We’ll concede there may have been a time when regulated energy monopolies were needed here.
Whatever those reasons were, they are no longer needed.
It is criminal to let regulated monopolies continue to pick the pockets of our state’s ratepayers. 
The regulators at the Public Disservice Commission have allowed SC Electric & Gas – now owned by Dominion Energy – to over-charge 725,000 ratepayers $2 billion in a doomed nuclear power fiasco.
The PSC is going to let them continue to charge us for 20 more years or until the $9 billion they foolishly wasted is paid off.
 Energy expert Jim Clarkson of Resource Supply Management has watched this charade and advises his manufacturing and other high electricity users on how to control their electric and gas costs to avoid bankruptcy. 
In his advice to clients last week he wrote that the only way to make utilities efficient and accountable to ratepayers is to end monopoly regulation and let competition set rates.
With no competition and little control of what captive ratepayers have to pay, utility executives have bamboozled lawmakers and lied to state regulators to win wasteful rate increases.  
There was never any real justification for the regulation of the electric utility business by lawmakers and regulators, Clarkson says. 
Utilities have used gullible lawmakers to gain dominance over their customers, eliminate their more efficient competitors and recover money wasted on bad investments.
In the earlier free-market era, utilities under-priced competitors with cheaper electricity. 
What happened then was that the losers convinced politicians to guarantee they could recover costs on their unwise projects.
They convinced lawmakers to pass the Base Load Review Act to allow them to waste billions on mismanaged projects, pocket a profit on their mistakes and charge the ratepayers for it.
Those profits rewarded utility executives and investors, led to inefficient operations, shifted costs to ratepayers and protected their monopolies rather than taking care of their customers.
It’s time our lawmakers deregulated this criminal system.
– JerryBellune@ yahoo.com