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March 4, 2009

Assembly Dems: NYers overpay for electricity

By MICHAEL GORMLEY

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Are New Yorkers paying 10 percent higher electric bills as victims of a legal scheme to boost electric company profits? Or is the state's complex price-setting system really creating an incentive for cleaner, low-cost power?

That's the fight set for a hearing Thursday, when Assembly Democrats will say New Yorkers overpay $2.2 billion a year for electricity. They say the system sets prices at the highest level and claim collusion is part of the process.

The head of an industry trade group, however, said the claims are wrong. Gavin Donohue of Independent Power Producers of New York says the system encourages cleaner generators of electricity such as wind or hydro power, which can profit from higher prices. Less efficient, greater polluting and older coal plants would profit less or not at all under the system, he said.

"What you have here is price fixing — secret, elegant price fixing," said Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat whose committee is examining the system under decade-long de-regulation of the energy industry in New York. "Even if there wasn't collusion, the system is nutty ... it probably means that with a stroke of the pen, you could reduce everyone's bill by 10 percent."

Assembly Democrats have long opposed de-regulation of the industry begun under the Republican administration of Gov. George Pataki.

Donohue said New York's energy market is evolving and is already providing a trend of lower prices, when adjusted for inflation. He called the Assembly proposals to re-regulate or drastically change the system "unwarranted extreme measures," according a draft of his presentation at Thursday's hearing in Albany.

Donohue ackowledges higher prices for electricty are set under the current system, but said there is no collusion to profit from higher prices.

"It's totally inappropriate for an elected official to say that, given he has no evidence," said Donohue, who had worked in the Pataki administration. "We have a remarkably different story to tell."

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