The Public Utilities Commission will decide soon whether Maine Public Service customers will join the rest of Maine and the rest of the nation in increased competition for the sale of electricity. Its decision should rest with the idea that the logic that pushes a little state like Maine into a deregulated market exerts the same pressure on the MPS territory.

Maine will deregulate electricity generation in March 2000 because most other states are deregulating or will shortly. National competition is expected to bring lower prices, especially in high-priced states like Maine, so either the state provides for the purchase here of less-expensive power or it condemns ratepayers to higher costs and discourages new businesses from locating here.

Competition through deregulation depends on power generators having access to customers in Maine. For customers of Central Maine Power and Bangor Hydro, this requirement is easily met through the companies’ connections to the New England Power Pool. MPS in Aroostook County, however, is not connected to NEPOOL. Its out-of-county generators wheel power through New Brunswick Power Co., which, of course, is under no intrinsic obligation to see that northern Maine competes successfully in the U.S. energy market.

That is a barrier, but not an insurmountable one. Not only does MPS have a long-term, positive working relationship with New Brunswick Power but the utility and smaller municipal utilities in the County, with the support of state officials, have been working with the Canadians to encourage deregulation in northern Maine. They are close to a deal that would provide predictable operational practices and wheeling charges for the next several years.

If such an agreement can be made with New Brunswick, the PUC should allow the County to deregulate with the rest of Maine, confident that the region will benefit from keeping pace with everyone else.

The state’s concern with deregulating a sparsely populated region with few energy competitors is understandable: Consider the deregulated airline industry’s surprise for Maine this week when Delta announced its withdrawal from Bangor International Airport. The problem at this point, however, rests not with whether deregulation is a good or bad course but with whether maintaining a regulated utility in a deregulated climate makes sense. There is a large risk that if MPS were left in its current configuration it would become, in the memorable phrase of MPS Vice President Stephen A. Johnson, “a quaint electrical museum of the way things used to be before the rest of the world moved forward.”

That’s why it is important for the PUC to encourage the $37.4 million sale of the MPS generation assets to Wisconsin Power Supply-Power Development Inc. But the Green Bay firm the offer is good only if deregulation is approved. With PUC approval the purchase will pay down $20 million of stranded costs for MPS customers and let the utility skip an approved 3 percent rate increase scheduled to take effect in February. Stranded costs are the unrecoverable ones left behind after the transition to the deregulated market.

Even if the Wisconsin company did not feel the immediate pressure of nationwide competition to keep prices in check, it would still have to compete locally. And while the route to Aroostook’s 40,000 customers is circuitous for New England generators, it is a straight line for Canadians. Not only are there several major competitors surrounding the County currently, more are certain to arrive as Canadians themselves go through major electric-utility reforms and as the natural-gas line through the Maritimes is completed. The County has generators of its own that should have the opportunity to compete beyond their immediate territory.

Deregulation could bring a fresh incentive to make that eaiser by connecting the County to the rest of the state. Several studies over the years have looked at the possibility of wiring Aroostook to the New England grid. Much of the groundwork for doing so was completed in the 1960s, but was stopped when New Brunswick came along with a better transmission offer. It’s time for the King administration, through the State Planning Office, to study the situation again, viewing it not only in per-kilowatt-hour costs for ratepayers but as a statewide benefit of having an economically stronger County and all of Maine on one electric grid.

That study should also examine the potential of upgrading the connections to Washington County. Both Aroostook and Washington are saddled with the problem of having inadequate infrastructure to attract industry and inadequate industry to justify new infrastructure. This is where government can step in with funding to break a cycle that dooms half the state to job loss and falling population.

If northern Maine is to take part fully in state activity it needs the flexibility of deregulation and the direct connection to the rest of the region. Even with the risks the competition brings, the alternative of being left behind is worse; without deregulation, MPS would become a stranded cost for northern Maine.