22 June—The overpaid, underperforming management of utility monopoly Eversource has once again been caught with its pants down. In the interest of unbiased accuracy, it must be said that Eversource management clearly doesn’t underperform in everything—particularly in matters that serve its own interest.

Like pocketing undeserved bonuses; making idle promises about maintenance, upgrades, and preparedness; defending the poorly managed company that some nasty albeit perceptive people call Neversource against well-deserved and frequent criticism; complaining about state oversight and blaming it alone for the inflated rates its captive customers pay; threatening to flush customers down the toilet if Neversource isn’t allowed to squeeze even more money out of them. Us.

Hawaiians pay an ungodly rate for their electricity (and for virtually everything else) and Californians pay a little over half that. The third, fourth, and fifth most expensive electricity in the United States—just a shade less costly than the Flake State’s—is sold to captive customers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. The rates in those three New England states are only cents apart. And guess who sells that overpriced electricity.

That’s right, Eversource sells the most expensive electricity in the continental United States except for the several utilities that clean up in California.

So at about 4 p.m. yesterday, during a predicted severe thunderstorm, some 344 customers in The Monitor’s neighborhood, according to the blameworthy utility, lost power, “caused by tree limbs contacting power lines.” Our standby generator came on and kept us out of the dark until grid power was restored seven hours later. So we survived yet another outage barely inconvenienced—except for the cost of several gallons of propane.

But why did it take an Eversource crew that was supposedly waiting and ready to jump into action seven hours to restore power? It certainly wasn’t the linemen’s fault. Was Eversource even prepared?

If anyone needed a good reason to install solar panels, Eversource is it . . .