Last week, Peter Van Doren and I had an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that reflected on the record of electric utility restructuring in light of the recent rate hikes experienced in the “deregulated” states. Libertarian energy consultant Mike Giberson over at The Knowledge Problem, however, was unimpressed.
Giberson offers only two substantive criticisms. First, he takes issue with our claim that the case for vertical integration was scarcely heard during the debate over restructuring:
It isn’t clear from the article where Taylor and Van Doren were during the debates over unbundling, but delving into the voluminous public records of both federal and state regulators of the electric power industry would reveal that vertical integration has been among the matters discussed at length. Earlier in the article they quote MIT economist Paul Joskow, but if they were at all familiar with his work they would not make such “unfortunate” claims.
Vertical integration was in fact a big part of the policy conversation in the state legislatures and regulatory hearing rooms during the course of restructuring. But as Economist Robert Michaels at U. Cal., Fullerton argues, those discussions were superficial, uninformed, and politically charged conversations primarily concerning utility market power and the need to corral it. Paul Joskow’s work on this matter (which we are indeed well acquainted with) along with that of other academics who’ve investigated vertical integration in the electricity sector from an I/O perspective was given little serious attention by policymakers. That was our point.
Second, Giberson seems to take issue with our contention that vertical integration is an efficient means of remedying hold-up problems between generators and power distributors, facilitating efficient investment in transmission, and maintaining system reliability. Giberson finds it “curious that Cato Institute writers are so skeptical about the ability of decentralized arrangements (like prices and contracts) to lead to efficient results.”