Scott Patterson

speaker

67 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2021 last heard Feb 2021

Scott Patterson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Why Your Electric Bill Might Not Go Down Under Deregulation · 25 Feb 2021 podcast

In my conversations with people who've signed up to these plans is they don't really understand how an electricity bill works.

They can be complicated.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah, in the 1990s, there were a lot of people pushing for deregulation across a bunch of different industries.

And one of those industries was natural gas.

And a company at the time that had benefited from that and had been pushing for deregulation was a company called Enron based in Houston, Texas.

They thought, you know, we've really benefited from deregulation in natural gas and being able to trade it more and more.

So why don't we do the same thing for electricity?

So Enron and other proponents of free markets traveled throughout the country visiting state legislatures.

pitching this new idea that electricity should move from the current model, which was vertically integrated monopoly utilities, to a place where companies could buy and sell electricity and offer it to consumers.

And by doing that, you would lower prices for consumers down the road.

Got it.

So what do we know about how that worked out?

On paper, it makes sense.

If you've got multiple companies

bidding to sell their services to consumers, you'd think the ones with the lowest price would be where consumers would go.

And on paper, it sounds like a good idea.

In actuality, it didn't happen, especially in Texas.

And Texas is a really interesting case because there you have about two-thirds of the state that only has these so-called retail electricity providers.

there is no utility.

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