VOX: "This Ohio utility has an innovative plan to save coal power: force customers to buy it"

Should we laugh or cry? David Roberts has written an appropriately sarcastic, comprehensive review of FirstEnergy's attempt to gouge Ohio ratepayers to the tune of $3 billion over the next 15 years, to prop up its uncompetitive Davis-Besse atom-splitter on the Lake Erie shore, and its climate-fouling Sammis coal burner on the banks of the Ohio River.

Never mind that a decade ago, FirstEnergy lobbyists led the charge for "deregulation." Now, they're leading the charge for killing the competition (efficiency and renewables), as NIRS executive director Tim Judson has put it. And they're leading the charge for this ratepayer bailout.

Roberts' humorous, insightful article begins:

A power utility in Ohio is attempting to shaft its own customers in a manner so shameless as to defy description. Yet describe it we must, for it represents everything backward and perverse in the electricity sector and reveals that the interests of the institutions that provide electricity have come fundamentally out of sync with the interests of the citizens who depend on it.

Plus it's pretty funny, in a morbid sort of way. You almost have to admire the chutzpah. But to understand it takes a little explaining. Here's the TL;DR [Too Long; Didn't Read] version...