Politics has become just another business -- the business of managing government -- and elections are increasingly like the annual general meetings of a big utility company: less frequent, but just as dull.
More importantly, it guarantees priority access to the grid, ahead of the big utility companies.
Blanche Lincoln, who sat on the Senate's energy committee, now serves on the board of Entergy, a big utility that's a major force in her home state of Arkansas.
Rather than preside over the building of dozens of nuclear power plants, as was the wont of the big utilities during his first tenure as governor during the 1970s and early 1980s, he put California on a course of energy efficiency (known in those days as energy conservation) and renewable energy.
The slow restoration of the connections needed to heat water, run refrigerators and recharge cellphones prompted a lot of grumbling from elected officials and their constituents, most of it aimed at big utility companies.
But the new plants do not represent any immediate solution to California's electricity shortages, which are aggravated by the precarious state of two big utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison, which are billions of dollars in debt.
Companies that have thousands of PCs run up big utility bills.
"We're the most diversified of the nation's big utility companies," says Jack Haffey, the company's executive vice president.
Many large manufacturers and the majority of the big utilities support it, for now, as the least-bad option for what is considered the inevitable imposition of controls on heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide.
The extraordinary costs of an immediate shutdown have emerged as a major concern for the Japanese government, which has struggled to balance the desire for improved nuclear safety with the bottom-line realities of the big utilities.
