I got a let­ter today from the City:

Click to read it. At the bot­tom of the page is a tear-​​off form that I’m sup­posed to fill out and sign in order to opt out of the pro­gram, but my scan­ner won’t scan legal-​​size paper, so you don’t get to see it. It’s not all that excit­ing; you aren’t miss­ing much.

Appar­ently, before I moved to Lesser North­east Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City (just 20 min­utes South of Greater North­east Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City), the city res­i­dents voted to do this aggre­ga­tion thinggy to, allegedly, get cheaper elec­tric­ity. From what I gather, the gov­ern­ment picks which elec­tric­ity gen­er­a­tor will sell elec­tric­ity to the peo­ple who are part of the pro­gram, and uses the size of the group (and prob­a­bly a lit­tle of its heft as a gov­ern­ment bully) to get lower prices out of the cho­sen util­ity. Sounds a lot like a fancy way of dress­ing up an old-​​fashioned munic­i­pal util­ity monop­oly to me.

My cur­rent gen­er­a­tor is also the com­pany that main­tains the lines and deliv­ers the elec­tric­ity — KMWSS Elec­tric — and I’m happy with the ser­vice. Under the new pro­gram, KMWSS Elec­tric would still send me a bill for line main­te­nance and deliv­ery, but the bill would include charges from this new com­pany, Pre­mier­Power Solu­tions, for generation.

The fun thing about this whole non­sense is this: because “the vot­ers” elected, in 2001, to allow this pro­gram, I will be bound by the new con­tract unless I take action to opt out. This is the exact oppo­site of how con­tracts are sup­posed to work. They’re sup­posed to bind only the par­ties who agree, not the par­ties who fail to disagree.

I am dis­in­clined to do this aggre­ga­tion thing, but I’m also not the sort of per­son who does a lot of shop­ping around for lower elec­tric­ity prices. My ini­tial reac­tion is to not like the idea on prin­ci­ple. Does any­one have a rel­e­vant argu­ment for why I should not opt out of the aggre­ga­tion program?