entity.

There are bonds and there are bonds. You can lose your shirt buying the wrong bonds.


Government policy has a huge effect on fossil fuel and electricity prices. It's not a free market. We have an administration that has consistently said they want to limit and eliminate fossil fuel usage. We are seeing the fruits of those policies and efforts.

When people send money to green causes, this is what those causes want to happen. The slogan is always "alternative energy", but "alternative energy" is not even remotely ready to assume the load.

The result of these drastic energy price increases is going to be people without means being very cold, or dead this winter. And the problems these strategies are supposed to improve won't budge.

Wow. What a stretch.

" Combined, the oil and gas industry holds leases to more than 25 million acres of publicly-owned minerals, roughly half of which sit unused. Companies now hold more than 9,000 approved, but unused, drilling permits on national public lands, all of which could be put to use today." LINK

It is all greedy oil companies and greedy stockholders that cause the current issue.

Never mind the shutdowns caused by Covid-19 and a disastrous response by the previous administration.

It’s generally unwise to argue with the professor, but I must point out that when we were energy independent during the last administration, we were not faced with exorbitant energy prices. Now perhaps that’s a coincidence, but I think not. We need to revert back to what was working for all of us.

Ummm...you know, like, Covid happened and totally changed the landscape of production, travel, etc. and that there's, like, a war in Ukraine involving one of the biggest oil-producing countries in the world, right?

Like, for real?

Plane tickets were also $27 when Trump was president—didja think that was gonna stay the norm?!

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I repeat…..ENERGY INDEPENDENCE, once reversed, played a huge part in this mess! That is all I have to say on the subject….period.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01053-2

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Actually in an I-bond, that doesn't happen.

Since the investors are free to divest, the mechanism still works on compensation. After all, it is their ROI that is reduced with each dollar spent on operations... including compensation at any level.

The ''hatred'' of Eversource is a projection of the individual. They have the option of going off grid, but are trapped with the desire for electricity at the lowest possible cost.

They even complain about the programs designed to lower usage so that the infrastructure would not need to be expanded.
The UL printed a study on how PV generation, because it was lower power distributed over a larger area of the grid created less need for infrastructure upgrade. The Facebook comments really didn't seem to understand that if you demand more centralized generation the requirement would soon be an upgrade of the entire transmission line from the generating station to the end user. They think you just put more and more homes on the end of the branch line and that line never needs an upgrade.

Massachusetts even adopted Mass Saves to manage the usage so their infrastructure wouldn't need as much upgrade.

Sooner, more likely than later, they are going to need to seek out new generation... and other than small localized solar/etc sourcing... it will mean a new very large primary line upgrade. We just keep building farther and farther away from generation with higher and higher load factors.
That isn't going to be a freebie.
The chart I posted a link to shows the amount after depreciation of Eversource investment into the grid, and the rate of return before expenses. The rate fluctuates with the various depreciation and price sets... but is relative to bond levels. It is the investment that is skyrocketing as the grid ages out, and the demand for electricity in regions that previously had less demand are developed.

We had 13M b/d of refining capacity in 2016. We had 12M b/d of refining capacity in 2020. The policy to expand without limits LNG sales offshore was enacted in 2018 - that is what effects the cost of generating electricity from fossil fuels. Biden was in his basement during that period. So what Administration are you talking about?

That would be personal behavior... anyone can go off grid.
If you are talking nationally... the US is ENERGY INDEPENDENT.
We ship more LNG and petroleum distillates overseas than we have any other time in history in the last six months.

Since we will be losing more refining capacity in the future... the Houston refinery will shutdown at the end of 2023 because the price of gasoline and other distillates are too low to attain the needed ROI. The option is to cut usage.

Electric vehicles grid tied, will overwhelm the grid. Changing to higher CAFE standards will not have an immediate effect... so removing recreational usage of gasoline would be the broadest solution.
The federal government doesn't have that power... so it would be a State government decision. They will forgo it, simply by seeking to blame the federal government.

For electricity, the federal government could vote to repeal the Jones Act and change the 2018 policy. It would mean the EU would fall to Russia, and we may have to send troops in the future... but the US would see better prices as market demand would be sequestered when exports are removed creating a large glut in the US.
It probably would not have the huge effect on NH as might be hoped... in that we never build the KM pipeline expansion to bring more natural gas to our State. That limits infrastructure build out in natural gas and results in higher prices in winter months due to heating demand.