I’ll admit my bias up front: I grew up in an area served by an investor owned utility, that being PECo Energy, and my Dad was an engineer employed by PECo. Other than the blizzard of 1966, I don’t recall outages of more than an hour or so.
Now I reside in South central PA, and am served by something called a Rural Electric Cooperative, an entity which owns no power generation facilities, buys electricity from Met Ed/GPU, has me read my own meter, and charges me $13 to prepare the bill, recently revised to read “Service Charge.” Additionally, they like to nick you every now and then by simply changing the amount due on your previous bill to the balance forward. No date received posting for your check on the bill like any other responsible utility. I endured a 36 hour outage from Thursday night until this morning, and no one at the Co-Op seemed to know who was doing what and when it would be done.
While I understand that the REA or Rural Electrification Act was signed into law many years ago to help folk in remote areas receive electricity when the large utilities didn’t want to deal with that market, I think this scenario has expired.
I’ve also run into RECs from a construction standpoint. Case: I was redoing service in a twin dwelling, and went to the local REC office to see what they wanted, looking for local preferences. I read their literature, and decided to drop a 400 AMP feeder into a trough, and then into separate meter cans, from there into fusible disconnecting devices, and thence to panelboards. The REC failed my constuction because he “didn’t like it.” No article of the National Electric Code was violated, as I asked him to cite my error, and he had none. He chose to invoke the time old ball-breaker: NEC 90.4 in that the authority having jurisdiction can interpret the code as they see fit. Whenever I’ve done work in an area served by investor owned utilities, I hire the services of an independent inspector to examine and certify my work.
Until deregulation in PA, the Public Utilities Commission oversaw tha rates and actions of all investor owned utilities in the Commonwealth. What entity oversees the actions and practices of RECs? :mad: