Here's the most precise, striking analysis yet of how the lack of competition in Maryland's deregulated electricity market drives up prices for BGE customers and everybody else.
Last summer I wrote: "Expect interesting headlines in October, when [Public Service Commission Chairman Steve] Larsen's latest posse of consultants delivers findings on electricity just in time for a General Assembly session. The smoking gun may not be as hot as in the CareFirst case, but it's well worth uncovering."

It took longer than October, but now the consultants' findings are starting to come out. Research by Mid-Atlantic grid monitor Joseph Bowring undergirds a complaint just filed by Larsen & the PSC with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The complaint finds that there is a substantial lack of electrical-generation competition in Maryland and that federal rules have allowed generators to raise prices willy-nilly in times of high demand -- even with the lack of competition. It's over 200 pages long, and Paul Adams and I are still going over it, but here are a few highlights:

Bowring found that 17 generator plants in Maryland "exercised local market power in Maryland in 2006 to set the locational marginal price during 1,083 hours and significantly increased Maryland's wholesale energy prices by about 73 cents per megawatt hour of load-weighted hourly average LMPs." Local market power is a lack of substantial competition to prevent generators from raising prices.
According to Bowring, the plants "added $87.5 million to Maryland's 2006 real-time energy-related charges."

These plants are exempt from price caps that apply to other generators in non-competitive situations. The PSC is asking FERC to slap price caps on, pronto. The exemptions, says its complaint, "are anticompetitive and distort the PJM (Mid-Atlantic grid) energy markets to the detriment of electric customers." The lack of caps, the PSC adds, is "discrimintory, anticompetitive, unjust and unreasonable."

Bowring first complained about this situation to his grid bosses a year ago, but they silenced him. Since then the gird has new bosses and Bowring is getting an independent operation. But FERC, which approved the new setup, has never addressed the problems that underlay Bowring's complaint -- problems that cost you and I and other electric customers millions. Now the PSC again is trying to get FERC to do something.