Economic Deregulation and Customer Choice: Lessons for the Electric Industry

Summary

Policymakers and regulators are engaged in an ongoing debate about introducing customer choice in electric service. The most comprehensive legislative proposals envision a market in which all customers could choose their electricity suppliers. Electric utilities would no longer have monopoly rights to sell electricity to particular groups of customers. Instead, they would become transporters of electricity, and they could also compete in the generation marketplace. The price of the electricity would no longer be regulated, although the price of transportation still would be.

During the past two decades, numerous industries with many economic similarities to electricity have already undergone price and entry deregulation in at least part of the industry. The most significant include natural gas, telecommunications, airlines, trucking, and railroads. Like electricity, these are "network" industries. Suppliers and customers are connected via a network of pipes, wires, air routes, roads, or rails, and the decisions of one network user can affect the ability of others to use the network. The experience of these five industries can therefore serve as a guide in the debate over customer choice in electricity. A review of the evidence reveals several broad conclusions about the effects of deregulation, and each conclusion carries with it a policy implication.