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October 1, 2021 02:42 pm

Utilities Took Public Money, Gave CEOs Millions, and Then Turned People's Lights Off During the Pandemic

A new report finds that some of the country's most powerful utilities raked in millions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds last year -- while continuing to shut off service for households across the U.S. during the pandemic. Gizmodo: The report, released Thursday from the Center for Biological Diversity and BailoutWatch, takes a look at states with publicly available data on utility shutoffs. In the 17 states where there was available data on shutoffs, the report found that the 16 utilities operating in those states cut off electric services for their customers nearly 1 million times between February 2020 and June 2021. (For some context on shutoffs during a normal, non-pandemic year, the U.S. Census found that 1.2 million households in 50 states reported experiencing shutoffs within a three-month period of taking the survey in 2017, the latest Census Bureau data available on disconnections.) The offenses here are not shared by the utility industry equally; there are especially bad actors. The report highlights six utilities that were responsible for a jaw-dropping 94% of all shutoffs last year. NextEra, Duke Energy, Southern Company, Dominion Energy, Exelon, and DTE Energy make up what the authors call a "Hall of Shame." NextEra alone, the report found, accounted for more than half of all shutoffs. The analysis also examined financial documents, including proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission before a company's shareholder meeting, to calculate how much money these 16 utilities received from the government as part of relief efforts during the pandemic. The CARES Act was originally designed to help struggling businesses pay workers, but utilities took advantage of corporate loopholes within the act that changed how big businesses could report taxes. (The CARES Act also disproportionately benefited oil and gas producers: BailoutWatch, one of the authors of this report, has also used financial documents to show how oil companies laid off thousands of people and yet still gave their CEOs raises during the pandemic, all the while taking handouts from the government.)

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