or Unicom or whatever the hell they are calling themselves now.* They couldn’t keep one light bulb lit if their fucking lives depended on it. Another fucking power outage in the Loop, and this time it completely shut down the L system for several hours. (Yes, I was downtown and had to work my way home on slow and crowded buses. How did you guess? 
) An affected area from Chicago Avenue to 24th Street and the lakefront to Ashland, including the busy shopping areas of North Michigan Avenue and State Street. On a Sunday when the CTA was running eight-car trains because of the Bears game. They were only lucky that this fucking mess happened on a Sunday at all. On a weekday, it would have been chaos defined!
And this isn’t the first fucking time, not by a long shot. They had a transformer explosion a couple of weeks ago in the Loop that screwed up a smaller area, but on a weekday. Repeated equipment fires and explosions knocking out power to large areas. Brownouts and blackouts during the summer. IN THE LOOP, mind you! If they can’t maintain a reliable power supply to the heart of the city, where all the big customers are – enormous buildings with dozens of elevators, thousands of computers, and uncountable light bulbs – what good are they?
And about keeping lights on if their life depended on it – it does!!! The city government, especially Mayor Daley, are NOT happy about ComEd’s performance in the last few years, to make a major understatement. There’s been serious talk about going after ComEd’s city franchise several times in the last decade. You would think that alone, if nothing else, would make them install the best equipment for the vital downtown area. After all, it’s one thing for city officials to talk about pulling the franchise, but it’s another level of trouble entirely when business leaders – who presumably are wary of government putting a company out of business – weigh in on the franchise issue. Daley is especially concerned because he’s trying to make Chicago into another “Silicon Alley” capitalizing on Chicago’s universities, central location, excellent communications infrastructure, large industrial buildings, etc… But computers need a RELIABLE electric supply, and the ComEd follies of the last few years may scare away dot-com businesses who depend on their computers running 24/7.
But instead of investing in basic electric infrastructure to keep the lights on, under their public franchise, Unicom (what the hell is that, the cousin of a unicorn?) is diversifying into other industries entirely, like “district cooling” (central plant chills water and pipes the water to surrounding buildings to use as air conditioning). Why don’t they try a little reliable district LIGHTING before they stray off into other ventures?!
I usually don’t favor a government takeover of any industry. But an electric utility operates under a franchise from the city – in exchange for using the public streets and being the exclusive distributor of electricity, they are supposed to provide a reliable supply of power to everyone who pays their bill. And ComEd, IMHO, is violating this public trust. The fact that past power troubles were followed by serious franchise-termination plans means that ComEd will NOT take “fix it or else!” conditions from the city seriously, or they would have fixed the problem before now.
The city should find a power company with a record of reliability to operate the Chicago electric system, strip ComEd of the franchise as quickly as the law allows, and reassign the franchise to the new operator.
What say ye?
*Are they trying to make THOMAS EDISON, the person who started their bloody industry in the first place, into a non-person or what? Or do they just think the name sounds so “20th Century” in a dot-com world?! ComEd is desparately removing anything from their name, etc., that has “Edison” in it.