On some lists, finishing first is a good thing.

If you are a utility company, however, you don’t want to be ranked No. 1 in the Jacksonville Electric Authority’s annual rate-comparison survey.

Sad to say, Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. is the new leader on JEA’s list. Central Maine Power Co. was not listed in the survey. CMP’s residential rates, according to state officials, are slightly higher than Bangor Hydro’s.

Based on the JEA analysis, a Bangor Hydro residential customer who used 1,000 kilowatt-hours a month paid $1,683 for electricity last year. By comparison, a residential customer served by Seattle City Light, the least expensive utility on JEA’s list, paid only $429.

This is not a good deal for the state of Maine.

Which raises an interesting question. What series of public policy blunders led our fair state to the creation an electrical system that sucks up disposable income like an interstellar black hole?

Utility executives blame regulators. Regulators blame shortsighted utility executives. Politicians share the blame. As mysteries go, this is not a scientific riddle on a par with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Maine, for one, has the largest and fastest-flowing rivers in New England. Add to that the huge potential for tidal generation in Passamaquoddy Bay. The state also borders on Quebec, which has built the largest hydro-electric system in North America.

In Seattle, the federal government blessed fortunate consumers with the Grand Coulee Dam. Dickey-Lincoln, a similar federal hydro project proposed in northern Maine, was checkmated by environmentalists. Congress sank the partly completed Quoddy Bay tidal project during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.

The end result was no federally subsidized power for us.

Peter Bradford, a former commissioner of the Public Utilities Commission and a Carter administration appointee to the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission, thinks the most telling blow to Maine electrical prices occurred in the late 1960s when state utilities rejected an aggressive bid by Hydro-Quebec to sell them Churchill Falls hydro power “at a firm half-cent a kilowatt-hour price for 30 years.” The offer was turned down, Bradford said, because the utilities were hell bent on going ahead with the Maine Yankee nuclear reactor.

Maine Yankee, alas, became an albatross and was closed nearly a decade before its scheduled shutdown, thus standing its owners with about $200 million in unforeseen decommissioning costs. Even with those setbacks, Bangor Hydro President Robert Briggs estimated that the now-inactive reactor, partly owned by CMP and Bangor Hydro, reduced state power costs by between $6 billion and $7 billion over its 25-year life span.

Some of those who now second-guess the Maine Yankee option sang a different tune back in the early 1970s. Democratic activists led an unsuccessful referendum drive to create a state authority that would build its own nuclear reactor near Rockland to compete with Maine Yankee. Had that occurred, state taxpayers likely would have been stuck with all of the safety problems and cost-overruns that dogged Maine Yankee.

According to Briggs, the asteroid-sized blow to Maine’s electrical system was the notion forced on state utilities by regulators during the late 1970s and early 1980s that nonutility biomass plants would become a cheaper alternative to nuclear or fossil fuel generators. That was, to put it simply, a $1.5 billion bad guess.

Briggs says the new natural gas pipeline planned across Maine is the state’s most likely ticket to lower electric bills. Gas turbine generating plants currently on the drawing boards, he said, would have a combined output several times larger than that of Maine Yankee.

The other wild card is electrical restructuring. Under a new Maine utility deregulation law, CMP, Bangor Hydro and Maine Public Service will divest themselves of their generating plants before March 1, 2000. The companies will essentially become caretakers and toll takers for their transmission lines. Because Maine’s law permits utilities to recover their “stranded costs,” it will be six or seven years into the next century before state customers begin to see any major benefit from price competition among the new electrical generating companies, Briggs conceded. Stranded costs are the dollars utilities invested but could not recover from the sale of their generating facilities.

An industry lobbyist in Washington who is following the deregulation issue nationwide said consumer cost savings from electrical deregulation should have been in the range of 30 to 40 percent. That won’t happen, he said, because utility lobbyists “have been kicking butts” in all the state legislatures all over the country to make sure — as they did in Augusta — that ratepayers foot the bill for white elephants like Maine Yankee and the biomass contracts.

John Day is a Bangor Daily News columnist based in Washington, D.C. His e-mail address is zanadume@aol.com.