Stop the Pennsylvania Rip-off

This understanding comes from my childhood experiences growing up in the Abbotsford housing project and depending on public assistance for my family to live. Please sign this petition for all the mothers in Pennsylvania so that they are not forced to make the same hard choices my mother had to make. —Tom Knox

• In 1996, the Pennsylvania General Assembly enacted the “Electricity Generation Customer Choice & Competition Act.”
• The stated purpose of the Act was to provide electricity to residential and business customers at “lower cost” and to “improve service.”
• As a result of litigation, most electric utility companies have capped their electric rates for customers. These caps are anticipated to expire for most ratepayers within the next two years – beginning 2010.
• Once rate caps expire, commercial businesses, manufacturers and residential customers can expect to see their electric rates increase from 10% to 60% in the first year – depending upon the service territory.
• The underlying problem is that effective retail competition for electric generation does not exist in Pennsylvania – thereby eliminating any competitive pressure to keep rate affordable. Since 1996, deregulation has failed to deliver on the promise of “lower rates” and “improved service.”According to a March 2009 study conducted by the American Public Power Association, deregulated states (such as Pennsylvania when existing rate caps expire) pay rates that are, on average, 54% higher than those states that have continued to regulate electric utility rates.
• For example, in Pike County, Pennsylvania, rates skyrocketed 73% when rate caps expired in that service territory.
• In the PPL, West Penn Power, Allegheny, and MetEd / Penelec service territories, average residential electric bills are projected to increase between $47 and $67 per month.
• Electric rate increases will result in business closure or cancellation of future expansion, job loss, increased bill delinquency rates and higher living costs for working families.

Tom Knox has proposed a three part solution

1. Extend caps electric rates increase for 3 years, limiting increases to the cost of inflation plus 1.5%;
2. create a state Power Purchase Authority that will obtain electric generation for all residential customers, leveraging the state’s significant buying power for lower rates and pass the cost savings onto customers; and,
3. Provide customer safeguards to prevent winter termination of electric service and make it easier for service to be restored.

Click here to Sign the Petition

Paid for by Knox for Governor.

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