How Can Utilities Energy Supply Companies Tolerate Buying Back Product They Sold Previously, From Domestic Solar Energy Consumers?
Thought For The Day
I admit I personally found the answer to this question a head-blower.
It took a little while for it to sink in, how crazy the answer is to this question, because my mind was at first repelled by it, and I’ve analysed this system so much, over and over, the past seven years, every time I think I have it all straight and traced out in the system model, and in my mind, another hole in the rabbit-hole opens up.
It was a little like I remember around 2008, when Paul Grignon’s Money-as-debt documentary came out, after we, of my generation in those days had been convinced all our lives until then that the function of banks was literally to look after our hard-earned savings, with vaults of saved money, rather than for the issue of money-as-debt.
Now we all know the latter, its no big deal, we don’t question it, we just move on, another few steps further into Enshittopia.
But this one I hadn’t realised before, and I should have, I really should have.
The answer is that the Utilities Energy Company Still Makes Energy Profit from us, even when it is buying energy from us.
That maybe doesn’t sound all that crazy, stated by itself.
But what it actually means is that Utilities energy companies don’t supply us with energy at all.
Nope, it is actually us who supplies them with energy, always.
We, the public “consumers” of utilities energy, actually supply energy to utilities energy companies.
Their business comprises them taking energy from us, not the other way round.
This has to be the case, for them to make profit at all, because profit is energy, and if they are not profiting from us, who are they profiting from?
So if we convert all the monies in and out, between the two parties, the consumer, and the supplier of utilities energy, to energy in KWhrs at market rates, and weigh up with the KWhrs of utilities energy in and out, the net result has to be that they always get a lot more KWhrs coming in, in the form of money, than they are putting out, regardless of the direction of flow of the utilitites energy in KWhrs, it always has to add up to profit for them.
This is why they don’t mind “buying back” energy they sold before, because regardless of whether they are buying it back from the public, or selling it to the public, its always at energy profit to them, the net flow of energy is always from the public, to them.
Isn’t that bizarre?
I don’t think it was always like this historically, though I will need to check. I think its another use case of Enshittification, which always appears in for-profit systems that might have started with the best of, or the most honourable of intentions a long time ago, but as the difficulty of extraction has gone up, enshittification has set in, and here we are now in Enshittopia, ignoring all the enshittification, which is all around us, relentlessly heaping up, with of course the planet heating up, literally from all the lies we need to tell to ourselves, to ignore our planet now burning, and the genocide going on, and the impending nuclear war.
The universe sings “Liars, liars, planet’s on fire”.
It really does know when we are lying.
Nobody would really have agreed to this, if they had known back then, would they, surely?
