Lost Revenues

Lost Production

Damaged Equipment

Spoiled, Damaged, & Contaminated Inventories

Loss of Life Support Devices  & Hospital Medical Technologies

Lost Data / IT Downtime

Decreased Employee Productivity

Loss of Communications

Temporary Closure of Facilities

Loss of Temperature Control

Failures of Critical Infrastructure

Safety & Security

It no longer makes sense for commercial utility customers to continue paying excessive electric rates that average over 20 cents per KWH with some hours costing up to 45 cents per KWH for unstable electrical service with frequent business killing power outage and brown outs. Manufacturing, computer data center, hospital, food / grocery, education, and financial services facilities are the most vulnerable to power disruptions. Power outages cause a wide variety of losses for large commercial, industrial, and institutional power users that range from over $100,000 per hour to multiple millions per hour. 26% lost power every month and 56% experience an outage lasting over one hour. These losses are a hidden cost of energy that frequently exceeds the utility cost of electricity and exceed $18 billion annually for California electric utility customers.

Unfortunately, utility service is becoming less reliable as many utilities have under invested in both new infrastructure and the maintenance of existing systems. PG&E has filed for bankruptcy a second time in less than two decades due to liabilities from several large scale forest fires caused by poorly maintained equipment. PG&E has been forced to reallocate the majority of their funds to mitigating fire damage and paying liability claims from those fires. As a result, they have adopted a power curtailment strategy to prevent future fires that shuts down both local and long-distance transmission lines in areas that have a high risk of fire. This causes cascading power outages both in the local fire risk areas and in areas hundreds of miles away that are served by high voltage transmission lines running through the fire risk areas.

In Puerto Rico, PREPA has filed for bankruptcy following decades of corruption and mismanagement. The island has suffered from unreliable power and months long power outages following Hurricane Maria.

Extreme mismanagement at both PG&E and PREPA has exposed systemic problems that will take over a decade to fix and guarantees rising electric rates. Both utilities under invested in both maintenance and the new generating and transmission assets needed to provide reliable service and to meet the needs of a growing economy.