Utility deregulation advocates claim it will lower your electricity costs.

It hasn’t, even in Texas which claims it has.

The crash of the Texas grid last month gave pause to such claims.

But politicians blamed deregulation “to sustain and increase their meddling in the economy,” energy expert Jim Clarkson of Resource Supply Management in Columbia told the Chronicle.

South Carolina is a regulated state.

You in Lexington County pay among the highest power prices in the country.

Some of that resulted from Lexington Countybased SC Electric & Gas’s $9 billion nuclear power plant failure.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of rates in regulated and deregulated states found ending deregulation didn’t always lower prices.

20 years ago, retail energy companies promised deregulation would cut power bills.

The opposite happened. Consumers who signed up with retail energy companies in deregulated states paid $19.2 billion more than they would have if they’d stuck with regulated utilities.

The Journal’s analysis was based on US Energy Information Administration data from 2010 to 2019.

Retail energy companies buy electricity from generators – power-plant operators, wind farms and solarpower firms.

They sell it to consumers, usually over the local utilities’ lines.

Giving consumers a choice between their regulated utilities and new rivals, the argument went, would create competitive pricing.

But in nearly every state, consumers paid more than their incumbent utilities charged.

The Journal analyzed power prices in 13 states and the District of Columbia.

It excluded other states where retail companies supplied less than 1% of residential electricity.

Retail consumers paid $1.9 billion extra in Pennsylvania and $1.7 billion in New York.

In 2019, consumers paid $3.1 billion more in DC and the 13 states.

That was the biggest single-year difference over what they would have paid.

On average, retail electricity cost 14% more than utility power in 2019, an alltime high.

Texas retailers hold nearly 60% of the state’s electricity market, the Journal reported.

Yet they charge the most in markups over their regulated competitors.