Fed up with prices that force them to subsidize residential consumers, factories and hospitals cogenerate electricity in their heating plants. Technology outwits the regulators. Regulators are cannibals. As commissions proliferate, they undercut each other. Direct broadcast satellite, cable's competitor, is booming under the hands-off watch of another bureau of the same federal commission.
Regulators invest badly.
They direct utilities to put billions in overpriced power plants, inefficient wires and extravagant service out to the very last ranch at the end of nowhere. Competition, when it arrives, is devastating, just as the fall of the Berlin wall was devastating to the factories that built Trabants. In these times of radical technological change, utility monopolies are as unstable as politburos. Many of the old-guard enterprises may still grow and prosper, but only if they learn to sell to a whole new class of buyers. Consumers, not commissars.