Levelizing Costs

I received this comment:

"You're missing the bigger point. Look at prices upstate versus downstate on nyiso.com. New transmission from upstate to downstate would cause electricity prices to levelize somewhat upstate/downstate.Because of the huge population unbalance, each 100% rise in energy costs upstate would result in roughly a 20% reduction in costs downstate. That would cause a political volcano of unprecedented proportion.I don't believe that there exists the political courage to levelize power costs. By the way, the same political issue is what killed the proposed merger between ISO NE and NYISO. It would have caused prices to rise in New England and to drop in NY."

I did not know that there had been a proposed merger between ISO NE and NYISO.

With respect to levelizing costs, I would argue that before we levelize electricity costs let's levelize incomes. And the New York City area would say let's levelize the cost of living before we levelize incomes. And we could go on and on...

I read once that if we averaged incomes throughout the globe, that everyone would have about the same income as the average person in Bangladesh. It's probably true since I think about 2 billion people live on $2 per day. That's depressing since Bangladesh is pretty poor.

I once went to a presentation on Bangladesh. Many in Bangladesh don't have clean water sources and were using surface water, which can be easily contaminated. With good intentions, wells were provided to help alleviate the problem, but no one knew that some of the groundwater had natural levels of arsenic. Low-level arsenic poisoning causes significant health problems. The speaker had been part of a group that tested many of the wells. As a warning they painted those that had high levels of arsenic. Sickness via arsenic or sickness via contaminated surface water. Not much of a choice.