If nothing else, the Maine Public Utilities Commission showed this week that restructuring the state’s electric utilities would be every bit as complicated as promised. The question that remains is whether it will be as beneficial as it is complicated. For that answer, Maine will need patience.

After failing to receive satisfactory bids from power generators in a first round this fall, PUC commissioners Monday opened bids on a second and found themselves only slightly less disappointed. For sales to homeowners, Central Maine Power’s territory will begin with a standard offer of 4.1 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity from Energy Atlantic. The bids for its industrial and commercial classes and for all three classes in Bangor Hydro’s territory, however, were so high that the commission will require the utilities to temporarily continue as energy suppliers as well as serve in their new limited roles of a transmission and distribution companies. Bangor Hydro’s new residential price for energy will be set at 4.5 cents per kwh. Both energy prices are in addition to transmission costs.

Competition among energy suppliers was supposed to begin in March 2000, but it is clear now that real competition is some ways off. Back in 1997, when Maine lawmakers devised the state’s restructuring plan, they assumed that Southern New England would have restructuring well in place by now. That would make adding Maine to a significant regional market a simpler matter. But for a variety of reasons – much of it having to do with similar complexities that Maine regulators are facing – Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island practically are no further ahead than Maine.

Patience is difficult when faced with so much uncertainty, and the PUC’s decision to delay competition has the potential to create costs for customers in the future. But its conclusions so far have been reasonable responses to unanticipated problems. The path for the many restructuring rulings it will make in the coming months must be to move Maine as quickly as possible into full competition. There’s no going back to the old system of electric companies owning power generation, and being caught between the old and new systems provides pitfalls of its own.

Lawmakers began restructuring with the idea that the market could make better decisions about electricity pricing than government regulators. It is a theory that will take many years to demonstrate. The PUC should act in a way that lets Maine get on with it.