Viewpoint: What if NW Energy owned a restaurant (monopoly cafe)
Karen Kirk
Imagine you live in a town with no grocery stores and only one restaurant. The daily deliberations about what to have for dinner are a moot point – because there’s only one source of food. For every meal, every day, you dutifully head to the Monopoly Cafe.
At first, this arrangement seemed ok. It’s not the best cafe, but they always spoke of their plans to make it better, cleaner, and serve healthier food. It seems weird that the owners are guaranteed 10% profits every year, even as they make some questionable business decisions. But you stick it out, not wanting to complain. Besides, you have no choice anyway.
There’s no menu at the Monopoly Cafe, you get what’s served and if you don’t like it you can just go home hungry. There’s no option on the price, either – it’s expensive day in and day out. Recently they raised the price a whole lot, claiming they’re just catching up to the market and they won’t need to raise prices again for a while. Well, you can guess what happened next. They raised the prices even more.
And then there’s the food. This stuff is like the worst, rubbery gristle you can imagine. Every so often, the management of the Monopoly Cafe holds a few “listening sessions” to get input on the food. Townspeople show up and stand in line to share their ideas. People express their visions for fresh meats, fruits, and vegetables. Our town has abundant potential to grow top-quality natural and local foods, so why aren’t we doing that instead of eating rubbery gristle?
After lengthy consideration, the Monopoly Cafe’s Board of Directors flies into town on their private jets to announce the new menu: More rubbery gristle! You see, there are special state laws that allow the cafe to layer on even more profit for rubbery gristle, so they’re happy to sell you even more of what you don’t want.
The locals are over it. They came up with a nickname for the Monopoly Cafe: The Neighborhood’s Worst Eatery. The name sticks, and soon everyone is referring to the Monopoly by its nickname, NWE.
The NWE management has yet another trick to enrich themselves. They toss all the garbage from the restaurant into the ditch behind the cafe. Piles of rotting gristle accumulate in foamy ponds, which overflow into the nearby creek. The creek used to be your town’s drinking water until it became contaminated. Cleaning up that mess is gonna be expensive one day, and you’ll have no choice but to pay for it. But NWE reminds you it’s a small price to pay for the treat of dining on rubbery gristle every day.
Your patience for the Monopoly Cafe is worn thin. You hate to see your kids eating the least healthy food imaginable, and you learn that cafes in other states use locally-grown foods that cost less. How is it possible that you’re stuck with the worst food and the highest prices? Don’t you have any recourse?
Amazingly, you do. The People Supervising Cafes are in charge of making sure the cafe treats you right. Let’s call them the PSC for short. The state government and the PSC are supposed to rein in the Neighborhood’s Worst Eatery – they can require better food, a cleaner restaurant, and lower prices. But weirdly, they never have. They’ve approved everything NWE asked for, leaving you stuck with the bill and a chronic case of heartburn. To make a bad situation even worse, lately NWE has decided to just go rogue, sidestepping the PSC’s authority and doing whatever they want. They’re betting that no one will stop them.
This metaphor seems outrageous, right? But it illustrates the situation NorthWestern Energy has created. It might feel hopeless but it isn’t. The PSC (Public Service Commission) now has a golden opportunity to rein in NorthWestern Energy. We’ve all put up with expensive gristle for way too long. It’s time for Montana’s regulators to hold NWE accountable, restore the balance of power, and stop rewarding bad behavior.
Wouldn’t that be delicious?
Karin Kirk is a geologist and science journalist specializing in energy and climate. She sits on the steering committee of Montanans for Affordable Energy.