In some States of the Union, utilities, such as natural gas, have been deregulated, which to the uninitiated seems to represent something that could possibly save them money, but that isn't necessarily so. The thing about natural gas that we need to understand is that an infrastructure has to be created in the first place, so in Georgia, for instance, the Atlanta Gas Light (AGL) is the company that previously had the monopoly on providing natural gas for consumers in Georgia, but after passage of a new State law, their monopoly ended and was replaced by a deregulated market, allowing a natural gas marketplace to which these companies interestedthen submitted financial particulars and plans to the commission and thereby upon approval became certifiedmarket providers of gas to consumers in Georgia.
The first hint that deregulation isn't the same as a free and open marketplace is the fact that the actual natural gas, the infrastructure that brings natural gas into your home, the pipeline maintenance of that gas, and the actual delivering of natural gas is still under the control as well as being the responsibility of the Atlanta Gas Light (AGL) company which for providing this service is allowed to charge for it via a State certified rate schedule with “AGL Pass Through Charges" being shown on your monthly bill. Again, think about it, the entire infrastructure of the natural gas going into your home is the responsibility of not your deregulated natural gas provider, but the responsibility of Atlanta Gas Light. This being so, what exactly are these deregulated natural gas providers actually providing to consumers, since they have created none of the infrastructure nor are they responsible for any of that infrastructure, including importantly, the actual natural gas that is provided. The best that can be determined about what all these deregulated natural gas providers actually do, besides billing the customers for their agreed upon fixed rate, or variable rate plan, or whatever plan the customer has signed up for, is to purchase the natural gas on the commodity market and then re-market it to consumers, which signifies, that they are really marketers of natural gas and not producers of it. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, and perhaps that is the very definition of deregulation, however, it just seems rather deceptive that the natural gas provider that consumers have selected actually have little or nothing to do with the discovery, delivery or the extraction of the real natural gas product, and in actuality aren’t much more than being in the business of buying, negotiating, and procuring natural gas contracts.
Not too surprisingly, when you add a layer of marketing to the natural gas supply chain, you have added a layer of profit and infrastructure to the price of natural gas, and even though there appears to be plenty of competitors in the now deregulated market, those competitors have a distinct tendency to crowd out the inferior marketers, and hence over a period of time, to begin to act as an oligopoly that without enacting outright collusion are able to enact a gentleman's agreement that enables the marketing and smoothing of rates to be conducive to their bottom line, and passed on to the unsuspecting public as deregulated competitive rates, whereas in actuality, the consuming public has been effectively hoodwinked.