We’ve already talked previously about all the things the Wall Street Journal and others got wrong about the blackouts in Texas, but Josiah Neeley over at R Street did a useful deep dive into the WSJ’s assessment that deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities and that retail choice customers paid $19.2 billion more from 2010 through 2019 than they would have if they’d stuck with their incumbent utility.
Neeley points to the peer-reviewed 2018 report from the Baker Institute which found that electricity rates in competitive market states have generally fallen in recent years, while rates in monopoly utility states tended to increase or remain flat. Texas, which has the most liberalized power market in the country, in particular has seen significant declines.
Read Neeley’s full piece over at RStreet.org.