Oct. 25--To cash-strapped PPL customers, the only aspect of electricity deregulation that will seem important on Jan. 1 will be the 30 percent jump in your bills.

This is a bad time to add more expenses to home budgets already on tilt -- yet the electricity industry argues that 13 years after legislation was enacted, consumers will finally start to see the benefits of deregulation, despite the bitter pill of higher prices.

It's a tough sell, and the industry knows it. But the industry's leaders argue that the expiration of government-mandated rate caps that kept prices at 1996 levels is just a return to reality -- and they say the rate caps were the very reason why the promises of deregulation haven't been kept.

Consumer advocates have shifted from fighting the rate cap removal to coping with it. They're hoping homeowners will learn to take advantage of money-saving opportunities, and that the higher prices will finally motivate consumers to use less energy. And as the public displays anger, confusion or indifference toward the issue, the electric industry has been busy trying to explain why it's all happening.

"A lot has changed" since 1996, said Ryan Hill, a PPL spokesman. "Customers haven't seen that yet. They're going to see that in 2010 now, and it's going to be an adjustment for those customers."

PROMISES OF DEREGULATION

Back in 1996, a national movement toward electric deregulation believed competition would drive down prices and produce more reliable service.

The competition would take place in the generation of electricity, not the distribution of it. PPL would remain the company that runs wires into your home, sends you bills and fixes outages. But the ways PPL gets the energy would change. In 1996, PPL was the only company generating energy -- now private companies could run their own power plants and offer their energy to consumers at a lower price than PPL offered. That energy would still be distributed by PPL, but if you chose another company your bill would note that it came from a different company and reflect the different price.

The end result, advocates believed: Multiple competitors would race toward the lowest prices but would still have to offer reliable service, or consumers would flock to another supplier. But that didn't happen as hoped.

Few customers switched suppliers. The price of generating electricity soared above the rate caps due largely to rising costs of oil, coal and natural gas. Since private companies couldn't make a profit without setting prices above what the government would let them, they fled the state.