"The companies that come in and want to serve a new market will gravitate to the big clients," predicts Toussaint. "We expect to see a survival of the fittest, where the big critters will eat highest on the food chain."
Toussaint, who grew up in Boulder, urges Coloradans to take a hard look before signing off on electricity deregulation. "I hope we can save some states from this folly," she says.
The dramatic change in the California market means that huge amounts of electric power have already started to move over the western electrical grid. (Colorado is part of a network of power lines that includes all of the Western states. There are fewer power links between Colorado and states to the east, so selling Colorado power to the East Coast isn't yet feasible.)
The increasing amounts of power being "wheeled" over power lines around the West have also led to breakdowns in the system. The massive power outage of 1996, for instance, was blamed on a single short-circuiting power line near the Columbia River. That incident was widely viewed as an example of the problems deregulation can foster, especially if utilities under competitive pressure decide to cut back on maintenance.
"The pressure on managers will be to cut costs," predicts Reif. Today the Public Utilities Commission can rCR>equire Public Service to invest in maintenance, he notes; that power would likely vanish under deregulation.
Currently, the only Western states with power dramatically cheaper than Colorado's are those in the Pacific Northwest. With their huge rivers generating enormous amounts of hydro power, Oregon and Washington can sell power for as little as four cents per kilowatt hour. Enron recently purchased a major utility in Oregon, with the intent of selling excess power out of state. However, officials in Oregon and Washington have resisted deregulation, and Reif says that even if the market there is eventually opened to competition, most of the electricity would flow to higher-paying customers in California, not to Coloradans.
"I think we can write off the idea that we could ever get cheaper power," he says.
One problem for those opposing the corporate stampede to open Colorado's electricity market is the public's indifference to the issue. Most consumers take power for granted, and the discussion seems like an abstraction to many people.
"The average customer doesn't even know what is being proposed," says Lewandowski. "Ninety-five percent of the people don't even know what you're talking about."
Consumers will likely become interested if they see huge jumps in their electric bills. But by then, Lewandowski says, it will be too late to do anything about it.
"If you have to pay 15 percent more on your electric rates, I don't think that's such a great deal," he says. "If this is lousy for the people, why should we do it?"
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