If you lived in Houston in 1999, Reliant Energy called the shots. The company owned the power plants that generated your electricity, controlled the wires that delivered the electricity, and billed you for every watt of electricity you used. If you didn’t like that setup, too bad. As the parenting saying goes: you get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit. Senate Bill 7 changed all that. Under the banner of deregulation (“dereg” for short), the bill proposed getting rid of most of the state’s electricity monopolies and creating a competitive marketplace that would, in theory, encourage companies to generate low-cost power. Though the move was promoted and cheered on by Enron—the now disgraced apostle of go-go deregulation—plenty of other parties endorsed it. Large…
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