Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply

I'm featured briefly in this week's Village Voice in an article about the recent blackout in Queens. The usual suspects whine about how deregulation somehow put the lights out for a week. On the other hand...

There are those who take an opposite tack from the advocacy groups, seeing the Queens debacle as indicative of insufficient deregulation. Jim Lesczynski, the Libertarian Party candidate for Sheldon Silver's Lower Manhattan assembly district, calls the New York State plan "phony deregulation" and adds, "They tweaked their regs and called it deregulation. What we really need is real deregulation. What we really need is a free market in electricity. Then you'd have lots of suppliers rushing in to fill that demand."

But the Queens blackout had nothing to do with inadequate supply; it had to do with grid deterioration. Lesczynski has a quick answer to this observation too: "They can afford to let their equipment go to pot," he says, "because they're a monopoly and what are we gonna do, go elsewhere? If they had someone threatening to compete against them, we would have reliable electricity."

Various competing companies, each with its own lines? Sounds like a lot of potential for chaos.

"The free market has a lot of potential for chaos," he says, "but it has a way of working itself out. If you don't perform you don't stay in business."
I couldn't have said it better myself. Oh wait, I did say that myself.

Here's how you can tell we don't have real deregulation in the electricity market. Can you imagine any other company urging its customers not to use so much of its product?

(Kudos to whoever gets the obscure 80s rock reference in the title above.)

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