1.8 million customers without power in Houston region after Hurricane Beryl makes landfall, CenterPoint says
I'm not knocking CenterPoint's performance during Hurricane Beryl, but the incident begs the question: as more of our lives become dependent on electricity, are we making the existing system more fragile by connecting all new load to it? Maybe we should create options for new load by allowing for the creation of new independent and unregulated utilities to serve them. Not only would that reduce the growing fragility of what we have, but the competition among such utilities would lead to many more approaches for managing reliability, some of which might be better than what we have today.
That's the idea behind Consumer Regulated Electricity: new, unregulated suppliers operating outside of the regulated grid to get the benefits of speed and innovation that can't be achieved within the current heavily regulated structure.
