Commentary

Deregulation – What A Dud!

By Bill Collins

Competition’s,

Hard to see;

In buying,

Electricity.

As the clock struck midnight on December 31, Connecticut noted two huge duds. One was great – the failure of Y2K to bring on chaos.

The second was more troubling – the failure of electricity deregulation bring on competition. For residents in 24 targeted towns, it should have been a day of glory. At last they could shop around among competitors for the best deal. That’s the way free enterprise is supposed to work, and it’s the way the General Assembly had said it would work. But as it is, all those expectant customers will now just keep getting their juice from good old CL&P or United Illuminating, at least until some new players suit up.

Perhaps by July 1 things will improve. That’s when the other 145 towns get to act in our disappointing deregulation drama. One new producer, Select Energy, Inc., has indeed already been licensed. But wouldn’t you know, it’s just a subsidiary of Northeast Utilities. Not a lot of competition there. Nonetheless, the way new power plants are sprouting around the state, we ought to expect some all-out scratching for customers before long.

The trouble is that those customers may not be us. “Select” has made plain that its target audience is the big guys, like factories and office buildings. Private homes will come later, maybe much later. In the meantime we can enjoy the six percent rate reduction, mandated by the new law, and hold our breath for the future. We can also while away some hours trying to decipher the Important Message about all this which the Department of Public Utility Control sent us. Maybe it was clearer in Spanish.  Actually there is one useful thing we can do in the interim – try to  join a co-op. If there’s anything clear about our new competitive landscape, it’s that size counts. Individual homeowners will be like just so much flotsam on the sea. To strike any kind of deal, they’ll have to rally together. The only co-op I know of so far is Connecticut Energy Cooperative, Inc., 888/667-2667. If any others care to contact me, I’ll be happy to print their numbers, too. Clubbing up has already worked well for oil. The Citizen’s Oil Co-op, Inc., 860/561-6011, has brought major savings to homeowners who joined together to bargain with fuel companies.

But beyond these few wrinkles, our electricity future is darkly clouded. Will all these impending gas-fired generators actually compete for our business, or will they just merge? Will British AmerGen, or some other nuclear bottom-feeder, buy up Millstone at such a low price that it can continue to run? Or will the new owner just close it down and try to make a killing by doing it for less than has been set aside in the trust fund? In that case, there will be fewer kilowatts produced statewide, so power prices will probably stay high.  Closing Millstone would also make it more worthwhile to keep our state’s “Filthy Five” oil-fired plants running.

There is, luckily, one silver lining in this corporate-rigged mess. It’s likely that somewhere along the line we will be offered the chance to buy “green” electricity. That is to say, juice which comes from the wind or sun. It will surely be more expensive, but today we lack that option altogether. The cost of both sources had dropped fast, and will fall further as more of us sign up. And it’s not such a cockamamie idea. Denmark already gets 10 percent of its power from wind, and is aiming for 50 percent by 2030. Our windswept Great Plains are now looking to meet that demand over here.

Choosing wind and sun would also be one way to stick it to the oil companies, which today profit grossly from government subsidies. Besides, as Greenpeace says, by the time we burn even a quarter of our proven oil, gas, and coal reserves, the world’s glaciers will be soup, and all those Bangladeshis will be paddling like crazy for California, looking for dry land.

(Bill Collins, a former mayor of Norwalk, is a syndicated columnist.)