Two pieces of legislation that passed in the Legislature last session pushes Maine to rethink the way electricity is sold in Maine, marking a measured retreat from the nation’s most far-reaching electricity restructuring. In an opinion piece this week, Central Maine Power’s president, Sara Burns, has no such hesitancy: Ax restructuring now, she writes.

Whatever mistakes Maine lawmakers made in their march toward changing Maine from a regulated to a competitive model of electricity pricing, the overriding one certainly was that restructuring was inevitable and that Maine had to act. To the extent Maine backs away from this reform, it should do so with the thought that there are numerous options available between the new and old models.

Ms. Burns observes, “Today, some unregulated generation companies

are reaping extraordinary profits in Maine. In some cases, they can generate energy for 2 cents to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour and charge consumers 12 cents or more. Before restructuring, the [Public Utilities Commission] would never have allowed regulated utilities to make such a windfall,” she wrote in a recent commentary.

That’s true, but had a utility-owned plant failed under the old system – and several have since restructuring – ratepayers could have been on the hook for the cost. Now they are not, though they are still paying off stranded costs from contracts undertaken two decades ago.

That is the difficult balance. Many people can agree that lawmakers made a mistake in having utilities sell off their hydro generation, which is cheap, reliable and renewable. But how many consumers want to accept the risk of paying for new gas generation? (Anthony Buxton, who represents industrial customers, wonders whether the utilities are even capable of operating their own power sources. He points out that the last utility-built plant in Maine was Wyman IV, completed in 1973, and that the utilities stopped building because they didn’t like the risk either.)

Mr. Buxton says the question Maine should be asking is not whether the old or new model works better, but what is the best way for Maine to get the benefit of lower prices.

Under one of the bills passed last session, the PUC would write rules to order utilities to enter into long-term power contracts, which is a reasonable way to answer that question. A more far-reaching one is in the second bill, which has directed the PUC to study whether Maine would be better off leaving its regional power pool, known as ISO-New England, where it is unusual in its surplus of power and willingness to site power infrastructure.

Maine can answer this question in part by asking what other regional alliances are possible, including with Atlantic Canada, which has lower power costs and conditions more similar to Maine than does southern New England. Kurt Adams, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission, predicts Maine’s ability to negotiate with ISO-New England will improve as the regional body sees the state is serious about leaving.

Ms. Burns’ frustration with the status quo is understandable – for residential customers in particular, restructuring hasn’t brought all the benefits that were predicted. And she may be proven right about utility-owned power. But the range of possible solutions to its shortcomings exceeds simply going back in time.