“Everyone is Unhappy”

The board of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel released a report this week that it titled, “Everyone is Unhappy.”

Referring to the state’s electricity system, the board noted that “thirty-two states have cheaper electricity for residential consumers than Ohio,” and that among the states that have enacted some form of generation deregulation Ohio’s “rate of cost increase stands alone as the highest.”

“So what to do? Consumers have grounds to be unhappy, commerce and business have grounds to be unhappy, and utility executives and stockholders have grounds to be unhappy. In fact, they all might have grounds to be very unhappy in the future, if some analysts are correct and the investor-owned utilities plunge into a death spiral,” wrote the board.

The group calls for the legislative creation of a task force to study reforms in Ohio electricity law.