Many good ol’ boy politicians are going to think this is an outrageous idea.

That’s OK. They are the ones who pretend to believe the outragous idea that the state Public Service Commission works to protect the public and the regulated monopoly ratepayers.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Public Service Commission’s purpose is to:

• Protect monopoly utilities from competition.

• Ensure that they recover the costs of such bad investments as the $9 billion nuclear failure that SC Electric & Gas and San-tee Cooper forced on us with the support of state lawmakers’ misguided law that allowed them to pick our pockts of $2 billion in higher electric rates.

“The idea that state regulators protect customers is completely wrong,” says energy engineer Jim Clarkson of Resouce Supply Management. “Utility regulators protect the utilities.”

If you ever doubted the true purpose of utility regulation, the PSC has offered solid proof that they are not on your side as a power company customer.

They are there to protect utility executives and their investors.

Until the law changed last year, the state Office of Regulatory Staff labored under the same deceitful burden.

Clarkson, who helps big industry power users control their costs, said the PSC’s worst decision was to let SCE&G financialcially drain its 275,000 ratepayers with the highest rates in the US for 9 straight years.

SCE&G’s owners and Santee Cooper managers made a huge mistake by trying to build 2 nuclear reactors with Westinghouse, a compnay that did not know what it was doing.

The PSC saddled their ratepayers with skyrocketing costs on the empty promise of cheaper future electric rates.

To pay off billions in debt, the PSC let SCE&G charge the cost of their mistakes to those least guilty of the financial fiasco.

The PSC should have denied recovery of any nuclear costs.

We hope you will let your state lawmakers know you want them to end this charade.

– Jerry Bellune