when politicians take over power

The winds of change have brought challenges to Dominion Energy, SC Electric & Gas and other public utilities. They have begrudgingly gone along with the reforms.

The utilities helped write the rules for competition. The reforms the politicians and the utilities designed largely failed. Yet the market, not the political system, took the blame. The utilities were delighted and assumed it was back to business as usual.

Having fended off the forces of market reform, the utilities now find themselves under attack by big government and regulators have become the senior partners in the monopoly-regulatory system. All of these reforms make the utilities less accountable to customers and grant more discretion to politicians. There is even talk of “decoupling” profits from sales, which will make profit levels strictly a political decision.

Those who have lived by the regulatory sword are destined to die by it.

The regulators are now capturing the regulated power industry. Prices will go up, and service quality will go down as the utilities become more like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Jim Clarkson, Columbia

Clarkson is CEO of Resource Supply Management which advises its clients on how to reduce power costs.