Stop the Presses! Newspaper Notes the Obvious!
October 8th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
It still feels like summer. It’s hot and electricity bills are shockingly high. That means it’s time for the MSM to point out the obvious: electricity deregulation, five years on, still sucks. Today’s public service announcement comes courtesy of the Houston Chronicle. We’re glad they did it but ummm… we told you so. Here’s the Chron:
If Texas’ deregulated electricity market is broken enough to need fixing — and that’s debated — will it take a few drops of solder or a full-scale rewiring?
Texas power rates have increased 56 percent since 2000, and the state’s electricity is among the most expensive in the country despite promises prices would go down when the state opened electric power to competition.
Actually the Chron deserves credit in this piece for explaining the principal way Texas dereg - like all deregulated electricity markets - is rigged.
Texas’ wholesale market is set up so that the last power plant that ramps up to meet demand — called the marginal provider, and typically an older, costlier gas plant — effectively sets the prices for the whole market.
That’s right - you’re paying Rolls Royce prices for some Chevy clunker of a power plant. Makes you mad enough to want to go off-the-grid, doesn’t it?
I wanted to go off the handle, however, when I read David Sibley’s defense of deregulation. Sibley is the former Republican state senator who authored the dereg bill in 1999. Now, you guessed it, he works as a lobbyist for the electric industry. The Chron paraphrased Sibley as saying that deregulation is “empowering consumers to shop for better rates.” First, lots of folks aren’t shopping around. Second, getting ripped off is not empowering anyway you cut it. Third, choices are nice when shopping for toothpaste, but forcing consumers to choose from a wide array of screwy, inflated electricity plans is just asking them to pick their poison.
October 9th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Many thanks to The Texas Observer, Dallas Morning News, and The Houston Chronicle for reporting the facts about electric deregulation.
How many more newspaper stories will it take to get our legislature and Public Utility Commission to make some decisions that are in the interests of the consumer and the environment? Despite the failure of electric deregulation to lower prices or improve service, the industry and its high paid lobbyists like David Sibley say it’s a success. Like the saying goes, “You can put lipstick on a pig but its still a pig.”
Low and fixed income families are forced to use a bigger and bigger portion of their income to pay for electricity so that major corporations can earn record breaking profits. More families are doing without other basic necessities like food and drugs so they can pay the light bill. More families are being disconnected for nonpayment, some of them losing their homes in the process.
The individuals who can help to fix the problem refuse to notice that it exists. That way the electric industry keeps getting richer by taking advantage of small consumers. Deregulation is supposed to be better for consumers than regulation because having two bad options is better than having one good option. That a joke that’s not very funny.