Recent orders forbid many utilities from disconnecting customers who do not pay bills during the pandemic. While necessary, the question arises: what do we do once the crisis is over?
Most everything is different now because of this corona thing. It’s corona chaos and even some of the constants of utility service and regulation are anything but. Like commercial consumption of electricity. Like residential consumption. Egads! Like bill collection and resilience planning and workforce management and regulatory procedure and well, a lot of other constants — heretofore — in our ways of working.
Though we cannot celebrate Zenobe Gramme’s birthday April 4 with a big party jam-packed with friends, we will raise a glass to the great inventor of the electric motor. There had been toy-sized motors before 1873. But when Zen and his sidekick Hippolyte Fontaine – Hipp for short – accidentally reversed an electric generator that year, they happened upon a real motor to power the second industrial revolution.
