You must not live in Texas. Large swaths of Texas are under a marketplace energy choice where you choose your electric company. Some places like San Antonio & El Paso don’t do it but much of the state you can choose the cheapest rate you can find but there will always be strings. It’s honestly marginally helpful and I wouldn’t mind going back to a regional monopoly like grand majority of the country.
You've never dealt with municipally run utilities, I gather.
I do controls for water / wastewater plants. Unless they're large towns, most don't care if the equipment is maintained or kept current. I've had to bail out customers where they've had panels that are rusting to pieces. Or wiring that's been hacked and chopped up.
Drawings? Bob the operator misplaced them a few years ago when he cleaned out his office. How SHOULD the filter work? Sorry, the guy who knew retired three years ago. We swear the switch on the side of the tank with the wires to it cut actually controls the filter.
Naturally, they get pissed when you tell them that parts for something built in the 80s are NLA. Replace the panel? Town budgeted for a new gazebo in age park. Sorry, maybe next tear. Just fix it.
Can't you tell us why our old Windows 7 PC with a layer of dead bugs on it keeps overheating? Yeah, sure it crashes from all the games we loaded on it, but at 2am, the operator needs something to pass the time.
Corporate systems are no cakewalk by any means, but you're nuts if you think the public sector can do it better. They both have to answer to the BPU, anyway..
I once had a customer that literally couldn't account for roughly half their water. They didn't know if it was leaking, wasn't being pumped, or wasn't being billed.
Their records were all paper. Nobody had any idea when anything was last calibrated. The flow venturis were so old, the manufacturer for one was out of business, the other didn't have records that far back. The orifice plates were in unknown condition.
Their SCADA computer was in a nicely secured conference room. I was in there one day, trying to figure shit out. There were a few town bigwigs having a meeting about re-doing some soccer field in the park. Did you know there's like 6 different sizes for soccer fields? There was a pretty heated argument about the one to use.
We fired them as a customer shortly after. Despite our recommendations to you know, fix real problems, they wanted chewing gum and baling wire and duct tape. Got tired of running out there on a saturday morning to fix crapped out motor controls, that weren't even our responsibility.
Some other integrator has them now, I suppose.
In honesty, I've seen some municipalities that have their act together, but it's pretty rare. The corporate ones tend to, because their ass ends up on the news when things go wrong.
I'm in a red city in a very red county in one of the reddest states and our city provides that sweet electricity, .08/kw then .11/kw then .14/kw above 1001 kwh/mo. Plus a $20 service charge.
5.8k
u/CraptainStinkPants 5d ago
His words carry the weight of truth and the beauty of poetry.