New Orleans       In the early and mid-1970s, ACORN and other citizen-based community organizations around the country were involved in one utility campaign after another with investor-owned companies.  They were constantly asking for rate increases or were trying to build expensive, often coal-fired plants for speculated future demand.  You name a state and a company during those years, and you could easily find where there was a fight.

Middle South Utilities, now Entergy, through its wholly owned affiliates Arkansas Power & Light (AP&L), Mississippi Power & Light (MP&L), Louisiana Power & Light (LP&L), and New Orleans Public Service, Inc. (NOPSI), along with the gas company, ARKLA, had us running back and forth to the utility regulators on a regular basis.  We and other organizations fought and sometimes won what we called “lifeline” rates that guaranteed 400 watts of electricity a month at low, fixed costs.  We also fought the bulk rate discounts given to big business and large users, like Alcoa Aluminum, which at the time used 10% of the energy produced in Arkansas, paying pennies, while consumers paid more.

This stroll through ancient history may have new meaning now, because of pressure on utilities, and therefore consumers or what ARKLA’s CEO back then, Witt Stephens, called the “biscuit cookers.”  These fights are coming back, even after years of conservation and declining energy usage, because of big tech hunger for building data centers, initially to power cloud computing, but now because of their voracious hunger to feed the growth of artificial intelligence.  They are trying to build them everywhere it seems, at least everywhere they can easily access water, land, infrastructure, and customers.  Some want to repurpose old nuclear power plants.  All of them seem to want to shift a lot of the burden of the cost to build, expand the grid, and operate from their own balance sheets to the monthly bills of consumers.

There are a lot of issues here.  In Ohio and Virginia, commissioners have faced massive proposals.  Thus far, some commissions in those states are resisting big tech.  In Louisiana, it seems the governor has put pressure on the commission to transfer most of the costs to consumers on gas-fired plants proposed by Entergy in the northern part of the state near Monroe.  Even small and large businesses in that area are squealing like stuck pigs about having to pay some other businesses’ bills.  Part of the problem is that no one can tell when these centers will actually be built, or how much power they will actually use, yet the cost to hit our monthly bills will be now.

The tech companies will make the usual arguments about jobs and taxes paid to the community.  Most of us have learned over the years that much of that is hype, but when we open the bills every month, it’s biting our butts, not theirs.  This is a campaign for now that ought to engage us all.  Act now or pay later.