What? A power outage? You gotta be kidding me!

My place has had at least 2 or 3 power outages just in the past 6 months - and that's actually fewer than what some local neighborhoods have experienced, or what I've experienced in similar time frames.

Our local electric monopoly is Duke Energy. For those unfamiliar with Dook and the kind of problems it has, they're a lot like Unitil in New England. Unitil is so wretched that some towns have tried to get a different power provider - a story that got some national attention.

Duke is a lot like Unitil: high bills and unreliable performance.

And Duke expects us (its customers) to pay when it doesn't deliver. After Dook took days to restore power during the Blackout of '08, it demanded a rate increase to make up for the resulting loss of business. Naturally, regulators rubber-stamped this demand - just as they rubber-stamp Duke's many other requests for rate increases.

Making us pay for power that wasn't even being delivered is exactly like if a bubble gum company sues everyone who was born before bubble gum was invented.

Fast forward to this week.

Tuesday was one of few days in the past few months that has had decent weather. There was no significant wind, no rain, no lightning, and certainly no ice.

So guess what? The power went out at Northern Kentucky University for well over an hour. Electric was knocked out to over half the campus for almost 90 minutes. As a result, NKU was forced to cancel evening classes.

The silver lining is that it was at NKU instead of at a school that actually has a First Amendment. NKU's suppression of dissent has become legendary. But that's beside the point.

Reportedly, the cause of the power outage has not been found.

Well, I think I've found the cause: it's Duke Energy. With Dook, weather doesn't have to be bad for power to go out. Often, it'll just - poof! - go out.

There doesn't have to be a reason. It happens because it happens.

Under Duke, the area basically has a Third World electricity infrastructure. But we're forced to keep throwing money at it, even as it never improves.

Of course, this is the same company that was allowed to charge customers for building a new nuclear plant even if the plant was never actually built. (The fact that they even wanted to build a nuclear plant is proof they didn't learn a thing from Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.)

(Source: http://nky.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20090318/NEWS0103/303180009;
http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=2692277)