Markets for Power: An Analysis of Electric Utility Deregulation

This timely study evaluates four generic proposals for allowing free market forces to replace government regulation in the electric power industry and concludes that none of the deregulation alternatives considered represents a panacea for the performance failures associated with things as they are now. It proposes a balanced program of regulatory reform and deregulation that promises to improve industry performance in the short run, resolve uncertainties about the costs and benefits of deregulation, and positions the industry for more extensive deregulation in the long run should interim experimentation with deregulation, structural, and regulatory reforms make it desirable. The book integrates modern microeconomic theory with a comprehensive analysis of the economic, technical, and institutional characteristics of modern electrical power systems. It emphasizes that casual analogies to successful deregulation efforts in other sectors of the economy are an inadequate and potentially misleading basis for public policy in the electric power industry, which has economic and technical characteristics that are quite different from those in other deregulated industries. Paul L. Joskow is Professor of Economics at MIT, author of Controlling Hospital Costs(MIT Press 1981) and coauthor with Martin L. Baughman and Dilip P. Kamat of Electric Power in the United States(MIT Press 1979). Richard Schmalensee, also at MIT, is Professor of Applied Economics, author of The Economics of Advertising and The Control of Natural Monopolies, and editor of The MIT Press Series, Regulation of Economic Activity.