Another Bite Out Of The Conservative Argument

Competitive Era Fails to Shrink Electric Bills

The conservative view has been to give a wide berth to the power of competition and keep government as far away from industry and corporations as possible. The argument has been that competition and deregulation would produce lower rates and costs, increased jobs, and a better global psotion. But the reality is that most corporations only took advantage of deregulation and the laissez faire approach to competition to line their pockets, boost their bottom lines and screw the average consumer in the process. In the case of electrical and other utility service corporations, they haven't even kept up with the old requirements of maintaining and building adequate infrastructure... and the irony is that many state governments have allowed an "infrastructure fee" to be added to utility bills.

A decade after competition was introduced in their industries, long-distance phone rates had fallen by half, air fares by more than a fourth and trucking rates by a fourth. But a decade after the federal government opened the business of generating electricity to competition, the market has produced no such decline.

Instead, more rate increase requests are pending now than ever before, said Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the association for the investor-owned utilities that provide about 60 percent of the nation’s power. The investor-owned electric utility industry published a June report entitled “Why Are Electricity Prices Increasing?”

About 40 percent of all electricity customers — those in 23 states and the District of Columbia where new competition was approved — mostly paid modestly lower prices over the past decade. But those savings were primarily because states, which continue to have some rate-setting power, imposed cuts, freezes and caps at the behest of consumer groups that wanted to insulate customers from any initial price swings.

The last of those rate protections expire next year, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and other federal agencies warn in a draft report to Congress that “customers may experience rate shock” as utilities seek to make up for revenue they did not collect during the period of artificially reduced prices and to cover higher costs of fuel. They warned that “this rate shock can create public pressure” to turn back from electricity prices set by the market to prices set by government regulators.

The disappointing results stem in good part from the fact that a genuinely competitive market for electricity production has not developed.

Concerned about rising prices, California and five other states have suspended or delayed transition to the competitive system.

And voters around two California cities, Sacramento and Davis, will decide next month whether to replace investor-owned utilities with municipal power in hopes of lowering rates. Drives are under way to expand public power in Massachusetts. In Portland, Ore., the city council tried and failed to buy the local utility company.

Electric customers in other states are facing rude surprises.

In Baltimore, an expected 72 percent rate increase in electricity prices has aroused so much protest that the state legislature met in special session, where it arranged to phase in the higher costs over several years. In Illinois, rates are about to rise as much as 55 percent.

The three New York area states opened their electricity markets to competition, with different results.

In Connecticut, residential electric rates rose up to 27 percent last year to an average of $128 a month, and are expected to go up as much as 50 percent more in January.

In New Jersey, rates rose up to 13 percent this year, and are poised to go much higher.

New York residential customers, by contrast, paid an inflation-adjusted average of 16 percent less in 2004 than in 1996, a state report said. It is not known how much of that is attributable to government-ordered rate cuts, but the state benefited from huge increases in power generated by its nuclear plants and by buying power from New England plants that, starting next year, may have less electricity to sell to New York.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and five other agencies, in the draft of the report to Congress, are unable to specify any overall savings. “It has been difficult,” the report states, “to determine whether retail prices” in the states that opened to competition “are higher or lower than they otherwise would have been” under the old system.

Joseph T. Kelliher, the commission chairman, said Friday that eventually “market discipline will deliver the best prices” and noted that every administration and Congress since 1978 had pushed the industry toward competition. He added that the commission recognized a need for “constant reform of the rules.”

Under the old system, regulated utilities generated electricity and distributed it to customers. Under the new system, many regulated utilities only deliver power, which they buy from competing producers whose prices are not regulated. For example, Consolidated Edison, which serves the New York City area, once produced almost all the power it delivered; now it must buy virtually all its electricity from companies that bought its power plants and from other independent generators.