Massachusetts Electricity Policy in the Spotlight

If you’re looking for a well-researched report that puts a human face on many of the pitfalls of electricity deregulation, you’d do well to review the recent series from Miriam Wasser of WBUR, the NPR station in Boston.  It highlights several major concerns such as customer cost, consumer protection and a lack of transparency by marketers regarding the power they are selling.

The WBUR report sums up the cost problem succinctly:

“Massachusetts is one of about a dozen states where residents can choose to buy electricity from a supplier other than their default utility. When lawmakers set up this system in the late 1990s, the assumption was that a competitive marketplace would result in lower power prices for customers. But for the most part, the opposite has happened.”

It goes on to note that the burden of this policy has fallen especially hard on those who can least afford it such as the poor, the elderly, and non-native English speakers.  How bad is it?  The report notes the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office could not find “a single case of a company that has been able to charge customers less than a utility over a multi-year period.”

Part 2 of the report discusses why those “100 percent renewable” plans marketed by energy middlemen, may, in fact, be less green than consumers believe.  It is a cautionary tale, which should remind consumers that things aren’t always as advertised.

None of this will come as a surprise to those that follow electricity policy debates.  These reports arrive on the heels others from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Baltimore Sun, which explored similar themes.

WBUR offers another piece of information in the series.  It is a list of recommendations on how to avoid paying too much and being scammed by competitive electricity marketers.  It’s sound advice for anyone living in the roughly dozen states that restructured their retail electricity supply.  There should be one more tip to added to the list, however.  A good first recommendation would be: encourage your public policymakers to maintain sensible, traditional regulation of your state’s utility providers.