According to The Washington Post, the average BGE customer will face a yearly $743 price hike and the average Pepco customer an extra $468 per year. A number of legislative bills are swirling around the assembly to ameliorate or reverse this price hike, from re-regulating the industry, to providing low income people with assistance, to phasing in the increase over two or more years.

The Baltimore Sun reports on March 10 that in this legislative election year, state delegates are scrambling to make something happen. State House Speaker Michael Busch (D-Md.) told The Baltimore Sun that BGE users will face a price hike, but below what has been announced.

What will happen remains to be seen.

Deregulation of the energy industry has not created free-market competition as its proponents have contended. The predominate trend in energy, media, and telecom industries these days is toward conglomeration. AT&T recently made a $67 billion bid to purchase telecom giant BellSouth, and BGE itself is in the middle of merger with Florida Power & Light.

Past critics of this deal say the Florida company is in a weak financial position and attempting to pass off costs to Maryland customers. Deregulation of the energy industry also helped create the 2001-2002 energy-crisis in California that led to rolling black-outs and numerous out-of-state energy companies, such as Enron, over-charging California consumers.

Within a year of the 1999 deregulation of the California energy industry, wholesale electricity costs for the state spiked from $7.4 billion to $27.1 billion, according to the California State Attorney General's office. The Attorney General there has been suing energy companies for overcharging and market manipulation ever since, and to date claims to have recovered $3 billion. Their Attorney General also has produced a 2004 report on the crisis and concluded that deregulation "failed." Instead of lowering prices through competition, deregulation led to ratepayers facing "black outs and huge bills as they watched energy generators and traders game the system."

The "Attorney General's Energy White Paper" can be found online at ag.ca.gov/publications/energywhitepaper.pdf.

Whether the Maryland state assembly will restore state control of the utility industry remains to be seen, but they should. State control of the utility industry ensures that out-of-state companies cannot swoop in, purchase Maryland energy companies, and suck out profits. It empowers state regulatory bodies to set fair prices in a market that never can be free, fair, and competitive as some free-market theorists assert.

Public staples such as health care, energy services, and schooling cannot be viewed as commodities like toothpaste or pizza that can be created and sold easily. In energy, transportation and delivery systems cost billions and as a result become defacto monopolies, ensuring multiple companies cannot compete with each other. While heating in the winter is sometimes overconsumed, it is needed at some level by most citizens. This combination of hooked-in demand and monopoly infrastructure creates an environment that can lead to soaring, unjustified prices. Price-gouging is the logical result if an energy company views state residents as solely a means to boost their own income and company stock values.