Unless you subscribe to The Wall Street Journal — which I don't — you can only read the first few paragraphs of an article on their website but sometimes, that's enough. This is the beginning of a piece about electricity in Texas, a topic that has been much in the news lately for obvious reasons. The headline is "Texas Electric Bills Were $28 Billion Higher Under Deregulation."
Texas's deregulated electricity market, which was supposed to provide reliable power at a lower price, left millions in the dark last week. For two decades, its customers have paid more for electricity than state residents who are served by traditional utilities, a Wall Street Journal analysis has found.
Nearly 20 years ago, Texas shifted from using full-service regulated utilities to generate power and deliver it to consumers. The state deregulated power generation, creating the system that failed last week. And it required nearly 60% of consumers to buy their electricity from one of many retail power companies, rather than a local utility.
Those deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state's traditional utilities, according to the Journal's analysis of data from the federal Energy Information Administration.
A lot of people in this country hate with a passion, the idea that they have to get necessities of life from a (shudder) government. Okay, I kinda get that. Certainly, we can all cite instances of government waste and incompetence. What I don't get is why those people are fine with the government putting them at the mercy of a private business that might demonstrate waste, incompetence and price-gouging.