Don’t let Kansas follow California into electric rate catastrophe | Opinion
I shuddered as I covered the public hearing Wednesday night on Evergy’s request for an electric rate increase — because I remember California.
Evergy is requesting a bold increase of 8.62% in its rates. That’s $196.4 million spread across 735,000 customers of what used to be known as Westar Energy, until a 2018 merger with the former Kansas City Power & Light Co. changed it all into Evergy.
The rate increase request includes Wichita, Olathe, Topeka, Lawrence and a host of smaller cities including Manhattan, Pittsburg, Leavenworth, Hutchinson and Salina. If it were to pass as proposed, the increase would be just over $13 a month for the average residential customer.
But that’s not what worries me.
Rate cases are decided by the Kansas Corporation Commission after a court-like adversarial process between the utility lawyers and lawyers representing customers, and the utility almost never gets as much as it asks for.
What really sent a chill through my spine was when Wichita resident Lori Lawrence proposed getting rid of the regulated monopoly where the KCC sets Evergy’s rates, and replacing it with a competitive system where you can — supposedly — choose your electric company.
“One of the biggest problems with how we do our energy supply in Kansas is the regional monopoly issue that we are all faced with,” Lawrence said. “This lets Evergy, as we saw on the map, control half of our state, and we have no other options. The regional monopoly system needs to be disbanded. Kansas Corporation Commission, I’m speaking to you; legislators that might be in the room, I’m speaking to you: if we have a competitive rate system in our state, in our city, we would see lower rates because there would be competition.”
And people clapped for that.
I like Lori Lawrence. She’s the chair of the local Sierra Club and I agree with her on a lot of things.
But she’s wrong on this one — catastrophically wrong.
California got Enron, higher prices, rolling blackouts
I was a California journalist when the state decided to switch most of its electric system from a regulated monopoly to competition — and it was one of the biggest economic disasters in state history.
It started in 1996, when the Legislature passed and Gov. Pete Wilson signed a bill to replace state regulation of power companies with consumer choice and competition, also known as “retail wheeling.”
Over the next few years, a handful of mammoth energy-trading conglomerates — led by the late and unlamented Enron Corp. — gained control of California’s power generation and manipulated prices and supply, raising rates through the roof and causing rolling blackouts and brownouts across the state.
Pacific Gas and Electric was forced into bankruptcy, the largest utility failure in U.S. history. Wilson’s successor as governor, Gray Davis, was booted out of office in a recall election that was mostly a cry of anger over the state’s power crisis.
The only major utility that came through unscathed was the city-owned and operated Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which was exempt from the retail wheeling law.
The DWP director was David Freeman, a cowboy-hat-wearing odd duck who believed that public utilities exist to serve the public, not generate profits for distant investors.
So he fired up all the DWP’s old power plants, and when I left California, my paper was running full-page ads from the city of LA, urging businesses that had moved to the suburbs to come back into the city for cheap power.
Even now, almost 30 years later, California hasn’t really recovered. Its electric costs are still the highest in the continental United States and more than double what we pay here.
By the time the worst of the crisis hit in 2000, I’d moved to Kansas.
When I started covering utilities here, the KCC and Legislature were well down the path to retail wheeling. When they saw what happened to California, everybody said: “Nope, ain’t happening here.”
But 25 years is a long time, and that institutional memory is long gone from the KCC and the Statehouse.
Power costs more in deregulated states
After Lawrence spoke at Wednesday’s hearing, I ran the numbers on the current price of power in Kansas versus deregulated states.
According to the American Coalition of Competitive Energy Suppliers, a trade association, 17 states and the District of Columbia have consumer choice for electricity.
They all pay more for residential electric service than we do in Kansas.
The average price for Kansas home electricity is 14.29 cents per kilowatt hour, according to a March report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
In states with retail competition, rates range from a low of 14.71 cents in Georgia to a high of 32.41 cents in California. The average across all all those states is 21.82 cents.
Besides that, consumer choice of electricity is kind of a scam anyway.
All the electricity that companies generate goes into the same power grid. It’s like being at a frat party where everyone pours whatever alcohol they brought into the same picnic cooler, and everybody gets the same mixture out of the tap.
For example, power company advertisements might tell you you’re buying “green energy” to land your business, but all that really means is that Greenco put that much power into the system and you took that much out of it. It’s an accounting entry in a ledger, nothing more.
Regardless of who you might choose as your electricity supplier, they’re not going to string a power line to your house. Evergy will still have to handle the distribution end of the business, and you’ll still have to pay them for that, directly or indirectly.
So even if you loathe Evergy, you’re stuck with them (or whatever they call themselves after the next merger) for as long as you live here.
If we change our system from a regulated monopoly to (sort of) competition, we have very much to lose and probably nothing to gain.
Let’s not.
This story was originally published June 13, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: The Evergy rate hearing took place Wednesday. And earlier version of this column contained an incorrect day.
