Customer Reviews

The Last Energy War: The Battle over Utility Deregulation

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

My only significant criticism of the book is that it is a somewhat one-dimensional assessment of a multifaceted phenomenon. While the issue of restructuring the electric industry is complex, and the economic drivers are deeper than Wasserman details in the book, the book is still an absorbing assessment of the impact that occurred when the electric utility industry embraced commercial nuclear energy. "Too cheap to meter," was the mantra of the 1950's. Well, we all have a basic energy became, in some respects, a tremendous white elephant for the industry and it's regulators. Wasserman opines that the investment required was enormous, and the return has never been completely realized either in economic, social, or environmental benefit.

An interesting book. Too bad there's not much in here about utility deregulation.

The book is an angry diatribe against various causes that the author hates, including, among others, robber barons, big corporations, corrupt politicians, nuclear power, materialism, the Vietnam War, turncoat environmentalists, and the utility industry. Rather than address these topics in turn, the author attacks each of them in every chapter of the book. The use of various colorful adjectives to describe these evils does little to dull the monotony.

These points might be tolerable if the book actually lived up to its title, but utility deregulation is treated only in the last two chapters, and in a very limited fashion at that. The first of these consists of ten pages about the California deregulation debacle, which even deregulation proponents agree was a terrible mess. The second is a brave statement about how the bad guys won't win, with little explanation for why not.

The book has little in the way of data or supporting evidence for its contentions, particularly with respect to deregulation. We are told the exact number of demonstrators dragged off the site of a protest at a nuclear power plant (1,414), but we are never told the numbers which might show that deregulation will raise the cost to consumers, though we are told that detailed studies have been done demonstrating just this.

The author also does little to present an alternative plan, being far more interested in attacking his opponents. The chapter on solar and wind energy is almost an afterthought, and energy efficiency gets perhaps a paragraph. There is nothing on how a plan using alternative energy systems might be implemented. In contrast, two chapters are dedicated to attacking nuclear power.

In the end, this book is an interesting propaganda pamphlet, but will do little to inform the public about the pros and cons of utility deregulation.

A short book, with a very populist bent. The book discusses the history of utility regulation from the 1880's to near present day. Harvey Wasserman is a well regarded and well known opponent of nuclear energy, and his viewpoint comes across in this book. The discussion revolves around the approach by the investor owned utilities to back nuclear power starting in the 1950's, and then requiring the bailout of the nuclear construction boom following Three Mile Island. Even more interesting in the wake of the recent Japanese earthquake and the impacts on nuclear generation in that country are Wasserman's concerns on safety and the environment. While heavily slanted to his political-economic point of view, the book will get the critical reader thinking about many of the challenges of nuclear power as well as the motivations of the generators and distributors of electricity.

Having been has been involved on both sides of the energy equation exploring for oil, gas and geothermal resources using seismic and magneto-telluric methods and working for the utility industry in coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants, I can say that Harvey Wasserman has written a book that details exactly how and why we're in the mess we're in.

This book is primer for anyone who wants a breif history of the utility industry. It begs the question of when the public will wake up and take back what corporations have stolen from us.

I read Harvey's book when it first came out. I'm not an expert on this subject, but the issues he raised in a highly accessable style worried me, although no one was talking about them at the time. Now, they're front page headlines. We think these decisions just happen, then discover when we read a book like this, that they're product of huge political interests, and that we, the ordinary citizens, pay the toll.

A wonderful rallying cry for a more democratic approach to key energy issues.

Paul Loeb Author Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time [www.soulofacitizen.org]

The author does a good job explaining how the deregulation has allowed the utilities to push the cost of their investment decisions on to their customers and taxpayers. Read it with an open mind and take it as one opinion in the deregulation debate.