B.O.H.I.C.A!*

PRU readers may remember an October post we put up about the City's meeting with ComEd. Our posts on ComEd and the City's meeting were a result of ComEd's piss poor performance in the aftermath of an August storm that left many Park Ridge residents and ComEd customers without power for as long as 98 hours. Many residents and business people in Park Ridge began to also discuss the generally piss poor service the Park Ridge community has received from ComEd over the years. ComEd's response to the complaints was to promise to do a report and get it back to the City.

The PRU Crew still maintains that ComEd and the City of Park Ridge should be discussing the costs and benefits of burying power lines.

Yesterday we came across another article in Crain's about a recent move by ComEd's parent company, Exelon Corp., to link Commonwealth Edison Co. to PJM, an East Coast power grid. According to the article, "The decision to join PJM instead of its Midwestern counterpart, commonly known as Midwest ISO, means the Northern Illinois power market is now tethered to the East Coast, where electricity supplies are far tighter and prices correspondingly higher than in the Midwest."

And ComEd customers can expect to see "households and small businesses...rates jump by 1 cent per kilowatt-hour by 2009, according to Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) staff calculations — 10% above next year's average rate of 10.2 cents per kilowatt-hour." Additionally, "in October, ComEd filed for a $360-million rate increase for delivering power, which if approved in full would raise household electric bills by about 8% starting next year. Put the two items together, and that's an 18% increase in electric bills by 2009."

The article notes:

"By itself, the PJM-related increase would nearly erase the relief won in this year's Springfield negotiations, which reduced ComEd's 24% rate hike that took effect at the beginning of the year to 13%.

In those negotiations, Exelon's Mr. Rowe won an important and overlooked concession: State officials are barred for the next 15 years from trying to force ComEd off the PJM grid."

It's clear to us that public officials are nothing if not fashionably late to a party; the article goes on to report that, "Local officials are beginning to question the PJM tie-in. In a hearing before the ICC last week, Commissioner Robert Lieberman chided PJM officials for hiking electric rates with no promise of anything in return from the industry. "It's not clear to us what we're getting for that," he said."

Maybe PJM will promise to do a report and get it back to the ICC.

*Bend over, here it comes again!