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New Brunswick power rates rising in June.
May. 11th, 2010 09:29 amAnd for once, it's not the little guy who suffers most!
The local power company was trying to sell itself to a company in Quebec in order to pay off all its debts and whatnot, which locals were really steamed about. For all that New Brunswick sucks in many ways, I have to say that when the locals get passionate about something, they hang on! People theorized that selling the company to another province would eventually mean that NB jobs got lost and replaced with jobs for people in Quebec instead, and while nobody could say for sure, that was entirely likely to happen, if history is any indicator.
But the deal fell through, so to compensate, electricity rates are being raised by 3% starting in June. For Rei and I, this isn't a big deal. Our heat comes from central heating and is shared throughout the apartment building, so we already don't have to worry about that. (Though that causes a whole host of other problems, but I won't go into that here.) Our power bill is only about $40 a month, so at most it'll go up by a little over $1. We may be strapped for cash, but we're not that badly off yet!
There is some concern, though, about people who are on fixed incomes and use electric heat. Their power bill might only go up by $5 a month, for example, but that's $5 they'll have to shave off other areas of their lives, like food. Some people on fixed incomes really only have enough to pay for essentials, their rent/mortage and bills and the same batch of groceries every week, and have nothing left over for savings or emergencies of the like. So unless their income goes up accordingly (and we all know that it won't), they'll either have to cut back on power use (possible in some cases but not all) or shave that extra money from other areas (most likely to have to happen).
But aside from that, the people who'll feel the crunch most are big businesses. When your power bills are thousands of dollars each month for large office buildings, that extra 3% adds up to a lot of money!
Consider, for example, the last call centre I worked in. It was a very small centre, and we maybe had 25 computers set up. We were instructed, when our shift was over and it came time to log off, never to shut the computer down. Always just log off and then leave. This was, in theory, so that anyone coming in for their shift could log straight into the system without waiting for it to power up again, and nobody could access anyone else's email (which could have been done if nobody logged off at all).
However, waiting to log on took almost as long as rebooting anyway, and even though we had few computers, we had fewer employees. We may not have had dedicated seating, but since we all had our pick of computers, we all sat at the same desks every day without fail.
Shifts tended to last for 6 to 10 hours. So there were computers that were being left on and idle for 14 to 18 hours at a time, wasting power, and we weren't allowed to turn them off.
Considering the company went out of business because they were broke, they did surprisingly little to cut a few corners and save money where they could. When I worked alone at night, I turned off the bathroom and kitchen lights unless I was in there, for example, because they didn't need to be on.
It doesn't take much to save power in companies like that, but I'll bet that most companies will do nothing but complain that their expenses have increased and how they need to lay off an equivalent amount of employees to balance it out.
Aaaand on a completely different subject, somebody recently commented to an article I wrote about living with Tourette's syndrome and suggested that maybe my condition could be explained as possession by djinn, and I ought to keep an open mind about it...
The local power company was trying to sell itself to a company in Quebec in order to pay off all its debts and whatnot, which locals were really steamed about. For all that New Brunswick sucks in many ways, I have to say that when the locals get passionate about something, they hang on! People theorized that selling the company to another province would eventually mean that NB jobs got lost and replaced with jobs for people in Quebec instead, and while nobody could say for sure, that was entirely likely to happen, if history is any indicator.
But the deal fell through, so to compensate, electricity rates are being raised by 3% starting in June. For Rei and I, this isn't a big deal. Our heat comes from central heating and is shared throughout the apartment building, so we already don't have to worry about that. (Though that causes a whole host of other problems, but I won't go into that here.) Our power bill is only about $40 a month, so at most it'll go up by a little over $1. We may be strapped for cash, but we're not that badly off yet!
There is some concern, though, about people who are on fixed incomes and use electric heat. Their power bill might only go up by $5 a month, for example, but that's $5 they'll have to shave off other areas of their lives, like food. Some people on fixed incomes really only have enough to pay for essentials, their rent/mortage and bills and the same batch of groceries every week, and have nothing left over for savings or emergencies of the like. So unless their income goes up accordingly (and we all know that it won't), they'll either have to cut back on power use (possible in some cases but not all) or shave that extra money from other areas (most likely to have to happen).
But aside from that, the people who'll feel the crunch most are big businesses. When your power bills are thousands of dollars each month for large office buildings, that extra 3% adds up to a lot of money!
Consider, for example, the last call centre I worked in. It was a very small centre, and we maybe had 25 computers set up. We were instructed, when our shift was over and it came time to log off, never to shut the computer down. Always just log off and then leave. This was, in theory, so that anyone coming in for their shift could log straight into the system without waiting for it to power up again, and nobody could access anyone else's email (which could have been done if nobody logged off at all).
However, waiting to log on took almost as long as rebooting anyway, and even though we had few computers, we had fewer employees. We may not have had dedicated seating, but since we all had our pick of computers, we all sat at the same desks every day without fail.
Shifts tended to last for 6 to 10 hours. So there were computers that were being left on and idle for 14 to 18 hours at a time, wasting power, and we weren't allowed to turn them off.
Considering the company went out of business because they were broke, they did surprisingly little to cut a few corners and save money where they could. When I worked alone at night, I turned off the bathroom and kitchen lights unless I was in there, for example, because they didn't need to be on.
It doesn't take much to save power in companies like that, but I'll bet that most companies will do nothing but complain that their expenses have increased and how they need to lay off an equivalent amount of employees to balance it out.
Aaaand on a completely different subject, somebody recently commented to an article I wrote about living with Tourette's syndrome and suggested that maybe my condition could be explained as possession by djinn, and I ought to keep an open mind about it...
