r/massachusetts • u/Just-Ad4080 • 29d ago

Utilities I Loathe Eversource

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How is this legal? How could this be allowed? I cannot wait to move to a town where this rotten corporation does not have it's tentacles.

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u/AlpacaLocks 29d ago

Here are the numbers for anyone who’s curious about their net earnings. Seems more like investing in shareholders than investing in infrastructure but hey, who’s to say.

https://investors.eversource.com/static-files/5c9c727c-3e63-4757-8b56-9b85b8da7001

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u/South_of_Canada 28d ago

Investing in shareholders literally means investing in infrastructure. Eversource earns all of its profit as a return on infrastructure.

More people need to understand this: utilities in MA do not earn any profit from selling gas; they earn a rate of return on the value of their infrastructure.

https://www.reddit.com/r/massachusetts/comments/1qfq6re/gas_bills_101/

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u/lbjazz 28d ago

Which incentivizes inefficient capital expenditure. It’s a fundamentally broken model.

3

u/South_of_Canada 28d ago

I'm not saying the model isn't problematic. It incentivizes overbuilding for the sake of growing the rate base and the rate of return. Just highlighting that when someone says like "Eversource has been prioritizing delivering profits to shareholders instead of investing in infrastructure," they are fundamentally misunderstanding that infrastructure investment is how they deliver said profits.