Op-Ed by Brittany Baker, CCAN Action Fund’s Maryland Director, initially published in Maryland Matters

For the past quarter-century, Marylanders have been struggling with the impact of policymakers’ decision to deregulate the state’s gas and electric utility markets.

By many accounts, deregulation has been bad for consumers, attracting predatory energy suppliers to our state. And it hasn’t delivered on the clean energy expansion that backers promised when the Maryland General Assembly was racing to join other states in deregulating their utility markets back in 1999.

Recently, the new CEO of Baltimore Gas and Electric, Tamla Olivier, proposed re-regulating Maryland’s utility markets. That’s likely to be a major topic of discussion – and, quite possibly, significant legislation – in next year’s General Assembly session.

But as bad as deregulation has been for the climate and for ratepayers, re-regulation, as Maryland’s major utilities envision it, could be far worse. And it would likely do little to boost battery storage, solar energy or land-based wind energy – solutions that will both lower energy costs and help the state confront climate change.

There’s no doubt that Maryland is facing an energy crisis, but that’s not unique to our state. It’s exacerbated by the ever-growing demand for energy due to artificial intelligence and the proliferation of data centers in the region that serve the tech industry.

PJM, the regional grid operator, hasn’t helped by slow-walking approval of many projects, especially clean energy generation. At the same time, utility companies have been driving up distribution rates without increasing reliability or resilience.

With this as a backdrop, Olivier at BGE suggests that re-regulating the state’s utility markets would enable gas and electric companies like hers to begin to tackle the energy shortage by generating their own power in Maryland – something that current deregulation law prevents.

It’s easy to see that the profit motive drives the monopoly utilities that distribute energy in our state. They are accountable to their investors, not to the rest of us. BGE, the largest utility in Maryland, epitomizes investor-owned utilities that take advantage of ratepayers and squeeze them for every penny. BGE and other companies have been accused by a Maryland consumer protection agency of overcharging ratepayers for distribution for decades.

Now they are proposing to generate power in Maryland, once again, to rate-base these new facilities and further increase investor profits.

It’s painfully obvious that BGE wants to continue producing and distributing fossil fuels well into the future, despite the devastating consequences for our environment. BGE’s record, and those of other utilities, have already been less than admirable as Maryland inches toward an energy transition. During recent legislative debates, utilities sought to kill or weaken building efficiency standards and green building regulations.

We should be mindful that BGE’s name includes the word “gas” – an enduring part of the company’s legacy and business model. Who, if BGE and other utilities are allowed to generate their own energy in Maryland, will protect our environment and our ratepayers? Why would state officials want to continue enabling fossil fuel production when they claim they see the urgency of reducing carbon emissions and promoting renewable energy?

Next door in Virginia, lawmakers adopted utility deregulation a couple of years after Maryland did. But the state’s largest utility, Dominion Power, sought and won permission to continue generating energy in the state. That resulted in the construction of the next-to-last coal plant built in the U.S., in Southwest Virginia, which opened in 2012 and is set to keep operating until 2045. Marylanders surely don’t want something similar happening here.

During the 2025 General Assembly session, lawmakers put new rules in place to crack down on utilities’ unfriendly practices for consumers. Last year, they passed a law that added some additional, necessary guardrails on the state’s deregulated energy system. We need to let these reforms take hold before we even begin to contemplate another scheme that gives more power to investor-owned utilities, such as allowing them to build, own, and rate-base new energy facilities – a proposal that has the potential to do so much damage to our climate, communities, and pocketbooks.

Op-Ed by Brittany Baker, CCAN Action Fund’s Maryland Director, initially published in Maryland Matters