BGE:
Competition good
– for them

Mar 21, 2005

At the end of February, the Maryland legislature turned down the request of the mayor of Bel Air, a small town in the state. He proposed to group together all the households in the area in order to try to get bids from suppliers of electricity. He was trying to get his town's residents a better price than the increases that residential customers have been paying the last few years from Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE).

When the power utilities argued for deregulation starting more than a decade ago, they claimed that it would allow competition, which would bring down prices. We know we don't have lower prices. Bills have gone up about 50 per cent over three years. And that's a year before the cap on electricity prices comes off altogether. And now we see they didn't really want competition.

The BGE press releases talk over and over again about how "Competition means savings." Right, savings for the big boys.