"Right now the professional acts pay the utilities for the year," said Thomas J. Flemming, superintendent.
Suppliers are afraid to sell power to the utilities for fear they will not be paid.
Pressure is building from the utilities for the Energy Department to make good on its contract to take the wastes.
It would also have stripped the energy secretary of his ability to unilaterally increase fees charged to the utilities for development of the repository.
The same goes for the rent/mortgage, for the utilities, for the car, for the cell phone bill, for nearly everything.
A second group is looking for short-term solutions, such as postponing the due date of bills from the power suppliers to the utilities, for perhaps 90 days.
Private companies that produce their own power, through cogeneration plants or alternative sources like wind power or biomass generation, can now sell their power to the utilities for as much as $190 a megawatt hour.
The researchers said they began exploring the utilities for vulnerabilities last fall after seeing a reference to the persistence of data in memory in a technical paper written by computer scientists at Stanford in 2005.
Although many details were not resolved, participants said they were closing in on a plan that would make the state government the main buyer of electricity, which it would acquire under long-term contracts and then turn over to the utilities for distribution to consumers.
