My electric company runs advertisements promoting energy conservation, as well as ubiquitous inserts on energy saving in every monthly bill. For example, they urge consumers to use compact fluorescent light bulbs, turn down the thermostat, etc.
This is NOT an energy co-op, it’s a for-profit corporation. And my former electric company in a different state behaved similarly, so I know it’s not an isolated case.
Why do they do this? Isn’t it against their own self-interest… like a grocery store urging people to eat less?
Thanks!
6 Responses
It’s because the energy companies like to raise their prices every 5 minutes and by urging us to be more ‘green’ makes them look like the good guys. It’s all about good PR.
PR. They want to appear as if they care.
You actually see the same thing with grocery stores. They encourage people to eat “healthier,” yet they keep selling bad-for-you foods.
That is called Corporate Social Responsibility it looks against their own self-interest but it is not, with that they are improving the image, and costumers can think that is a good company…
At the end you decide what to do, but the company is just making good advises and that is good for them. So it is not crazy to think in a grocery store urging people to eat less.
think about it
From the perspective of an energy supplier, they will incur much higher costs if people do not curb their energy usage and reduce demand. Conservation is much cheaper than building new energy producing infrastructure capacitiy especially if it entails coal-fired plants which create tremendous amount of pollution.
The cost to the consumers to reduce energy usage is mostly minor –timers, and other power regulation tools and some behaviour changes to be more conscious of what we waste.
The other realization energy companies are finding that maximizing profits can lead to degredation of other parts of our social system. So increasing air pollution, hurting residents in poor communities that cannot prevent impact from bad energy generation practices and generally wasting a limited natural resouces come back to haunt the corporation in the end.
Mine does the same mainly because they are forced to by both state and federal government.
In the end they don’t make a very convincing case for conservation, last year alone my power company raised my rates four times and my power use over the past seven years had been well below the year before, unfortunately my costs continue to climb while my use drops and again they raised my rates another 9 percent thus far this year.
They are just like big oil, they see how little you can really use then jack up the prices so they make more with less.
The only way to truly conserve is to be able to disconnect from the grid altogether which for many is easier said than done.
Building a new power plant is a long and expensive process.
Selling electricity from an existing plant is much more economical for them, but as our population grows and we buy more gadgets and like the A/C turned up more every year in bigger and bigger houses, our appetite for electricity is increasing. If they can slow that growth, or even it out between day and nighttime, then it makes life easier for them.