"BGE rate to climb higher in June" | baltimoresun.com

According to an article in the Baltimore Sun today, January 23, 2008 — click on the image above to see the whole article — residential electricity customers who are served by Maryland's Baltimore Gas & Electric, a subsidiary of the Constellation Energy Group,

... will pay an estimated 5.5 percent more for electricity starting in June, largely as a result of federal rules that are driving wholesale energy prices higher. ... The increase will add about $100 to the average customer's annual utility bill ... When combined with increases imposed since rate caps expired in 2006, BGE customers will be paying 85 percent more for electricity than they were before the General Assembly approved deregulation in 1999.

In 1999, the Maryland General Assembly deregulated the state's providers of electrical power in an effort to introduce competition into the electricity market and thereby hold down prices. An unintended consequence of that, combined with recent regulatory (not deregulatory) initiatives at the federal level, has been:

... more than a year into that effort [by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to impose new rules on the wholesale energy market], the latest increase shows just how difficult it is for state regulators to influence the federally regulated ... market. Many policy decisions affecting prices in Maryland are made in Washington with only limited input from state regulators.

"Because utilities no longer own generation plants that the state can regulate ... [utility customers are] at the mercy of what comes out of those wholesale energy markets," said Bill Fields, an attorney for the state Office of the People's Counsel, which represents utility customers.

This is just one more reason why oldstyleliberal has come to wonder whether strong government involvements in economic markets doesn't do more harm than good.

Even though Maryland has "deregulated" its electrical power marketplace, no real competition among BGE and various potential alternatives has materialized. Customers like me who live in locations where BGE once had a state-protected monopoly still don't have viable alternative providers of electrical power to buy from, eight years later. Moral: even when governments deregulate, they bungle the job.

This is something oldstyleliberal hates to admit. He is, after all, a liberal, and liberals believe that government programs help, no? Yet, time and again, government "solutions" just make bigger problems.