Not that I can determine. The boardroom set wants to make it more difficult for people to know if they are paying competitive rates, they want the energy companies’ internal accounting to be less costly, and they want to take in an ever increasing amount of money even though their rising rates have made private power generation a real option for more and more customers. Oh, and they want to do everything they can to eliminate windpower, and they hate being forced to net meter for solar.
Publicly, they state the opposite of everything I just said, but as Terry Mann used to say “know them by their works and not their words”.
It’s worst in New Castle county, and generally the northern third of the state. In the less densely populated south there’s DEMEC (a consortium of nine towns with public electric utilities) and the Delaware Electric Cooperative, which is a non-profit utility originally chartered in 1936 that has an unbelievably great record for delivering value to the community. DEC is considered the ultimate antichrist by whatever DP&L/Connectiv/Pepco/Exelon is calling itself today!
Court interpretations of the FTCA and the Sherman Act both address this. If a company has “significant and durable market power” in a market in a geographic area, then they are classed as a monopoly according to a thing called the “rule of reason”. If there was no explicit conspiracy to create this horizontal division of the market then the DoJ will not prosecute this as a criminal offense, but it is still a violation of the “per se rule” and the company is subject to civil regulation under existing antitrust statute.
You are correct that in practice the key time for enforcement of nonconspiratorial behavior is at the time of M&A, and that enforcement seems unaggressive, but there are something like 3-4 mergers every day that rise to the level of requiring DOJ/FTC attention, the amount of economic and legal analysis (such as harm analysis) that the agencies are required by statute to carry out in each case is substantial, and so not nearly enough is actually done. That could be ameliorated somewhat by giving the agencies a freer hand and more resources.
The airlines case is a special one, as the 1978 deregulation gave the CAB authority to grant antitrust immunity to the airlines.
(For the record: IANAL, but until recently my immediate family included a DOJ antitrust prosecutor.)
