Deregulation Aimed to Lower Home-Power Bills. For Many, It Didn’t.

Twenty years ago, a new breed of energy companies promised consumers that deregulation of the electricity industry would cut their power bills.

The opposite happened.

U.S. consumers who signed up with retail energy companies that emerged from deregulation paid $19.2 billion more than they would have if they’d stuck with incumbent utilities from 2010 through 2019, a Wall Street Journal analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration data found.

Retail energy companies buy electricity from generators—power-plant operators, wind farms, solar-power firms—and sell it to consumers, usually over the local utilities’ wires....