Seth's Letter to the Editor echoes Kurt Vonnegut’s call for a Ministry of the Future to better serve our long-term interests. February 7, 2026 Providence Journal. Read Seth's letter Leave politics out of the Federal Reserve...
Streetlights
Having determined, through municipal energy audits, that streetlights were consuming a huge amount of energy and were a great opportunity for energy cost savings, we helped develop and pass the law enabling cities and towns to buy their streetlights back from the utility, change them out to LED lighting (much more efficient and longer lasting but not allowed by the utility’s streetlight tariff) and provide new value from the capacity to better maintain and manage with dimming and dark-nighting. Working with a new collaborative, the Partnership for RI Streetlight Management, we have since helped municipalities buy their streetlights, integrate LEDs, implement controls and better manage maintenance. We continue to press the PUC to allow streetlight metering so that our cities and towns can more readily control their lights and will be charged for the electricity actually used in their streetlights rather than billed under an arbitrary formula based on anticipated consumption.