Perspective

California regulators and the utilities they oversee have been talking a lot in recent years about competition. But just being able to "talk the talk" isn't enough (em utility companies and the regulators who monitor them have got to "walk the walk." And on that score, they've just barely begun to crawl. Despite all the marketing hype, the monopoly mindset is still very apparent among industry officials and regulators.Take California's energy industry, for example. With considerable fanfare and hoopla, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) announced in March 1994 that the state's electric industry would soon be "restructured" into a competitive industry in which customer choice would lead to lower-cost service. The impetus for this proposed restructuring was widespread dissatisfaction with the high cost of electricity in California. With electric rates 50 percent higher than the national average, a broad-based coalition of consumer, business, industry, and agricultural customers had already asked the CPUC to reduce rates across the board by 25 percent over the next five years. The high rates stem in large part from earlier decisions by the CPUC that enabled Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to pass on to their customers virtually all the excessive costs they incurred building nuclear power plants. (Edison, along with San Diego Gas & Electric, owns the San Onofre nuclear generating station in San Clemente; PG&E owns the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo.)