The Maryland Public Service Commission led the way on Friday's federal complaint against the "reliability pricing model" employed by the mid-Atlantic electric grid. The model provides windfall payments to Constellation Energy and other incumbent generators and is one reason among many that electricitiy prices are so high. See Paul Adams's story in Saturday's paper for an excellent description of what's going on. The PSC didn't comment in the story, but here's an excerpt from a statement they just put out. Doesn't seem to be on their Web site yet.

Under the Reliability Pricing Model, auctions were conducted in 2007 and 2008 to establish the price and supply of electricity capacity for the years June 2008 through May 2011. The complaint alleges that these auctions were not competitive, were subject to price increases by incumbent generators, yielded excessive prices, and did not accomplish the intended purpose of stimulating new generation for the periods in question. For the PEPCO and BGE service territories, no new generation was bid into the capacity auctions for these periods.