Battle Over Deregulation
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- November
- 27
One of the big fights in next year’s state legislative session may be over whether the state is better or worse off after deregulating the electric industry a decade ago.
Today, a report by the energy retailer-backed group Capitol Hill Research Center said that deregulation has helped New York with a broader selection of electric providers and disputed recent reports that deregulation has fueled a huge jump in costs to consumers.
The group says that between 1996 to 2007 in New York, rates for all customers (residential, commercial and industrial) increased by just 1.3 percent, if adjusted for inflation.
It disputes a report in October by the group Power in the Public Interest that found energy prices have soared 18 percent since 1999. That report found that in states with regulated markets, though, the price of electric has declined.
James Watson, director of Capitol Hill Research Center, based in Albany, said the increases can’t be blamed solely on deregulation and that the Power in the Public Interest report is flawed.
“There’s a lot more to this picture than meets the eye,” Watson said. “It’s a far more complicated equation. ”
Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, D-Greenburgh, Westchester County, has introduced legislation to end utility deregulation and move it back to a more regulated industry, saying the experiment with deregulation has failed.
He knocked the latest report as being written by “the people who made the money” off deregulation. “They are the owners of the plant,” he said.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 3:14 pm by Joseph Spector.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
