First the airlines, telecommunications, trucking, and natural gas industries. Now electric utilities. The shift to restructuring and deregulation is well underway in America and just around the corner in West Virginia.
Electricity is at the root of American culture.
That is, the high costs of building power plants and erecting and maintaining power lines ruled out competition. Realistically, only one entity in a given area could deliver these services. Therefore, utilities were granted exclusive franchises and were regulated by the federal and state governments to ensure that they provided reliable service at a reasonable rate of return on invested capital. But that was nearly 60 years ago. Today power lines etch the U.S. horizon, zigzagging across and up and down the continent.