Gas Hot Water Heater and Vacation Setting

[Mike Sellers]

decocritter wrote: De regulation basically doubled our gas bills, while the consumer has had to really conserve. You have to pay a marketer and the piper. My gas bill used to run $12 -20 for most of the year but winter.

But remember when the proponents of deregulation were going on and on about how the increased competition would lower our gas bills? Thanks bunches for that one, huh?

[JoeH]

Mike Sellers wrote:
[quote=decocritter]De regulation basically doubled our gas bills, while the consumer has had to really conserve. You have to pay a marketer and the piper. My gas bill used to run $12 -20 for most of the year but winter.

But remember when the proponents of deregulation were going on and on about how the increased competition would lower our gas bills? Thanks bunches for that one, huh?
They made the same promises about deregulating electricity here and that was used to justify removing a lot of regulations on the cable companies. Same result. Hopefully people paid attention and will keep that in mind the next time they come around and ask to deregulate the next utility. :villagers:

[Mike Sellers]

JoeH wrote:
[quote=Mike Sellers]
[quote=decocritter]De regulation basically doubled our gas bills, while the consumer has had to really conserve. You have to pay a marketer and the piper. My gas bill used to run $12 -20 for most of the year but winter.

But remember when the proponents of deregulation were going on and on about how the increased competition would lower our gas bills? Thanks bunches for that one, huh?
They made the same promises about deregulating electricity here and that was used to justify removing a lot of regulations on the cable companies. Same result. Hopefully people paid attention and will keep that in mind the next time they come around and ask to deregulate the next utility. :villagers:
What the braintrusts who pushed deregulation didn't realize or chose to ignore was that they had one billing system/bureaucracy to handle handle all of the gas customers. Once you had ten companies providing the gas, you also had ten separate billing systems/bureaucracies which drove prices up instead of down due to the inefficiencies of multiple systems. Kind of obvious in retrospect but the genie's out of the bottle now.