Heber, Karen, thank you! I’m new to Del. Carter, but she seems like someone who has both ideas and a willingness to fight for them.

Why not propose a solution yourself instead of basically saying “somebody oughta do something about that”? I can tell you one option that will NOT work: re-regulating. Rate regulation is nothing but smoke and mirrors, with consumers getting a monthly bill that is artificially held below real energy costs. A scheme that inevitably makes consumers apathetic about saving energy. Of course, somebody has to pay the difference. That somebody ends up being MD taxpayers, through higher tax rates to pay BGE the difference, else BGE goes belly up. Do you want a workable solution that reduces energy costs in the mid and long runs? We can start by building more nuclear fission reactors. Technology has progressed by leaps and bounds since the last fission reactor was built in the US around three decades ago. Don’t like that? Well, we can tear down a lot more mountains in KY, PA, and WV and burn a lot more coal. Not great, but still way better than our attached-at-the-hip dependency on third-world countries with lunatic fringe governments. Still not good enough for you? We can certainly build a lot more oil rigs along US coastlines, throughout the Gulf of Mexico, and in Alaska’s ANWR. Don’t like that? We can always self-diminish our mental capacity and clear cut the entire Northwest in a decade or two, all while huddling around smoky wood stoves. Anybody have delusions of hydrogen power? It takes huge amounts of energy to crack water into hydrogen. That means building thousands of new nuclear fission plants around the country to supply the underlying energy to separate out enough hydrogen for our energy needs, ignoring the cost of all the new infrastructure. Then again, we could stop spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year fighting Stone Age murderers half way around the world and use the money saved for alternative energy research, like far more efficient solar arrays. Or better yet, use a big chunk of the money to make mining the Moon for Helium-3 a viable option. Why does that matter? Because Helium-3 is almost non-existent on Earth but present in huge concentrations on the Moon. Helium-3 is an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, which only yield a tiny fraction of the radioactive by-products compared to fission reactors. Did you know that one metric ton of Helium-3 is worth at least one trillion dollars and provides enough fuel for a fusion reactor to power a city of ten million people for at least one year? One payload full of Helium-3 on a Space Shuttle is about enough to run the entire United States power grid for one year. So there you go. I just gave you plenty of options (some viable, some not) for the short and long hauls. Now it’s your turn.