The Indy Star has an editorial entitled Can bigger utilities actually be better?
The Star notes that Hoosiers do not often benefit from corporate mergers, notes that the old utility, PSI, merged with Cinergy, but still maintained a local feel even though the company was run out of Cincinnati. Now Cinergy is merging with megacorp Duke Energy. The Star grumbles, and probably rightly so, about the utility’s further removal from its Hoosier roots. But then, incomprehensibly, the editorial seems to call for the nationalization of utility regulation and to take regulatory authority out of the hands of the state. Consolidation is bad when it comes to utility mergers but it’s good when it comes to regulation?
The Star apparently fails to remember that the Bush administration’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission studiously failed to act when energy mega-corporations, Enron most prominently but also apparently including Duke and El Paso, were running scams to drive up prices and causing rolling blackouts in California’s deregulated energy market. The line from the Bush administration at that time, most prominently from Dick Cheney, was that California’s problems were being caused by too few oil refineries.
So, for the Star to ask that the same folks be put in charge of Indiana’s energy policy seems misguided at best.
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