The possibility of switching to alternate fuels was precluded by state environmental regulations. Subsidized rates, differential class rates and cost-shifting to sales tax payers all work against the best and most efficient distribution of electric energy. Deregulation has only slightly reduced the old monopolies on power generation, but the industry is still enslaved to thousands of federal, state and local regulations. That political process involved changes to more than a dozen sections of state law, requiring many compromises and transitional steps that were both novel and risky. Of necessity, the process included assumptions and judgments by legislators, industry and regulators which were incorrect.
Crystal balls are always in short supply.
The most substantive effect of the legislation was to distribute the monopoly of the three major utilities over power generation. All the King s horses and all the King s men cannot make electricity. The sixty-plus pages of legislation, hundreds of pages of rules, thousands of pages of regulations, topped off by the individual judgements of tens of thousands of regulators, cannot make a free market. There is no substitute for the cumulative judgement of millions of consumers and businesses who make billions of independent decisions about their economic future, every hour of every day of every year. Given a few reasonable laws that protect honest and binding agreements, the free will of the people will always optimize the use of valuable resources.