![]() ![]() Hundreds of businesses on Long Island have long sought the low-cost electricity made available by the New York Power Authority, the state’s nonprofit power supplier. Like water service, electric power works best when not run by private interests. These public power systems are a matter of civic pride and customer satisfaction. In some of the most conservative states in the nation, like Nebraska and Mississippi, virtually every community is served by a nonprofit utility. Nonprofit, publicly owned electric systems are common. ![]() This is neither a radical nor a fanciful idea. The Legislative Commission on the Future of LIPA, created last spring, has been tasked with coming up with a plan for 2025 that would allow LIPA to run the electrical system directly, saving ratepayers lots of money. State legislators from Long Island, working with ratepayers, community groups and the Reimagine LIPA campaign, created after Isaias, lobbied for the establishment of a state legislative commission to chart a future for LIPA without PSEG. LIPA board members past and present have voiced serious questions about continuing to “outsource” our electrical system. Most recently, PSEG has been taken to task for its dismal customer satisfaction ratings. Even though LIPA pays PSEG an $80-million-per-year management fee, LIPA has faced continual frustration. Three for-profit utilities - LILCO, KeySpan/National Grid and PSEG - have made lots of money off Long Island ratepayers. PSEG’s own management performance proved so terrible during Hurricane Isaias, in 2020, that LIPA sued it for “corporate mismanagement, misfeasance, incompetence and indifference.” The suit was withdrawn only after a new LIPA-PSEG contract was renegotiated last spring, imposing more controls over PSEG for the remaining three years of the agreement, through 2025. KeySpan was later bought out by National Grid.Īfter National Grid badly mismanaged the preparation for and aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, it was replaced by PSEG, a New Jersey-based utility. LIPA brought in another for-profit utility, KeySpan, to manage and operate the system. LIPA was created by New York state after the Long Island Lighting Company almost bankrupted ratepayers with its failed Shoreham nuclear power plant. It purchases the electricity we use mostly from National Grid, the same company that sells natural gas on Long Island. But this public authority hires private companies like PSEG to actually run the system. The Long Island Power Authority, which most people know little about, owns the wires and substations. Long Island has a unique way of providing electricity to customers. Who does what? And how does this add up to unnecessarily high electric bills? ![]() Yet there is also the Long Island Power Authority, as well as National Grid. Most Long Islanders are rightly confused about who is responsible for our ever-rising electricity bills. ![]()
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