Statement from Alliance for Secure Energy Executive Director Jeff Cloud

HB 1602, proposed today by Rep. Ryan Martinez, promises to “introduce choice” for electric customers by creating competition between providers by breaking apart generation, transmission and retail distribution into separately operated businesses, also known as deregulation or electric restructuring. We know from polling conducted as recently as this week that Oklahomans remain overwhelmingly opposed to deregulation.

The legislation is backed by a local group called the Alliance for Electrical Restructuring in Oklahoma (AERO) and promotes the financial interests of third-party gas marketers who are funding the effort because they stand to profit from decreasing Oklahoma’s regulation of the electric market and uncoupling transmission and distribution. In seeking to dismantle our state’s cost and reliability protections for electricity consumers, these niche interests make plain they want all of the rewards without any of the operating responsibilities and related risks.

As legislators consider this most recent proposal, we should learn from the failed experiments by other states, including Texas, California and New York. Residents in these deregulated states have lived through a volatility reflected not only in unpredictable costs but in life-threatening protracted outages. These deregulated markets receive less oversight on the investments utilities make to the grid, less oversight on rates and frequently see higher wholesale prices in order to enable profits to new energy suppliers, who operate independently of utility companies.